A word, or 710, all of them chosen with utmost care, about the Language Police, a subset of the population that belies its highbrow image by sometimes reading about television:
The Language Police are the apparently well-intentioned folk who call or write those whose words appear in public to inform them of their grammatical gaffes (hopefully), mispellings (see previous word), redundancies (often appearing in close proximity to their best phrases), wee errors in word choice (“manse” when they meant “really big house” instead of “clergyman’s house”) or flat-out howlers (“secular” when they meant “non-secular”).
The thing is, the Language Police–and I apologize to the subset of the subset whose general cheeriness mitigates what I am about to say–tend to have a tone problem. They tend to, to put it bluntly and sever an infinitive, gloat. They practice police brutality. A typical voice-mail message might go like this:
Caller (dripping sarcasm): That was a pretty good column Wednesday–if you like sentence fragments and dashes when commas will do. Nice going, E.B. White. The Tribune used to be a good paper. So what are you and your `copy editors’ doing there? (Disgusted hang up. No return number.)
Do not get me wrong. Language Police can serve a vital function, reminding us that there are people ready to catch us out and that an article containing a bouquet of basic errors sacrifices significant credibility.
But, although I have done exactly zero scholarship in the matter, taunting does not strike me as the best way to teach. The taunted loses sight of the important message (which is to mind your Ps and Qs, especially in words such as `piquant’) and tends to focus on his desire to manually inflict injury upon the proboscis of the taunter.
Moreover, when a language cop gloats, it gives the impression that the only joy he takes in a piece of writing is finding errors in it. And that suggests that despite what he sees as a vigorous defense of the mother tongue, he may not like language very much at all. To take a piece where the writer has crafted many clever or lyrical phrases, worked in an apt analogy or two, and communicated his point with potency and then reduce that piece to the misspelling of `embarrassment’ (a nagging habit of mine, to my great. . .) is to miss the boat for the pier.
And even more moreover, it seems that some people don’t understand that language is not a solid, but a liquid. It changes. It flows. It moves from one place to another in the hands of thee, its users. One of the delights in reading a good writer is the way he or she plays with the language, a game that often includes stretching the rules to see whether or not they will break.
Here is the part where television enters the discussion. Writing down these long-simmering thoughts was prompted by an anonymous fella (deliberate slang spelling) who called to complain, with extreme snottiness, about a word in my review of the movie “Lolita” two Fridays ago.
He said I had misused “akimbo” because it applies only to arms, not also, as I had written, to legs. Well. After a first, arm-specific definition, my dictionary, Webster’s New Collegiate (bibliographical information available upon request), offers a secondary one, “set in a bent position,” and then uses “legs akimbo” in its example sentence.
That same caller said the TV critic Ken Tucker, reviewing the same movie on National Public Radio, had mispronounced “dour.” He said it is only pronounced “do-er,” not “dao-er,” as Tucker had said. Well again. My dictionary puts the dao-er pronunciation first.
This is not at all to imply that Language Police are usually wrong. Most of the time, to my dismay and even mortification, they are right, if rather narrow-minded. This reverse taunting is simply my (entirely undignified) way of acting on that punch-in-the-nose impulse.
So if you monitor usage with good humor, keep the cards and calls coming, please. Indeed, I write this fully anticipating a deluge (by which I mean three) of notes containing quibbles and corrections.
But if you are persnickety enough to sit there and count, in order to take issue with the word tally above, you will have to find a way to take it up with my word-processing program.
– Photo Justification Item: So I’m watching “Airport,” this rather peculiar British documentary about one in London (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11), and I’m trying to imagine the Chicago version of it.
And I have to conclude that even were it as well and quietly observed as this one, the portrait of O’Hare just would not be the same. Much of the interest in “Airport” arises from the there’ll-always-be-an-England quality to the personalities and customs.
Working backstage at London’s Heathrow, the producers of this subtly engaging piece follow a butleresque celebrity photographer as he snaps Melanie Griffith, the Queen and Mick Jagger (all in Monday’s first hour); detail the Queen’s first commercial flight, which entailed removing the first-class seats and replacing them with something called “the royal furniture”; and include, without comment, the bone-dry physical humor of their own camera operator slamming into a post while following a subject down a corridor.
