Pruning my Garden: from Tolkien to Pinker and beyond

I sat with my cousin on the floor in the corner of the bookstore, poring over Elvish grammar and the rich world of Tolkien’s languages.  A seed was planted.  Over the next few years, I tended to my little metaphorical garden, writing in Tolkien’s alphabets and languages, learning Spanish, practicing my broken Portuguese, and adding broken German to the mix.

Unfortunately, some of the plants in my garden grew thorns.  My love of words and grammar turned me into the grammar police, trying to “correct” everyone’s sentences, even in my own family.  “Don’t end sentences in prepositions,” I would say, or, “Mark all your adjectives with an LY.”  I wanted everyone to speak Academic English, and I was frustrated by deviations from the rules of Strunk and White.

Then I encountered Steven Pinker.  My friend Sofija lent me The Language Instinct.  Pinker's work exposed my metaphorical garden for what it really was:  full of toxic weeds.

Pinker wrote: “This book is about human language.  Unlike most books with ‘language’ in the title, it will not chide you about proper usage….In the pages that follow, I will try to convince you that every one of these common opinions is wrong!  And they are all wrong for a single reason.  Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time…  Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.”  (pages 17-18).  Pinker went on to describe the origins of my precious language “rules”.  And I recognized the thorns in my garden for what they were:  harmful and divisive.  Most of the “rules” of English were invented in the 1700s by academes who wished for English to work more like Latin.  And the consequence of such snobbery (including my own) was to create a divide between people raised in different language contexts.  My passion for prescriptivist rules of grammar had turned out to be a poison.  My metaphorical garden, I realized, was being choked by brambles.

Not only are the prescriptive "rules" of academic English divisive, but they are also really illogical.  In fact, Pinker wrote:  “Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level.”  (page 373).  And he is correct!  According to the natural patterns of the English language, “Me and my mom went to the store” is natural, whereas “My mother and I went to the store” is unnatural and breaks the patterns of English!  It’s all about the way English assigns case (I vs. me)*. 

Pinker proved that dialects of English have their own patterns, their own rules.  So-called “African American English” or “Urban English” (we’ve GOT to come up with a better name for this group of dialects) actually makes fine grammatical distinctions that Standard American English (the dialect I am using right now) does not.  Dialects of English are not lazy.  They are logical.

I discovered that Academic English was an artificial construct.  I learned that every generation changes language (more on that in another post).  I learned that every dialect—and every person who speaks each dialect—has dignity.

Although I am very opinionated, I make an effort to admit when I’ve been wrong.  So I pruned the garden of its wicked divisive thorny prejudices, trying to nurture instead my love of exploring languages.  And by stripping away the prescriptivist attitudes of my past, I was better able to love languages (and the people who speak them) for what (who) they really are—not for my idea of what they “should be”.  In fact, I went from grammar police to “grammar hippie.”  I defended those who spoke natural dialects (anyone who ignored the grammar books of school).

This had immense impact on my understanding of language disorders.  There’s a big difference between a child speaking a dialect (a difference in language acquired) vs. a child who cannot speak the dialect they are exposed to (a disorder in language learning).  As a bilingual speech therapist, this is the bedrock of my understanding of diagnosis and treatment. 

The Language Instinct was the beginning of my journey to value everyone, regardless of their exposure to academic culture.  There have been many others who have helped me along the way, among them Professors Lorimor and Lavine of Bucknell University, and a whole lot of really excellent linguists whose works have inspired me to value how everyone speaks.

Because dignity isn’t related to which dialect someone grew up speaking.  Everyone has dignity.  Every.  One.

*I will fight you on this.  Here’s why “Me and my mom” is more natural than “My mom and I”:

I can give you some strong evidence that “My mom and I” is unnatural and breaks the patterns of English:

            1.  The same people who say “My mom and I went to the store” are likely to misuse that construction in joined noun phrases that are NOT the subject of the sentence, such as “He gave the tickets to my mom and I.”  That isn’t correct in Academic English, and it wouldn’t be correct in Latin!  BUT since these people are “changing” their case-assignment-pattern, they are more inclined to automatically avoid using “me”, “her”, “him”, or “us” in joined noun phrases.  For more discussion on this topic, please see this Language Log post from 2011

            2.  (And this is the more compelling evidence)  People say things like “Me and my mom went to the store” all the time.  The #1 way to know if a “rule” is natural to the language or just made up by academes is this:  if it’s natural, you don’t have to learn it in school.  Anything you have to learn in school is for an artificial system that doesn’t follow its own rules. 

It’s absolutely fine to know and use Academic English.  It is useful in professional settings, and it lends a uniformity to academic prose that has its advantages.  But please, if you choose to use Academic English in any setting, understand that you are making a choice, and please don’t look down on anyone who uses a more natural (and logical) dialect of English.  That’s the lesson I had to learn.