The Story of English, by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil
Miller, Stephen
S urvey mankind from China to Peru, as Samuel Johnson put it, and nowadays we often find it learning English. Such is the main point of The Story of English, a nine-part series aired on public...
...One could give many other examples to show that the story of English is not so glorious as MacNeil suggests...
...acNeil, however, is less interested in ridiculing those concerned with correct usage than in deflating the claims of so-called Standard English— the English of the BBC...
...But we need Standard English, he adds, "because we do not want in the end to cut ourselves off from international communication...
...James Murray, the great lexicographer who gave us the Oxford English Dictionary, said: "Language is mobile and liable to change, and . . . a very large number of words have two or more pronunciations current...
...According to Johnson, "it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure...
...What does it mean to say that Standard English is "nothing special...
...Nevertheless, it is hard to work up any anger about the TV show or book, since much of the non-Standard English MacNeil puts on display is fascinating in its own right...
...MacNeil does acknowledge this point, but his argument gets muddled...
...Before the late eighteenth century, no one cared about pronunciation or spelling...
...So black English is really a misnomer...
...As a Jamaican poet, Mervyn Morris, sensibly puts it: "One values greatly the Creole [the local variety of non-standard English] because it expresses things about the Jamaican experience which are not available for expression in the same force in Standard English...
...It is the English of the Indian novelist, R. K. Narayan, as well as the West Indian poet, Derek Walcott...
...We do not all think alike, walk alike, dress alike, write alike, or dine alike...
...But there is nothing "white" about Standard English, as MacNeil himself knows, since in the same chapter he says that many Southern whites speak a brand of English that closely resembles the English of Southern blacks...
...Huckleberry Finn is a great and very readable book even though written in a distinctly non-Standard English...
...The sights and sounds of the television program are so beguiling that they make it easy to ignore the weaknesses of the series, which are more noticeable in the book...
...He says that David Hume was inordinately fond of things English because he tried to rid the English written by his Scottish friends of Scotticisms...
...As a black educator puts it, "we should never lose sight of the need to provide for our young people access to Standard English, which is really a gateway for them to the broader community...
...Sometimes he seems to be only concerned with the question of pronunciation...
...Thus the Washington Post reports that the New York business community views government employees "with disinterest or disdain," and Jane Brody of the New York Times writes that there is "a pervasive disinterest in sex...
...But who gets upset about a split infinitive...
...Those familiar with the old meaning of disinterest find this use of the word jar-ring and confusing...
...He worships the great god Flux...
...More important, the new meaning of disinterest eliminates a very good old word, one that has played an important part in English philosophical prose, and one that lacks a good synonym...
...Standard English, he argues, is "nothing special," and in some potted history he claims that it came into existence with the rise of the middle class...
...True, but who ever argued that a living language could be controlled...
...The viewer of this beautifully photographed series is taken to many exotic landscapes: a bleak island in the Outer Hebrides, spectacular cliffs on the west coast of Ireland, a vast ranch in the dusty Australian outback...
...The book is a treasury of regional expressions—but it is a pity that MacNeil didn't fashion his arguments more carefully...
...In search of English, MacNeil went everywhere—if not from China to Peru at least from Singapore to Sierra Leone—and also to the San Fernando Valley of California, where we get a brief taste of "Valley Girl" English...
...One learns, for example, an Australian expression for a woman's having had a hysterectomy: "She had a hizzie in her hozzie...
...Murray did not think that every word currently in use was appropriate for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary...
...It is a free country, and a man may call a vase a vawse, a vahse, a vane or a vase, as hepleases...
...Samuel Johnson's prescriptivist dictionary, he argues, was published "at the very beginning of the heyday of the middle class...
...Even Samuel Johnson, who is attacked by MacNeil for his prescriptivism, agreed that it is vain to assume one can prevent a living language from changing...
...Other varieties of English are mainly for local—and generally oral—use...
...Other Australianisms are also amusing if not quite clear—e.g., as mad as a gumtree full of galahs (MacNeil never tells us what a galah is...
...Indeed, as Robert MacNeil, the genial host of the program, says in its companion book, "English is now everyone's second language...
...MacNeil will have none of Johnson's palliation, since he doesn't buy Johnson's gloominess about change...
...Samuel Johdson called ephemeral slang "fugitive cant," which he said "is always in a state of increase or decay, [and] cannot be regarded as any part of the durable materials of a language...
...Standard English, then, should be used not because it is superior to other brands of English but simply because it is the English that most people understand—the conventional English...
...Most slang words don't last long or travel well, which is why most writers use non-Standard English sparingly...
...Words, we might say, have their time and place, and most of the language of the Valley Girls should not be put in a dictionary—or used in most written discourse...
...In a long chapter on black English, MacNeil rightly argues that it "is gradually being recognized as just another variety of English, neither worse nor better than the way English is spoken by Scots or New Yorkers...
...MacNeil dismisses those who do not eagerly embrace all change by calling them the kind of people who regard the split infinitive as "the end of civilization...
...The spread of English fills MacNeil with awe and wonder...
...And why should he not...
...Geniuses, of course, can get away with anything...
...Nevertheless, some changes should be lamented because they make English less precise and less elegant...
...Although he complains about bureaucratese, he welcomes most changes, including those wrought by feminists, who have given us sentences clotted with "he or she" and such solecisms as waitperson...
...Take "disinterest," which is increasingly being used to mean lack of interest rather than impartiality—being "above" interest...
...Likewise, Standard English should not be thought of as white English...
...control of schoolteachers or governments...
...To defend Standard English is not to argue that it is a rigid and permanent body of "correct" words and usage...
...why should not we use our liberty in speech also, so long as the purpose of speech, to be intelligible, and its grace, are not interfered with...
...But to say black English is not inferior—is indeed a legitimate variety of English—still d8es not resolve the problem of its appropriateness in the world at large...
...Because English is always in flux, he says, "its form and expression are beyond the Stephen Miller writes frequently on politics and culture...
...But here too he is attacking a straw man, since few would argue that only BBC pronunciation is proper...
...One weakness is MacNeil's glib anti-prescriptivism...
...Writers from England, Hume strongly felt, had no special purchase on the English language...
...The book, which differs only slightly from the series, lists three authors but for convenience's sake I'll speak only of MacNeil...
...There is some truth to this argument, but not much...
...Purists who fret about the use of "hopefully" for "it is to be hoped" are, hopefully, few in number...
...THE STORY OF ENGLISH Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil Elisabeth Sifton Books-Viking/$24.95 Stephen Miller THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 47 MacNeil admits as much, but sometimes he implies that to choose Standard English over the native brand is to betray your roots...
...Martin Luther King, I imagine, could speak it, but his famous speech, "I Have a Dream," was spoken in Standard English...
...Once again, MacNeil is attacking a straw man...
...In fact, MacNeil celebrates English because it is "gloriously impure...
...At other times MacNeil seems to be arguing that all words, including Valley Girl slang, are acceptable, but on this question Murray and others would take a hard stand...
...There are also some wonderful slang words that were coined on the American frontier: absquatulate (to go away or skedaddle—another superb word) and discombobulate, both of which sound as if invented by W. C. Fields...
...it also enabled him to travel far and wide to show us its variety...
...Unfortunately, after quoting this woman, MacNeil goes on to say that Wilson Goode, the black mayor of Philadelphia, "has had to learn to talk white" in order to be a successful politician...
...It is special—not because it is superior to other forms of English but because it is the English that millions of writers use when they want to reach the widest possible audience...
...Both Murray and Johnson are talking less about correctness than clarity...
...But he refused to accept the argument that "if the changes we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in other insurmountable distresses of humanity...
...The series has its share of professors explaining things, but much of it is devoted to MacNeil's encounters with sundry locals who unconsciously betray their distinctive brand of English while hauling in fish, shearing sheep, piloting a steamboat down the Mississippi, or downing a pint in a cozy pub...
...Such is the main point of The Story of English, a nine-part series aired on public television stations last fall...
...But even those who championed Tkvain, such as Hemingway, did not follow his example...
...But Hume, who spoke in a thick Scottish accent, actually disliked most things English, and his campaign against Scotticisms was meant to show the world that a Scotsman could write English as well as an Englishman...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
