Him and I

[Carol]

CJ wrote: 
> <snip> I can't find your Six Cs post, and I only remember three of
them: clarity, conciseness and consistency. This is probably where we
> differ: I attach a great deal of importance to clarity; language is,
> after all, a *communication* medium. Consistency and conciseness are
> largely important only insofar as they affect clarity. They are
> important in certain settings -- e.g., academia, professional writing,
> journalism -- because the implied erudition helps establish the
> credibility and authority of the writer/speaker. But for the vast
> masses (unwashed or otherwise) they are not in and of themselves a
> matter of great concern. Whether I say, "He doesn't have any," or "He
> don't got none." is not an issue of clarity. And the lack of
> consistency is only important to those who value it.

Carol responds:

First, consistency isn't one of my Six C's, which are Clarity,
Conciseness, Concreteness, Coherence, Correctness, and Color, all of
which *generally* contribute to effective writing but are guidelines
rather than hard-and-fast rules. And, of course, we looked at writing
samples that illustrated or failed to illustrate the Six C's so that
my students knew what they meant. "Precipitation in the form of rain"
fails the conciseness guideline, for example. I generally used actual
sentences from my students, some typical and others laugh-out-loud
funny, to illustrate the concepts. I still have my collection somewhere.

As for consistency, that's a standard I never thought to suggest to my
students, but as an editor, I'm expected to impose it on a manuscript.
For example, if a writer, discussing the planet Earth (not "earth" as
the ground we walk on or "earth" meaning soil) capitalizes "Earth" in
some places and not in others, I have to decide whether to capitalize
or lowercase the word throughout the manuscript. (It helps to have
"the Chicago Manual of Style" aka CMS to provide guidelines for such
situations.) Similarly, if the writer spells out some numbers and uses
figures for others, I have to make the pattern consistent, following
some "rule" or guideline. The social sciences (represented by the
American Psychological Association, APA) generally spell out numbers
under ten; the humanities (represented by CMS generally spell out
numbers below one hundred and large round numbers). I have to be
familiar with exceptions to these rules, such as time of day or dates,
and format them consistently. So consistency isn't so much a "rule" of
good writing as an expectation of the publisher and a courtesy to the
reader. I also have to decide whether or not to use serial commas.
Normally I do, but in a manuscript that uses British punctuation, I
don't. Words and names have to be spelled the same way each time. If a
writer refers to World War II two times out of three as "the Second
World War" but once as "World War II," I have to decide whether to
change "World War II" to match what appears to be the writer's style
or to change "the Second World War" to "World War II" because that
name is more familiar to most readers. So what I'm looking at is
consistency within a given manuscript, as well as consistency with a
given publisher's "house style." Footnote or endnote format is another
example, but you get the picture by now.

CJ: 
> Trying to correct an uptown Chicago teen's "He don't got none" tells
us a lot about what the corrector values -- consistency, "standard"
English, high education -- but it also presumes the teen values the
same things. The first presumption, that non-standard English is a
mark of low education, is often unfounded. My own brother, raised in
Texas, liberally pepper their speaking with "all y'alls", "fixin' tos"
and "ain'ts", yet he has a college degree.

Carol responds:
The "uptown teen" needs to know why he's being taught standard
English, which is or should be to expand his options so that he's not
limited to blue-collar jobs for the rest of his life. (If he doesn't
want to go to college or even finish high school, he can always drop
out and see where it gets him.) If he's exposed to literature at the
same time, he can judge for himself the relative effectiveness of
standard English and his own familiar idiom and the uses to which both
can be put. (It's rather like exposing English-speaking students to a
second language, which will expand their understanding and cultural
sensibility even if they never use that language in later life.) 

As for your brother, I suspect that he restricts his "fixin' to's" and
"ain'ts" to conversation, not written work, and that his college
essays were written in standard English just as an educated
Mexican-American may speak Spanish at home but English at work. The
language or idiom used depends on the context. (Try submitting an
article peppered with "ain'ts" and "fixin' to's" to a magazine or a
scholarly journal and see whether it gets published.)

CJ: 
> The second presumption, that the speaker desires (or should desire)
to conform to the standard of the corrector is both paternalistic and
inconsiderate. In the case of the Chicago teen, in fact, insisting on
"He hasn't got any" does him a disservice in a community where
"standard" English carries a strong negative stigma.

Carol:
As I said, it depends on context. If he can use both standard English
and his local dialect, he can speak (or write) whichever is
appropriate under the circumstances, giving him an advantage over
those who speak only the local dialect, who may have difficulty
communicating outside their restricted circle. And the stigma outside
that circle will be equally strong if the local dialect is associated
with crime, poverty, and gang activity. (I don't know about Chicago,
but Detroit has something like a thirty percent high school graduation
rate. Education, including standard English, is the way out, the only
way out, of that trap.)

When I was in England, to change the subject a little, I tried to ask
a local Londoner for directions. I couldn't understand a word that he
spoke. I said, "I'm sorry. Could you speak a bit more slowly? I'm
American, and I'm having trouble understanding you." At that point, he
switched to perfect BBC English, enabling him to communicate clearly
to another speaker of standard English. Despite a few differences in
accent and vocabulary, we understood each other perfectly because
standard English provided a shared medium of communication, whereas
his "Lunnon" dialect (which might have been Cockney but probably
wasn't because I couldn't understand it at all) was only intelligible
to Londoners with a similar background.

CJ: 
> Ultimately, it's the community that defines the standard. ,snip>

Carol:

In the case of standard English, that's a very large community--the
entire United States for standard American English and the entire
English-speaking world for the features of standard English shared by
the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and all the other members of that
community. Without a shared language with a large number of shared
conventions (setting aside minor matters of whether "color" is spelled
with a "u" or not), that communication would not be possible.

You can be Humpty Dumpty and decide that a word means whatever you
want it to mean, but you'll have great difficulty in making your
intended meaning intelligible to anyone else. *that's* the point of
standard English--shared features accepted by and intelligible to a
large community and demonstrated most clearly in the written language
of published works, which are the primary instrument of standardization.

CJ:
Now, should the teen desire to pursue academics, he must learn the
"language" of academia, which includes conformity to "standard" English. 

Carol:
Exactly.

CJ:
But I wouldn't presume to jump his case when, from the comfort of his
college dorm room, he calls home and slips back into the English of
his youth.

Carol:
Nor would I. I would never presume to take away something so familiar
and personal. For that matter, I have the right to call margarine
"butter" and tissues "Kleenex" in my own home, however much I may be
criticized for doing so on this list or in another public context. But
what is appropriate in a domestic setting can't be called *standard*
because "standard" implies the usage agreed upon by a large segment of
the population. We no longer say "thee" or "thou" because the
plurality of the population that determines such things has allowed
them to go by the wayside. If my hypothetical neighbor decided to
teach her children Shakespearean English and no other language, they
might speak beautifully and poetically, but she'd have to home-school
them using nothing but the works of Shakespeare and the King James
Bible (which is Jacobean English, but close enough) since all the
textbooks published in the US and UK today are written in standard
modern English. Not to know that variety of English is to be severely
restricted and handicapped. OTOH, if the neighbor wanted to teach her
children Shakespearean English *in addition to* standard modern
English so that her children would enjoy Shakespeare's plays and the
King James Bible, I'd say more power to her. BTW, when I was a child,
the Episcopal church service used the language of Cranmer's Book of
Common Prayer and the King James Bible. I had no difficulty
understanding that language or appreciating its beauty, and I'm
grateful for the exposure to it, lost to younger generations for whom
the church service has been presented in modern English to make it
"relevant." The form of English in those books is no longer standard,
but that doesn't take away its value. 

Nor is English that was never standard, such as a local dialect,
without value. Often it's just as expressive and at least as colorful
as standard English. But we can't impose "Southern" or Chicago street
language on the population as a whole. The standard English taught in
schools must reflect a wider segment of the population. And that
segment is primarily determined by published works, whether those
books are best-selling novels or high school textbooks.
 
> CJ, who thinks academia should be slow to impose its own linguistic
> standards on communities which may well have different priorities.

Carol:
Who thinks that you've just shown the case to be otherwise with your
hypothetical teenager, who will be disadvantaged if he limits himself
to his local dialect instead of learning standard English *in addition
to* his native speech patterns, understanding that each is appropriate
in particular contexts