Charrow deserves to be stripped of her linguist's credentials for her
article. She has done a great deal to perpetuate public misunderstanding
of both language and linguistics.

First of all, she uncritically supports old-style prescriptivism, a tool
which I suspect has long had more to do with excluding "undesriables"
from elite social circles and elite professions than with standards of
effective communication. In so doing, she also perpetuates the
stereotype of linguists as slippery-slope liberals who support "anything
goes" education ("As a result of linguists'
refusal to be prescriptive, non-standard usages have crept into areas
where they would not have been allowed 30 years ago, and have become
accepted"). While she pretty correctly characterizes linguists'
descriptive stance towards language, she seems to want to undermine it
rather than defend it. She does not mention prescriptive intolerance of
natural change in language (such as loss of irregular singular-plural
marking in 'criterion, criteria'). She acknowledges the artificiality of
the prohibition on splitting infiinitives, but decries the use of
"their" as a singular generic, a common and natural usage  before the
18th-century grammarians got around to making their fussy (and sexist)
prescriptions about epicene (generic) pronouns. Instead of condemning
the linguistic insecurity that language snobbism causes in those who use
"whom" hypercorrectivey, she furthers it.

She doesn't address the numerous factors that make today's educational
landscape different from that of the past. Our culture in general is
anti-intellectual (thanks in no small measure to the political party
that the Washington Times leans towards); corporations are far more
interested in an ignorant, compliant, consuming populace than a
well-educated one that might question their ethics. Visual media are
taking over every aspect of communication and entertainment, except for
the islands of text messaging and e-chat (soon, I'm sure, to be replaced
by direct video-to-video communications). There is far less segregation
in education. Back in the day, no one expected African-Americans or
Hispanic migrant workers or American Indians to go much beyond eighth
grade if they went to school at all, and the school facilities provided
for minorities were inferior to those provided the middle class (though,
sadly, the schools most inner-city kids go to today are far worse). For
minority students (or, heaven forbid, women) to mix with the white male
elite in the best colleges was highly controversial, if not downright
unthinkable. Now, we are trying to offer educational opportunity to all,
but at too high a level: We continue to condemn most minority students
to inferior schools, then complain when we have to relax standards to
get them into and out of college.

Worst of all, she bases her article on  tired populary myths rather than
actual scientific observation of past and present teaching and usage.
How many students in the past actually did master "good grammar"?  Only
those who went on to college, I suspect, or found employment in
middle-class occupations. And how much of a role did language prejudice
play in those two outcomes? If you grow up in a middle-class home, your
language is much more likely to be like that of the school than if you
grow up in a different class. As true back then as it is today,
middle-class children have an automatic language advantage in school.
This is eroding somewhat, due to change in the middle-class dialect
(e.g., loss of 'whom' and pronoun-case changes) and to the decline of
reading and intellectual pursuits in all social classes. But many of the
grammar points today's pedagogical grammars harp on are still dialect
differences: multiple negation, differences in reflexive pronouns, verb
paradigms, "sit" vs. "set", and so on. A laundry list of changes in
middle-class English and formal/informal differences also shows up
(who/whom; "between you and I", loss of adjective/adverb distinctions;
"lie" vs. "lay", etc.), evening the terrain somewhat, but not enough to
erase the class advantage.

Why doesn't Charrow follow standard scientific practice by studying the
facts of the situation before writing her piece? I suspect it is because
she finds it to her advantage to ride the current wave of nostalgic
appeal to "the good ole days" rather than address  real problems.
Language does not cause, but reflects the intellectual interests of a
culture. Charrow's professional publications address clarity in legal
language. The Washington Times identifies her as working for the
government. Perhaps she could better use her  time cleaning up the
propagandist Newspeak the current administration is mass-producing.

***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~  E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
***************************************************

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/