In her dissection of the grammar wars, Julia Keller writes beautifully, with balance and clarity of thought. Many of us who love language measure and treasure it as much for those qualities as for its correctness.
The passion of her 10th grade English teacher, however, strikes a particularly resonant chord among those of us who also grew up learning to write under strict taskmasters imbued with messianic fervor and immutable syntactical codes.
Keller’s clever parsing of the tensions between the conflicting camps of “what-should-be” and “whatever” underscores the basic futility of the battle itself. In language especially, form follows function. Spontaneous, personal communication will always follow a shorthand, perky, improvisatory channel of thought, while more nuanced ideas necessarily embrace more complex vocabulary and sentence structure.
And both forms inevitably bow to the changing currents of time and custom, as does most everything.
Words, after all, stack up as the ultimate line of defense against chaos. So intuitively, almost desperately, we force them to make us understood, to make sense, in contexts of time and place, to friend and foe alike.
Of course, in terms of the language battle itself, it helps to see the forest if we stand back from the trees. Culture is never at peace with itself. From music to art to food to fashion to the black hole of politics, the warfare between the Keepers of the Flame and the Barbarians at the Gate will ever continue to engage us. Neither army ever truly wins, but like all power struggles in open societies, one side gains ascendancy for a time. Ironically the predictable tension of these cultural tugs-of-war is part of what makes life itself so unpredictable–and fascinating.
Human nature dictates that some of us embrace change, while others remain threatened by it. Neither perspective is right all the time. The same “rule” applies to grammar and its uses or abuses.
But surely writing crafted with careful structure and rich vocabulary will always be cherished by writers and readers alike–not for blind obedience to form but for beauty, charm, elegance and grace.
The battle is truly not for words but for hearts and minds, and we will have won if we say what we mean, and if the people who read it, get it.
On all counts, Julia Keller wins!
