Nerds, jocks, and the great English makeover

Businesspeople speak it. Academics understand it. Johnny Depp steams it up.

English looks so hot today that it’s hard to imagine it as anything but the homecoming king of global languages. But it wasn’t always so. Curious about the true story of our language’s past, I found myself studying a few musty old texts and contemplating Latin for the first time since high school. That took me back. I soon realized that high school gave me a pretty good metaphor for what I was learning. For if, at turn of the 18^th century, all European languages made up a high school, English was the kid with the thick glasses and the “Kick Me” sign on his back.

Milton was dead, the Bible had already been translated, and English back then had no idea who he was anymore. He had been copycatting that suave French senior for a while. An English-specific grammar and an adequate dictionary didn’t exist, so English never knew if he was saying the right thing. “We write by guess,” griped Thomas Stackhouse in 1731. And ever since the revolution—where Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads beheaded the king in 1649, took power, then made England realize that royalty wasn’t so bad after all—written English had been hanging out with the losers. The demand for revolutionary material had opened up publishing to the less educated, and the less educated made English look shoddy. Conclusion?  “Our language is in a manner barbarous,” John Dryden said in 1693.

Latin was starting to look awfully good to English. Although he was long-gone from the scene, Latin’s picture still stood proudly in the hallway. He was the unforgettable class president who never had a hair or verb ending out of place. People were still saying what a smooth talker he was. Everything sounded better when Latin said it; for Pete’s sake, little sayings of his had been engraved into the walls all over the school. As if nature hadn’t blessed him enough, Latin was also a first-rate athlete. He oozed confidence with all those unimpeachable rules, hard as a set of washboard abs. Everybody who was anybody looked to Latin as a language guide. On bad days, English would spend time staring at Latin’s cocky, immortal grin.

An idea formed. What if English were to become more like Latin?  If somebody could create a set of rules—a unique English grammar—to keep the riffraff from corrupting the language, English could earn some respect, and maybe even see his own picture up in the hallway one day. Writers applauded the idea because they wanted English to be understandable to subsequent generations. Politicians liked the idea because they wanted England to signal its independence from the continent by rejecting the universal grammar that other European languages used. Just about everyone assumed that English could be fixed and frozen just like Latin—as if Latin hadn’t changed at all in its lifetime. The great English makeover began.

Robert Lowth, clergyman and future bishop of London, assumed the role of coach. He took a long look at English, from clumsy prepositions to flabby verbs, and declared that the language needed “stiffening up.”  He wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762, which took a top-down, prescriptive approach, explaining how English should work rather than how it did. His book outsold the other grammars on the scene, some of which—gasp!—honored the reality of English speech.

When Lowth settled questions about language, he tended to look to the tongue of Caesar rather than the traditions of his local team members. What did last-picked, acne-riddled English know anyway?  Lowth frowned on the expression, “It is me,” which was natural to English speakers then and now, because it ended in the objective case. “It is I,” on the other hand, matched the Latin construction ego sum—where ego is a subject, not an object or a “me”—and was therefore better, according to Lowth, but awkward for anyone who has ever answered a telephone.

Always mindful of the old class president, Lowth looked to Latin when it came to prepositions, too. “The placing of the preposition before the relative is more graceful,” he wrote, “and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated style.”  The rule worked well in Latin, but not in English, whose sentences ended so naturally in prepositions. Even Lowth acknowledged that this tendency was “an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to,” showing that the strong inclination bent in his direction, too. We may never know if he forgot himself in that last sentence, or if he was joking at the expense of poor English.

Coach that he was, Lowth drooled over Latin’s verbs as if they were playbooks from the championship year. Latin gave verbs a distinct present tense, past tense, and past participle. English had a few verbs that maintained all three distinct tenses, too—like to eat (eat, ate, eaten) and to drink (drink, drank, drunk.)  But the language had grown lazy over the past few centuries and had combined some verb forms. To love (love, loved, loved) is an example of an English verb with only two distinct forms; to run (run, ran, run) is another. Lowth didn’t see these changes as an evolution towards efficiency, he saw them as a “very great corruption.”  Weak verbs were for weak languages, in his view, and he wanted English to stop the atrophy.

The new-and-improved English would not only look beefier, it would sound smarter after the makeover. That meant double negatives had to go. This was tough because most folks, even Shakespeare, used double negatives to express a single negative. Lowth called this practice “improper” and his assistant coach and successor, Lindley Murray, insisted that two negatives in a sentence made a positive. Simple algebra.Eighteenth-century England, in its zeal for classical ideals of logic and reason, was fertile ground for anyone who wanted to explain something rationally, even if it was something as irrational as English.

By some measures, Lowth’s makeover was successful. His grammar answered the 18^th century’s call to stabilize a fluid language and set the standard for future linguists. With its new six-pack abs—er, rules—English looked classier, or at least classical. (Think Greek statues.) The language wouldn’t be caught dead with the wrong crowd now; the rules were too awkward and pedantic for the less educated, anyway.

But some say that Lowth didn’t do English any favors. Even in the gawky stage, English was vibrant and flexible, even brilliant. Lowth stifled the natural flow of English in the name of logic and authority, widened the gulf between language and usage, and turned the lovable nerd into a status symbol. The end product looked a lot more like Latin, but English had to sell a piece of its soul along the way.

{Elise Hahl has studied English and Writing at Stanford and Johns Hopkins Universities. She lives in Boston with her husband and two sons.}

Sources

Atchison, Jean. 1991. Language Change: Progress or Decay? Second Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 9.

Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. 1993. A History of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 253, 257, 278.

Dryden, John, Edward Niles Hooker and Hugh Thomas Swedenberg. 1974. The Works of John Dryden, Volume 4. Berkeley: University of California Press, 86.

Graddol, David, Dick Leith and Joan Swann. 1996. English: History, Diversity, and Change. New York: Routledge, 151, 161.

Leith, Dick. 1983. A Social History of English. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 106.

Lowth, Robert. 1967. A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762. Menston, England: The Scolar Press Limited.

Murray, Lindley. 1968. English Grammar, 1795. Menston, England: The Scolar Press Limited.

Pope, Alexander. 1896. Essay on Criticism. New York: MacMillan, 15.

Stackhouse, Thomas. 1731. Reflections on the Nature and Property of Language in General, on the Advantages, Defects, and Manner of Improving the English Tongue in Particular. London: Dove, 187.

Ask any writer to define literary style, and you’ll find that the answer is as distinct as, well, that writer’s style. I noodled around on the Net and found that Gore Vidal defined style as “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, on the other hand, called it “craftsmanship”: “What’s really important for a creator isn’t what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what’s important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It’s not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

Poet Robert Frost remarked that “style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.”

Are you dizzy yet?

I took a crack myself at defining style in an essay in the Sin and Syntax Salon: I suggest that literary stylists use wonderful words, smart syntax, literary devices, and maybe even structure to echo or underscore the idea of their story.

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But, mucking  around a bit more, I asked some of my favorite writers—including Po Bronson and Susan Orlean—how they define style, and whether they have favorite “stylists.” Here’s what they said:

Po Bronson:

I don’t have singular favorite stylists, I just keep a mental catalog of style tricks I’ve seen over the years, which are available to draw upon (if, theoretically, I could remember them at the right moment). But I do think about it. On my website I have this page where I have an example of a variety of fiction and nonfiction, implementing stronger styles of various sorts. One’s a story through FAQ style narrative. One’s nonfiction meant to read with the immersion of fiction. One’s about split alternative narrative futures. One’s an early short story in maximalist voice, my reaction to the popularity of minimalism in the early 90s.

Susan Orlean:

Style is so hard to describe… I guess I’d say it’s as ineffable and indescribable as someone’s personality, and in fact, I think a writer’s style is linked exactly to personality. It’s the voice of the storyteller, the distinct tone and tenor of how a writer “talks.” I think of it as a genuine and organic expression of the writer’s way of looking at the world.  My favorite stylist? Hmm. Non-fiction? Or fiction?

Tommy Tomlinson:

I usually think of style as something that strikes me AFTER I’ve read the story—if the story is really good, I’m a lot more concerned about what happens next than how the author is presenting it. When the style outshines the substance, I usually just put the book down. It’s a delicate trick, I think, to write in a style that sounds like a narrator (or a character) speaking, and not like the author speaking. I love a narrative voice that sounds more like somebody telling me a story than an author writing down words. When the style is right it’s intellectually absorbing AND emotionally rewarding.

Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated has a distinctive style—he talks directly to readers, guiding them through the story, peppering them with questions. Every time I read a new Gary piece, it’s a jolt to read that style, and I’m always thinking this is the time it won’t work. Then 100 words later I’ve forgotten all about it and I’m neck-deep in the story. This is one of my favorites. And here’s a story I did a few years ago as a Gary Smith homage.

Katy Butler:

The “literary style” I worship is compelling and transparent. If style is the window through which I see the story, I don’t want the window drawing attention to itself, covered with filigree or etching. I want to see the characters in the scene, and be absorbed in the writer’s thoughts. So I don’t like unnecessarily fancy words or over-clever thoughts. On the other hand, I work for hours on the opening of a piece to get it right. I don’t want any dirt or lumps on that window. I scan the sentences, as if they were poetry, because what trips the tongue will trip the eye, and beautiful rhythm will please and reassure the reader without her knowing it. You want the reader to know she’s in good hands. I omit unnecessary words and details. I trust my irrational mind or heart when it insists on including a detail whose significance I don’t understand.

In the opening of “My Father’s Broken Heart” [written for the New York Times Magazine], I HAD to include the mention of two cardinals in my mother’s birdbath, her Japanese iron teapot, the weak October sunlight in which we discuss turning off my aged father’s pacemaker.  I don’t want the reader to linger over those details, but I want them to subtly suggest the fidelity of a long marriage, my immigrant mother’s foreignness and interest in Zen, the weakening of the end of life.

So I like style that is pared-down, and yet beautiful. Metaphors and similes exist, but are sparely used. More is implied than stated. There’s rhythm, alliteration, choice of “kitchen table” Anglo-Saxon words rather than multisyllabic Latinate language.

On the other hand, I love Virginia Woolf, and her language is often complex.. But the language never overwhelms the images. I am carried on a stream.

Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” is another example of the style I like.

Good prose writers are secret poets. We use all of the craft skills of poetry: telling detail, synecdoche, repeating elements at the opening and the end, rhythm, scansion, etc. But we pretend we aren’t doing it.

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My colleague Audrey Dolar Tejada, a journalist and poet who experiments with nonlinear storytelling at www.strangetango.com, added these thoughts:

Literary style is ultimate self-expression and exploration. In an era in which books are largely marketed to leverage on multiple platforms, in digital forms, as movies and screenplays, and as brands, I eschew the temporal for the eternal. Stylists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges wrote novellas—a literary form now rarely published in which concept and form, not necessarily plot, are part of the intellectual and sensory enjoyment of literary works. Judged against today’s best sellers, Borges’ “The Library” and Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” are unmatched in their innovation, spare beauty, and ambition.

How do you define style? ? Add your comments, below. And if you’d like to play around a bit with style, there are some suggestions in Week Twelve section of Online Writing Classes.

Exploring the split personality of a literary term

Style may not seem like such a sticky word, but ask writers and editors to define it, and you’ll find yourself in the mire. Some will tell you that style dictates whether you should use O.K. or okay, D.J. or deejay, an apostrophe before or after the s. Others will insist that style refers to sentences that swing, or paragraphs that unfurl with panache.

Look up style in a dictionary, and you may actually find the word panache—as well as synonyms like fashionable elegance, grace, and ease of manner. But the dictionary echoes the paradox mentioned above, too: among the definitions of style are “a distinctive manner of expression” and “conventions, used in writing or printing, that dictate spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographic arrangement and display.”

That second definition is owned by denizens of the Associated Press, the University of Chicago, and the Modern Language Association, who have laid down conventions in, respectively, the AP Style Guide, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the MLA Handbook. This reference-book troika has shored up copy editors for generations. Then there are the Young Turks, with the impertinence to publish their own style guides, whether the editors of Wired in the 1990s (of whom I was one) or the staff at Yahoo!, who just published The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing, Editing and Creating Content for the Digital World. Many of these style guides pretend to be about panache when they are really more about prissy rules. They trade on the split personality of the word style.

I blame Strunk and White for the confusion. Their ever-popular Elements of Style smashes the two unlike ideas together. To E. B. White and his co-author William Strunk, style referred to “cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” Their slim book, first published in 1957 and revised since, offers eleven “elementary rules of usage,” as well as lists of expressions “commonly misused” and words “often misspelled.”

Usage, though, is different from style; it refers to the way words and phrases are actually used in a community sharing a common language. (For example, those in the know don’t confuse irritate and aggravate; they use the former for something that vexes, annoys, or inflames and the latter for something that makes matters worse. For more on the difference between style and usage, see my list of style guides and usage manuals.)

To their lists of spelling and usage bugaboos, Strunk and White added “a few matters of form,” eleven “elementary principles of composition,” and a twenty-one-item “approach to style.” And there’s the rub—ideas about writing style (“write in a way that comes naturally”) are spliced in with ideas about spelling and usage (“use orthodox spelling”). The priss and the panache, mashed together.

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Let’s disentangle these disparate ideas, since most of us who are writers care more about “distinctive manner of expression” than we do about conventions of spelling and usage. We are curious about—and may even want to emulate—the literary style exemplified by such masters as Ernest Hemingway and James Salter, Joan Didion and Junot Diaz, George Orwell and Susan Orlean. So what are the elements of literary style?

Language. First come the surprising, precise, evocative words a writer chooses. Look how Hemingway described the Gulf Stream, in Green Hills of Africa: “a flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset.” Now check out Orlean on orchids: “There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies’ handbags, swarms of bees, clamshells, camels’ hooves, squirrels, nuns wearing wimples, and drunken old men.”

Literary devices. Next, there is the use of literary devices—imagery, metaphor, allusion, alliteration, onomatopoeia. James Salter used “the silence of a folded flag” to describe the quiet of an afternoon in provincial France. Martin Luther King, Jr., imagined his children being judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Barak Obama alluded to the struggles of farmworkers in pledging “Yes, we can.”

Musical sentences. Next comes the exquisite control of sentences, using clean syntax (all the parts in the right places) and rhythm (musical beats, incantation) to evoke a feeling for the subject at hand. Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is an example of musical syntax. Sojourner Truth’s “and ain’t I a woman?” punctuates her speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio; repetition can be quite musical.

Tone. Control over tone, the writer’s mood or attitude toward the subject is another element. Tone might be ornate or plain, high-brow or breezy, lofty or punchy, scientific or comic, lyric or ironic. Tone might be the essence of a humorous piece (take a look at “Buzzed”) or of a deeply serious essay (see the opening section of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”).

Voice. Voice is to writing what timbre is to speaking: it is what clues us in to the identity of the writer, even if we don’t have a byline telling us whose words we’re reading. Voice is close to style—it, too, reflects a combination of diction, sentence patterns, and tone. Voice is the particular way novelist Junot Diaz combines Dominican slang and the vocabulary of postmodernism. Voice is that quality that makes you suspect a New York Times story is written by Marc Leibovich even when you missed the byline. (One of my favorite Leibovich articles described President George Bush the morning after the 2006 primary: “He looked worn at his must-see midday news conference, in need of a haircut, good-night’s sleep, better makeup job, hug, vacation in Crawford or some combination thereof. The grooves across his forehead were dark and articulated, his voice slightly hoarse. He wore a maroon tie, the color of blood.”)

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In my mind, a stylish writer has a command of language, literary devices, supple sentences, and tone—as well as a distinctive voice. But literary style is more than the sum of these parts: it is writing in which the sentences in some way echo or underscore or complement the subject at hand.

A great example of literary style would be the following passage in All the Pretty Horses, when Cormac McCarthy describes his characters leaving the ranch in Texas and setting off on an adventure to Mexico:

They rode out along the fence line and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

An editor could flag several things style manuals would frown upon here, but in doing so might miss exactly what gives the passage its power. Notice how the rhythm of the sentences echoes the gait of the horses—starting out short and staccato as the horses pick their way through corrals, gathering steam as they canter across a pasture, and then taking off into an out-of-control gallop as they head out under the night sky.

Journalist Po Bronson took poetic license in a Wired profile of conservative intellectual and techno-utopian George Gilder. Bronson used style to humorous effect, conveying the essence of Gilder’s technophilia through this mock dialogue:

Every time Gilder meets an engineer, they go through this sort of cascade of language syntax, negotiating like two modems, trying to find the most efficient level of conversation they can hold. It ends up sounding like the dueling banjo scene from Deliverance:

George: “Hi, nice to meet you. Hey, that’s a sweet access router over there. Wow, both Ethernet and asynchronous ports?”

Steve: “Yeah, check this baby out – the Ethernet port has AUI, BNC, and RJ-45 connectors.”

George: “So for packet filtering you went with TCP, UDP, and ICMP.”

Steve: “Of course. To support dial-up SLIP and PPP.”

George: “Set user User_Name ifilter Filter _Name.”

Steve: “Set filter s1.out 8 permit 192.9.200.2/32 0.0.0.0/0 tcp src eq 20.”

George: “00101101100010111001001 110110000101010100011111001.”

Steve: “. .. . .. . .. … … . ….. .. .. …. .. .. . .. . .. … … . ….. ..”

George: “Really? Wait, you lost me there.”

Bronson combines word choice (those tech terms), sentence rhythm (if you call those sentences) and tone (not exactly serious), and all his choices combine to say something about Gilder and his world.

Literary style can tickle the funny bone, but it can also raise goosebumps. It was style that made Winston Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons (after the defeat at Dunkirk in 1940) so stirring:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The British prime minister combined strong words, straight syntax, and strong rhythms to buck up his country and tap into national strength.

Style can also be deceptively simple. Think of the stories that lulled us to sleep as children: they combined all the elements above and gave us enough calm to close our eyes and drift off to sleep. Margaret Wise Brown uses simple words, repetition, rhyme, and rhythm in her classic bedtime book, Goodnight Moon:

Goodnight moon. Good night cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light. And the red balloon…. Goodnight comb. And goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush…. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

Style in itself is not the end—meaning is, whether it’s a call to courage or a an evocation of the peace that ends each day.