Friday 15 August 2014

The sweetest essay on language that you'll ever read


My good friend Rowan was inspired (special thanks to our society) to write this short but awesome essay; and then he let me post it on here because Facebook's chat box wasn't built for sustaining rants. Read and be nourished.

“Punch the keys, damn it!”by Rowan Thorpe
Finding Forrester had it right: while writing, one must indeed punch the keys. This is true not only of the typewriter but also of the laptop. I, at least, find the need to be very noisy when I write. I’m not sure why this is; I just find it gratifying. But perhaps the thing that I miss most is the ability to express myself in my own words – not to have to muzzle my expression while being around those who constantly require the definitions for my words. 

The requirement to explain myself is annoying and almost degrading to the other person; I feel as though I belittle such people as I speak to them. I know that this notion is incorrect, and I am aware that, in truth, I am in fact expanding their mind and their vocabulary by educating them in the art of the English language, both in diction and in knowledge. Yet still I feel almost aloof, and so I do what I must to avoid the long and mind-numbing explanations that come with speaking at my level of language. I tone down my vocabulary to the lowest level, the lowest common denominator, so that all might understand. I’m not sure that everyone can appreciate this dilemma. I fear that it is one only experienced by those who have been brought up to love the English language and appreciate its finer points, to be able to argue it down to the definitions of words and why one should use one word instead of another when addressing certain types of people or making an argument in a certain arena.

Some might say that I’m an English snob, and there is a certain truth to that. I cringe when I hear “th” pronounced “f” or those who mumble, mispronounce or otherwise mutilate the mother tongue. It bugs me that people do not take enough care to communicate effectively with their speech, let alone the murderous way they portray the English language on common social media websites, especially when they are trying to make a point that they wish people to take seriously, or indeed when they are commenting on a major life event. These are the times when accurate and precise language are needed so that all might share in the news or appreciate a strongly held belief.

Now it is true that language evolves, changes and grows. But what we are currently witnessing is more unto the reduction of language foreseen by Mr Orwell is his Novel 1984 – we are killing language, reducing its form and size until we are left with a strange mutilation involving numerals and symbols, to the point that a person living 50 years ago would not understand the diatribes polluting the internet, and as such our common use of the English language, so that we all lose our extended ability to both recall and use words, words, words, as Shakespeare once put it.

Read this book.

This loss, therefore, is suffered not only by me but also by the public at large as we bring up children who not only use acronyms to describe how they are feeling in online situations but have started to use these same acronyms in everyday “speech” going as far to say LOL rather than laughing and to say BRB rather than the full version, be right back, for fear that the extra half second it costs them may in some way be massively detrimental to their life and that they may miss some experience because they uttered a fully formed sentence rather than the only slightly shorter and yet far less descriptive one. And some would say even more heinous acronyms, like WBU, that they have become accustomed to using. And all the while English loses so much of its expression to the point that one must oft even define ‘acronym’ itself to the very culprits who use them as common place language, as they know not what they do.

This sad predicament that we now find ourselves in is largely due to technology. The very thing designed to make our lives easier, better and more knowledgeable has had the opposite effect, culling the language of Shakespeare, of Milton and of Wilde to a state where none of those giants would be able to recognise it, let alone read it.

Perhaps in punching the keys all too often we have killed the very thing we were trying to create – not by a thousand paper cuts; but instead, by a million million strokes of the keys, we have stabbed and typoed our way into a pseudo English scarecely worthy of our predecessors.

Perhaps we should all put down the laptops and pick up a pen every now and again, open a book instead of waiting for the movie to come out and speak – though speak with elegance it would, like those who came before us.

Tuesday 5 August 2014

Matt defies standardised grammar and teaches a new grammar - part one

Recently, Al Yankovic (Weird Al) published a song called Word Crimes, which immediately became my favourite song ever, because a) it parodied Robin Thicke's misogynistic Blurred Lines, and b) it promoted good grammar.

Al, in a gesture of poetic irony, took a song that bespoke society's decline in love and respect, turned it on its head and suited it in an armour sturdy enough to take on the almost-as-crucial decline of the English language.

Unfortunately, a meddlesome Third Group of people seemed to notice that Al, in his song, made a grammatical mistake of his own. This group singled out the error over and above all of the critical truths he very humorously conveyed.

What was his error? In one of the last lines, he split an infinitive.

Part One: It's quite all right to split an infinitive

Weird Al's sacrilegious line reads, "Try your best to not drool." Are you cringing yet? Because, according to a rule somewhere, you should be.

What's a split infinitive?

You split an infinitive whenever you slot an adverb between the words 'to' and 'be', or 'to' and 'go', or 'to' and whatever.

The line, "To boldly go where no man has gone before," is a famous example.

What's an adverb?
Adverbs describe verbs or adjectives. 'Run' is a verb; 'run slowly' is a verb plus an adverb. 'Go' is a verb, and 'to go' is also a verb, but it's called an infinitive.

'To boldly go' is a half infinitive, then an adverb, and then another half infinitive. Evidently you're not meant to break infinitives in half (split them).


Personally, I, if at all possible, prefer to soundly reason than to blindly follow.

The commandment that "thou'st an infinitive shall 't be split, else thy head," comes from Latin, from which much of English grammar was derived.

In Latin, splitting an infinitive would render the sentence useless. You couldn't do it and still make sense.

Butand here's where the sound reasoning kicks in - we don't speak Latin.


More sound reasoning:
Language is a road, not a destination, and there's no point having roads if you've got nowhere to drive. It's the meaning that's important, not the density of your silly infinitive. Just look at him! (Above)

My understanding is that language is how we communicate, not what we communicate.

Third Group's counterexample to sound reasoning:
Beyond pretending that English is Latin, in most cases, splitting an infinitive will make your sentence sound awkward. There's normally a better way to write the sentence than to split the infinitive. So, basically, the meaning of your sentence is usually conveyed better with the infinitive left whole.

What this is really saying, though, is that rules exist for a reason. Full stops, for one, separate sentences. Stop signs keep people from crashing. Un-split infinitives, well, they help keep things sounding nice.

The Third Group, however, rant about Weird Al's split infinitive with none of this reasoning in mind. Their argument goes as follows:

"He split an infinitive!"
...
...
...
"Burn him!"
...
...
...

Right. Anyway, in the song in question, Weird Al achieves two important things by splitting an infinitive: humour and rhythm. These things are important because Weird Al is trying to a) be funny, and b) write a song.  Funny things need humour and songs need rhythm. What they don't need are roads with dead ends.

The last three lines of the final chorus, with the emphasised words in bold, read like this:


Go back to pre-school
Get out of the gene pool
Try your best to not drool

A little bit rude, right? That was intentional. The joke wouldn't have been effective had the infinitive not been split and the line read instead, "Try your best not to drool," (preserving the sacred infinitive).

This is because the emphasis on 'not' (rather than 'to') is what communicates the idea that not drooling is an exception to the norm. The only other way that the humour would have remained intact would've been to, I guess, rewrite the entire line and break the rhyme, but that would compromise the rhythm, and in turn the humour... so, actually, no.

Splitting the infinitive made that third line incredibly effective because it achieved exactly what Al had intended.

It should be known: grammar rules work most of the time because, most of the time, following them is the best way to achieve the exact form of communication you intend. For instance, I have followed a heck of a load of grammar rules in writing this blog post.

But the rules do not always help. Take the word 'silence', for example. By itself, 'silence' is just a word; yet, you can find it in many a novel, alone, by itself, acting as an entire sentence. Gasp? Not yet.


The word tells you one thing: that there was silence, but the word being by itself can show you other things, like suspense, tension, fear, and uncertainty. Had the sentence read like a sentence, "There was silence," then the emotions might not have been effectively conveyed.

The emotional value of the sentence is strengthened due to its simplicity (one word); and, if this is what the author intended, then writing "silence" as a sentence was entirely justified.

In saying that, a person should understand a rule before he dares to break it. He should know the rules by heart before he toys with them, otherwise it could very well be his head.

In a way, the Third Group is right. They know that you need a rule book before you can drive, but they're forgetting that no one drives without first having somewhere to go. And for that, you need a brain, too.

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