Ignorance or Sincerity?

Grammar consultants are in great demand these days by employers who fear that the inability of their employees to speak and write grammatically gives their businesses a black eye.

In addition to including English lessons in their employee training programs, some administrators go so far as to correct subordinates as they go about their work.

The senior vice president of a marketing and crisis-communications company in Florida interrupted an employee at a staff meeting to correct her failure to make subject and verb agree. She’d said, “There’s new people you should meet.” The v-p said he “cringes” every time he hears people use “is” when the subject calls for “are.”

The usage the Florida vice-president objected to was lack of subject/verb agreement in an expletive sentence. Although still an accepted target of revision in written English, this error is so common in spoken English that I thought everyone had given up on it in conversation.

What the staff member said: “There’s new people you should meet.”
What she should have said: “There are new people you should meet.”

Or, she could have avoided an expletive sentence altogether and said something like, “I’d like to introduce some new people.”

Not all employers are bothered by nonstandard usage. The v-p of a software company in Seattle values “sincerity and clarity” more than “the king’s grammar.” According to this businessman, “Those who can be sincere, and still text and Twitter and communicate on Facebook are the ones who are going to succeed.”

According to Tammy Erickson, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, younger speakers aren’t necessarily ignorant of correct usage; they just don’t think it matters as much as “sincerity in communication.”

So, when a young employee says, “Me and my colleagues want to meet with she and Mr. Singh about the the new design,” is he merely being sincere? Or is he kissing his chances for promotion good-bye?

Erickson says that younger speakers don’t see correct speech as an emblem of intelligence or education. I suppose that’s not a problem if they go to work for someone like the man in Seattle, but I suspect that the attitude of the v-p in Florida is going to prevail in the work place for a long time yet.

Youthful job seekers may not regard correct speech as an emblem of education or intelligence, but they’d be wise to look upon it as a mark of professionalism.

Every occupation has professional standards. One of the skills required of any white collar worker is–or should be–the ability to speak and write a standard form of English.

As long as English remains a medium of global communication, native speakers who can’t be bothered to master a standard form of it for professional purposes are inflicting an unnecessary economic disadvantage on themselves

More than One Kind of Irony

Irony and its adjective ironichave joined the class of carelessly used words–likeliterally and awesome–that drive many language lovers wild.

As early as 1926 H.W. Fowler decried the use of irony andironic to refer to happenings that are merely coincidental or odd. For example, if I run into you in Walmart and an hour later bump into you at OfficeMax, that’s not ironic; it’s a coincidence. If I’m driving to school with barely enough time to make it to class on time and get stuck at a train crossing, that’s annoying or frustrating, but it’s not ironic.

Fowler describes three kinds of irony: Socratic irony, dramatic irony, and the irony of Fate.

Socratic irony takes its name from the philosopher Socrates who would pretend to be ignorant, so as to encourage his students to argue their beliefs. The television detective Columbo is a master at this kind of irony. Just as Socrates used apparently innocent questions to show up his students’ shaky arguments, Columbo uses feigned humility and ignorance to lure his suspects into talking too much and revealing their guilt.

Dramatic irony is the irony of classical Greek drama, written for an audience that knew the details of the drama being presented. This kind of irony produces goose bumps in the audience or reader. When Oedipus swears he’ll bring his father’s murderer to justice, the audience knows that Oedipus is his father’s murderer. When Oedipus innocently marries Jocasta, the audience knows that she’s his mother. Strong stuff, dramatic irony. Novelists set it up by letting the reader know what the characters do not.

Irony of Fate occurs when misfortune is the result of Fate, Chance, or God. In Fowler’s words, “Nature persuades most of us that the course of events is within wide limits foreseeable, that things will follow their usual course…” If you watched the video clips of the floods that ravaged England in early 2014, you may have seen the pictures of the fabulous, recently completed mansion, its four-acre grounds ringed by a protective moat; despite the owner’s efforts, the waters triumphed. This is an example of the irony of Fate or Chance, also called cosmic irony.

Two other types of irony not mentioned by Fowler are “verbal irony” and “situational irony.”

Verbal irony occurs when a person says one thing, but means another, for example, saying “Lucky me!” when you slip on the ice and break your arm.

Situational irony is similar to cosmic irony. You go into a situation expecting one outcome, but experience the opposite result. The O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi” is built on situational irony: the wife sells her hair to buy her husband a watch fob; the husband sells his watch to buy his wife a decorative comb. The irony is that neither spouse can use the thoughtful gift.

Irony has more than one meaning, but “coincidental” and “odd” are not among them.

Pidgin and Creole Languages

The word pidgin refers to a language used as a means of communication between people who do not share a common language.

The word pidgin derives from a mispronunciation of the English word business. The term “Pidgin English” was first applied to the commercial lingua franca used in southern China and Melanesia, but now pidgin is a generic term that refers to any simplified language that has derived from two or more parent languages.

When a pidgin develops into a more complex language and becomes the first language of a community, it is called a creole.

Note: The word creole has racial applications, which are not addressed in this article.

Creoles typically arise as the result of contact between the language of a dominant group and that of a subordinate group, as happened as the result of European trade and colonization. The earliest reference to a creole language is to a Portuguese-based creole spoken in Senegal.

The vocabulary of a typical creole is supplied for the most part by the dominant language, while the grammar tends to be taken from the subordinate language.

A pidgin is nobody’s natural language; a creole develops as a new generation grows up speaking the pidgin as its main language. The grammar of a creole usually remains simpler than that of the parent languages, but the new language begins to develop larger vocabularies to provide for a wider range of situations.

Because of its distinctive use of verb tenses and other grammatical features, Black English is considered by many to be an English creole having British and American varieties. Haitian is a French creole.

Unlike pidgins, creoles are complete natural languages that differ from standard dialects of the dominant parent language in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

Some more examples of creole languages:

French-based
Louisiana Creole
Mauritian Creole

English-based
Gullah (US Sea Islands)
Jamaican Creole
Guyanese Creole
Hawaiian Creole

More than one parent language
Saramacca (Suriname–English and Portuguese)
Sranan (Suriname–English and Dutch)
Papiamentu (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao–Portuguese and Spanish)

Song Lyrics and Standard English

According to a story in the NY Times, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh studied the 279 most popular songs from 2005 looking for references to drugs and alcohol.

I’d like to see a study that tracks the repetition rate of nonstandard English in popular music. The Pennsylvania study found that some genres mention drugs and alcohol more than others. From my own cursory and unscientific survey, I conclude that nonstandard English is well represented across genres. (My observations are based on lyrics from songs mentioned in lists like the Top 40. There may be some better ones somewhere.)

Song lyrics have more power to influence the language of young people now than they did in earlier generations.

When I was growing up, I listened to songs on the radio at home, not while I was at school or walking around town. I had a record player and a small collection of records. My total listening time probably didn’t amount to more than two or three hours a week.

Today’s adolescents spend an average of 16 hours a week listening to music. Nine out of ten in this age group have an MP3 player or a CD player in their rooms, and I’d guess that a great many younger children have them as well.

Most American high schools operate on a 36-week schedule. Class sessions vary in length from 45 to 55 minutes. At best, a student never absent will receive about four and a half hours of English instruction a week for 36 weeks of the year; compare that to 16 hours of music consumption a week every week of the year:

English instruction = 162 hours per year
Music listening = 832 hours per year

During those 832 hours, young music fans hear thousands upon thousands of repetitions of such constructions as:

I feel the magic between you and I. –Eric Carmen

When you cheated girl, my heart bleeded girl. – Justin Timberlake

Can we conversate? –Young Rant/Shorty B.

Can You handle me the way I are? –Timbaland

Far too many stars have fell on me. –Dan Fogelberg

As time goes by, you will get to know me a little more better. –Backstreet Boys

The way my body feel/When you’re laying right beside me. –Sevyn Streeter
Me and you are supose to be together. –Ashley Tisdale

A blogger at the music site Hooks & Harmony gives the crown for bad grammar to Beyoncé. Peter Lee’s article about “Get Me Bodied,” together with his translation of the song into standard English, is one of the funniest language laments I’ve ever read. The poor man gives it his best shot, but finally gives up: “I can’t finish this. I feel like I just translated the last half of Flowers for Algernon.”

No one expects popular song lyrics to be written in formal English. The golden oldies had their share of gonnas, wannas, ain’ts and double negatives. But none of the songs from the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s that I browsed while writing this post exhibit the vulgarity and verbal poverty of the lyrics of recent popular music. Efforts at school reform notwithstanding, the most competent English teachers in the world cannot compete with the steady indoctrination in vacuous and nonstandard English that goes on outside the classroom.