The Great American Saloon Series/Barmaids

...respected academics such as Robert Scholes (his course descriptions exhibit "tautologizing, highfalutin jargon, obnub-ilation, and deadwood...

...Simon implies, was not to facilitate free expression but to indulge a sentimental and misconceived humanism...

...Always eager to enlist new bits of jargon to refine their field of study, linguists have coined the term grapholect to refer to the standard written language, as against the spoken language and its multiple dialects...

...He is currently a drama and film critic for The Hudson Review, New York magazine, and National Review...

...As a writing teacher, I have had many students with brilliant ideas who needed weeks before they could pen their first coherent sentence-and who will probably never in a lifetime write a single elegant one...

...media vulgarians such as Barbara Walters (her self-help book evinces an "illiteracy of the soul," and her stock in trade is a "lascivious prodding" whereby she "asks all those impeccably average questions that are burning in the inarticulate but inquisitive depths of every average to subaverage soul, aching to find a voice, however flat and lusterless...

...Simon exhibits the work of an amateur in the best and literal sense of the word: He confesses a love affair with his carefully acquired English, and his wit is unleashed mercilessly upon those who would debase the language...

...Certainly if the NCTE disappeared tomorrow, it would not be missed by those who are serious about honing their written expression...

...I have heard writing teachers tell stories of being physically threatened for proffering the very advice asked for by their students...

...In fact, Mr...

...Fowler, George Orwell, Wilson Follett, Robert Graves, E.B...

...For the true intent of the declaration, as Mr...

...explains the term in his Philosophy of Composition (the italics are Hirsch's): A grapholect is a normative language in ways that cannot be attributed to any dialect...

...John Simon, a non-academic, belongs to an endangered species: the cultured man of letters...

...Like many other conventions, English spelling works as a thread to help secure the fabric of human community...

...Hirsch, Jr...

...Simon's provocative assessment, professional critics such as Rex Reed (Reed is one of the "masters of the maladroit metaphor...

...popular novelists such as Erica Jong (Jong's novels demonstrate "a nexus between bad writing and a failure of the ethical-aesthetic sensibility...

...self-contradiction (the preceding quote is followed six pages later by: "Edited American English [a "dialect," remember] allows much less variety than the spoken forms...

...Finally, a grapholect serves as a norm by virtue of its actual or potential stability through time...

...And so it is in general with the written word...

...The arbiters also include, somethat the dialectal utterance "Mary daddy home" is perfectly acceptable for writing and communicates a precise meaning...

...In Paradigms Lost, John Simon extends an invitation to join him in a running, perhaps losing battle against the current debasement, of English and the attendant cultural sickness of an egocentric era...

...Why didn't the NCTE simply dissolve itself after publishing its silly manifesto...

...Failure may be endemic to the pursuit of elegant and precise expression, but to abandon the chase is to surrender the health of a culture...

...Any discourse upon it is expected to strike an embattled note...

...White, etc...

...Simon acquired English deliberately (I use the word in its full sense) as a teenager-English being his fifth language after the four he had acquired by age 13: French, Hungarian, German, and his native Serbo-Croatian...

...The NCTE declaration opts gase-ously for something like total freedom of written expression in the classroom-arguing, for example, An an essay on a touchy subject, John Updike once remarked that the "topic of the written word feels intrinsically contentious...

...Loosely anchored to a few such examples, the idea seemed very sensible in the abstract, so long as one ignored the concrete reality: that the English language is spoken by hundreds of millions of people in dozens of phono-logically distinct dialects...

...Poor writing more often reflects what pathologists call a low pain threshold...

...Simon quotes Juvenal: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes...

...or from academics outside the field of English (principally in history and the hard sciences: e.g., Jacques Barzun and Lewis Thomas...

...The spoken word is a fascinating and legitimate field of study inhabited by scholars who use ingenious methods of inquiry and who carry imposing titles like sociolinguist and structural grammarian...

...To illustrate, and to gird Mr...

...Nor does inept expression necessarily indicate ignorance...

...Who will guard the guards themselves...

...Long before he began Paradigms Lost, he had started grumbling publicly about the debasement of Western culture...

...In Paradigms Lost, Mr...

...It is therefore astounding that the NCTE-avowedly basing its rhetorical consensus on the most current linguistic research-could have drawn up so preposterous a document as the "Students' Right to Their Own Language...

...Its phonological norms are also, relative to any dialect, more certainly fixed and widely promulgated...

...though it keeps its doors open to all who care to enter, it is not a democratic fun house but a place of comic or tragic insight available fully only to an enlightened perception, a spiritual aristocracy...

...In fact, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine and one of the great prose stylists of our time, has discovered an awkward relation operative in the world of discourse, whereby depth of scholarship tends to be inversely proportionate to elegance of expression: "those who know can't write, and those who can write don't know...

...But if the frequent misuse of the key word dialect reflects only ignorance, the document's recurrent use of jargon such as class, self-esteem, social stasis, sensitize, cultural context, and the like reflects a bit of trendy ideological posturing...

...It is said that poor writing reflects bad thinking or stupidity, but this relation seldom holds...

...Simon directs his barbs more than once against the NCTE, principally because of a declaration published under the auspices of that organization in 1974, ineptly written and awkwardly titled "Students' Right to Their Own Language...

...But in Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, John Simon attacks those who don't know, can't write, and don't care-yet who set themselves up as arbiters of public discourse...

...Yugoslav by birth and American by choice, Mr...

...Simon's accurate instincts with a bit of theoretical support, let me start with a close analogy: English spelling and "spelling reform"-a crackpot cause that once attracted such respectable champions as Bernard Shaw...

...it is also an effort that derives its judgments from consensus, that maintains a common language amid divergent tongues, that stays open to anyone who cares to take on the challenge...

...In comparison with the stable convention of the grapholect, the spoken language is chaotic...

...In contrast to the Babel of "phonetic" spelling, a universally shared convention of English spelling, however arbitrary, breaks down all barriers of dialect and insures the possibility of communication among all lettered English speakers, from Houston to Edinburgh to Kano to Bombay to Melbourne to Hong Kong...

...As a transdialectal construct, its grammatical conventions represent norms that are not only more certainly fixed than those of a dialect but are also more widely promulgated than the grammatical norms of any dialect...

...Even highly educated and literate English speakers will characteristically (that is, humanly) articulate a muddled syntax, with false starts, run-on utterances, uhs and urns, shifted structures, grunted fragments-a hodgepodge of borderline incoherence depending greatly on gesture and intonation to achieve clarity...

...They include, by PARADIGMS LOST: REFLECTIONS ON LITERACY AND ITS DECLINE John Simon / Potter/$ 12.95 John R. Dunlap Mr...

...The spelling reformers, noting that English spelling was arbitrarily frozen a few hundred years ago with the advent of the dictionary, advocated a "phonetic" system that would, for example, eliminate the once fricative, now silent gh in words like night and neighbor...

...therefore, our students have every right to pen their thoughts in any damn way they please, so long as they seem perhaps to be making their points, maybe...

...It isn't and it doesn't, and Mr...

...And small wonder too...

...Much of the rationale behind the NCTE's declaration (and much needless controversy over the problem of literacy) rests on a fundamental misunderstanding about the written language...

...With just enough legitimate social and ethical points (e.g., the undeniable psychological harm which can result from a belligerent and tactless instruction of literacy) to merit a second or third careful reading, the document finally collapses under the deadweight of misinformation ("Dialects are all equally serviceable in logic and metaphor...

...Written expression is a form of personal identity-so people are inclined to resent being told their expression is inept...

...A grapholect is the only repository of a large number of lexical resources, whose extensiveness is always far greater than those of any dialect...

...Such a remark today is likely to provoke charges of "elitism," but only from those who would ignore the keynote phrase in the remark: "Open ' to all who care to enter...

...His expression is often .impish, always lively, occasionally self-ironic, intermittently racy, at times cajoling, usually humorous-but his invitation to arms and the battle itself are serious...

...Simon finds his most enthusiastic audience among readers of the popular press: The essays that make up the collection Paradigms Lost first appeared over a period of three years (1977-79) in Esquire and More magazines-hardly what you would call stuffy outlets...

...Imagine a Texan trying to read a novel written "phonetically" by a Scotsman-or a Nigerian graduate student trying to untangle a monograph written by an Australian physicist, with every word spelled according to how the Australian hears it...

...But the spoken word is a field distinct from that of rhetoric, which adverts to the grapholect-the written word: the common language that binds all literate English speakers, whatever their dialects, in a community of shared discourse...

...Stripped of pretension, an honest precis of the NCTE's declaration might run as follows: "We have no right to behave imperialistically among the diverse cultures and classes of America...

...Two points, often obscured in the dust kicked up by the endless literacy controversy, are certain: To write is always hard, and to write well is often excruciating...

...The term "bidialect-ism" is a nondescriptive, hence illegitimate, term when one of the two "dialects" is a grapholect...

...Like it or not, the teacher of rhetoric inhabits a battle zone wherein lurks a chronic grumpiness that nibbles at whatever crumbs of idealism remain after years of encountering subliteracy in newspapers, in periodicals, in professional journals/ in fashionable novels, in the schools...

...Respondong to such imbecility, Mr...

...A commonplace among professional editors and most teachers of rhetoric is that the best writing about the craft of writing comes from non- academics (Herbert Spencer, H.W...

...His standards-although hardly "impossible," as some of his victims have charged;-are nonetheless tough...

...In the course of Paradigms Lost, Mr...

...Professor E.D...

...We're all cordially invited...

...The invective, I'm afraid, is at least partly deserved...

...Art," he once wrote, is not in the melting of high and low, not in the kicking over of the priorities of searching penetrancy and uncompromising effort to express the ineffable...

...and recurrent outcrops of the most rudimentary illogic, including circular reasoning, non-sequitur, and that favorite of the ideological poseur, hypostatiza-tion ("humanity tells us that...

...Far from being "elitist," the effort to fashion and preserve good English fascinates just about every English speaker and is profoundly democratic...

...Indeed, if one is to take the NCTE's declaration at its word, what need is there of any guards at all...

...to think about it makes us itchy, somehow irritated, as by cinder flecks in our eyes, or an uneven buzzing in our ears...

...BOOK REVIEWS what to my embarrassment, an influential organization called the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE): "a body so shot through with irresponsible radicalism, guilt-ridden liberalism, and asinine trendi-ness as to be, in my opinion, one of the major culprits-right up there with television-in the sabotaging of linguistic standards...

...To be sure, it's an effort that assumes the existence of standards, that disavows intellectual leveling, that sustains a hierarchy of preferences...

...We're all cordially invited...

...Simon shows why in one of the many clever rhetorical analyses sprinkled through his book...

...The term grapholect had been coined half a decade before the emergence of the NCTE's 1974 declaration, yet the term occurs nowhere in the "linguistically based" 18-page statement, and "standard English" (or, as the drafters of the declaration call it, "Edited American English") is referred to repeatedly and erroneously as a "written dialect"-a contradiction in terms...