Twenty-five years ago Harvey Daniels wrote
a wonderful book, Famous Last Words: The
American Language Crisis Reconsidered. His first sentence: “The
deathwatch over American English has begun again.” He wrote:
Predictions of linguistic
doom have become a growth industry. Time magazine
asks: “Can’t Anyone Here Speak English?” while Newsweek explains “Why Johnny Can’t
Write.” TV Guide warns of “The
New Illiteracy,” Saturday Review
bemoans “The Plight of the English Language,” and even United
Airline’s Mainliner Magazine blusters
“Who’s Been Messing Around with Our Mother Tongue?”
Daniels’ book shows a telling and amusing
pattern. What the voices of doom say about the death of the English language/writing/literacy/the
sentence today is almost exactly what they were saying in 1983—and also
what they were saying in 1950, 1900, 1850, and on back as far as you care to
go. So when you read this: “From every college in the country goes up the
cry, ‘Our freshmen can’t spell, can’t punctuate.’ Every
high school is in disrepair because pupils are so ignorant of the merest
rudiments,” you might want to check the date (that one was written in
1917). How about “Our language is degrading very fast”? That was poet
James Beattie in 1785.
The hallmark of all these jeremiads is the
fiction that in the past the state of the language was really good, but today
we are in a sorry state and the future is dire. The only problem is that it’s
hard to find when the good old days were because at wherever era you look
people were also saying exactly the same thing then.
If we’ve been on a downward spiral
every since Hengist and Horsa got off the boat in 443, it’s a miracle we’re
able to talk at all today. One can’t read these “writing on the
wall” laments without thinking they tell us a lot more about human
psychology than about any actual defect or deterioration in language.
Dick
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
From:
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008
10:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The Death of the
Sentence?
|
Hi
everyone. This was in my NCTE inbox this morning, so some of you may have
read it. (This is only part of the article). I bolded the second to last line
because it interests me: Does anyone know who "invented" the
sentence? The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall? By Linton Weeks
The demise of orderly writing: signs
everywhere. One recent report, young Americans don't
write well. In a survey, Internet language --
abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging -- seeping into academic writing. But above all, what really scares a lot
of scholars: the impending death of the English sentence. Librarian of Congress James
Billington, for one. "I see creeping inarticulateness,"
he says, and the demise of the basic component of human communication: the
sentence. This assault on the lowly -- and mighty
-- sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to
civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The
chronicling of history. Storytelling itself. He has a point. The sentence itself is a
story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Something happens in a
sentence. Without subjects, there are no heroes or villains. Without verbs,
there is no action. Without objects, nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or
created. Plus, simple sentences clarify complex
situations. ("Jesus wept.") Since its
invention centuries ago, the sentence has brought order to chaos. It's the handle on the pitcher, a
tonic chord in music, a stair step chiseled in a mountainside. |
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