The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  Examining Webster’s Third, the image presented by its critics turns out to be inaccurate. When I look up irregardless, the inclusion of which had caused the Life reviewer to complain bitterly, I see it is labelled ‘nonstand’, i.e. not standard usage. Ain’t is not exactly ‘embraced’, either. It is described as ‘disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech’. A graver problem, in truth, results from Gove’s requirement that each definition be a single sentence. Thus tocopherol is ‘any of several pale yellow fat-soluble oily liquid phenolic compounds that are derived from chroman and differ in the number and locations of methyl groups in the benzene ring, that have antioxidant properties and vitamin E activity in varying degrees, that are found in the dextrorotatory form esp. in oils from seeds’ – and that is only about a quarter of the full, one-sentence definition. A personal favourite is door: ‘a movable piece of firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open for passage into or out of a building, room, or other covered enclosure or a car, airplane, elevator, or other vehicle.’ Reading this, I feel I know less about doors than I did before.

  The revulsion against the new Webster’s found its most sustained expression in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. James Parton, the president of the American Heritage Publishing Company, initially tried to buy up shares in the Merriam Company and suppress Webster’s Third. Then he changed his angle of attack, and the result was The American Heritage Dictionary, which appeared in 1969. Its publishers made much of their responsibility as custodians of the English language and of American culture. Emphasizing how seriously they took this role, they set up a panel of one hundred distinguished arbiters – a number later enlarged – to comment on key matters of usage. The list of names is intriguing. In my 1976 copy, it includes the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, Peter Hurd (identified as a painter and cattle-rancher), film critic Pauline Kael and the feminist writer Gloria Steinem. Ethel Merman did not make the cut. Flicking through a copy of The American Heritage Dictionary, one occasionally finds statistical information about the panel’s views. For instance, we are told that 99 per cent disapproved of ‘ain’t I?’ in written English ‘other than that which is deliberately colloquial’ and that 84 per cent thought it unacceptable in speech. Bus as a transitive verb (‘We need to bus these children to school’) is ‘an almost indispensable term’, acceptable in formal writing to 91 per cent of the panel. ‘Rather unique’ and ‘most unique’ are not accepted by 94 per cent.

  Webster’s Third has outlived the controversy that greeted it, but The American Heritage Dictionary is also popular, and it embodies the widespread hostility to descriptivism. That a descriptive approach to language is the academic norm serves only to intensify the disgust felt by conservatives. Since the 1960s the study of language has played an increasingly important part in American academic life, embracing (not always very comfortably) the different interests of logicians, anthropologists and humanists. The activities of scholars in these fields are the butt of much everyday humour. Pop grammarians exploit public insecurity about the use of language and public misgivings about the abilities of scholars to provide sensible guidance. Meanwhile the scholars themselves complain about a society that does not honour their work.

  American universities have been the test bed for new ideas about the role of language in everyday life – specifically, its capacity to perpetuate unfairness and injustice. Advocates of political correctness have sought to amend the language of academic study, of campus life, and of the wider public. The rise of political correctness was one of the defining phenomena of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The phenomenon is with us still, though it operates less overtly than it did in its heyday. As its open-ended name suggests, it consists not of a single solid principle, but of a range of activities which can be split into two areas: describing and questioning. In the first of these areas, PC manifested itself in the form of verbal hygiene – a new, preferred terminology for speaking of minorities such as homosexuals, as well as in new ways of talking about teaching, learning and the curriculum. In the second area, it involved casting doubt on received notions of history, artistic merit and appropriate public behaviour.

  Promoted in the interests of sensitivity and the redistribution of cultural capital, often by sixties radicals who had internalized their outrage and become pillars of academe, PC was initially, as Geoffrey Hughes writes in his history of it, ‘a basically idealistic, decent-minded, but slightly Puritanical intervention to sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features’.13 But it was soon demonized by the political right as an exercise in sanctimonious relativism and leftist prickliness. To its sponsors, it was ‘a healthy expansion of morality’ (the phrase is Noam Chomsky’s); to its detractors, a sickness depleting the very idea of freedom.

  Significantly, the debate over PC consisted not so much of the proponents and opponents trading invective, as of PC’s enemies first hotly publicizing the issues and then dousing them with the icy water of ridicule. The opponents of PC saw themselves as a minority, when they were nothing of the sort. Though the label ‘politically correct’ had been in use for almost two hundred years, it gained currency in the eighties chiefly because conservatives adopted it to sum up the new enforced orthodoxies they were eager to disparage. The most acerbic critic of PC was Robert Hughes (no relation of Geoffrey), whose book Culture of Complaint (1993) diagnosed ‘the fraying of America’. Hughes savaged the ‘fake pity’ of political discourse, an entire culture’s ‘maudlin reaction against excellence’, feminism’s ‘abandoning the image of the independent, existentially responsible woman in favour of woman as helpless victim of male oppression’.14 Language was key. ‘We want,’ Hughes wrote, ‘to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.’ The ‘affected contortions’ of PC could do nothing to heighten civility and understanding.15 Instead, believed Hughes, they led to a loss of reality.

  The inherent problem of PC was, and is, that it seeks to extend people’s rights while at the same time curbing their freedoms. Instead of fostering respect for variety (of people, of cultures, of experiences), it stresses differences: we are not to think of the common good, but instead must recognize a growing number of special social categories. This contributes to the increasing atomization of society: shared experiences and values are regarded not as things to cherish, but as reflections of constraint, evidence of the oppression of the individual and his or her particularity.

  The basic intent of PC has been to draw attention to submerged social ills. Deborah Cameron argues that the largest threat it poses is to ‘our freedom to imagine that our linguistic choices are inconsequential’.16 Certainly, although some manifestations of PC are bovine, it is instructive to be shown that the names we give to things – to people – can reinforce prejudices. But negative attitudes precede negative names, and reforming language in the interests of equality is not the same thing as accomplishing equality. The niceties of PC allow us to applaud our own sensitivity while evading the redress of real evils. PC represents a return to linguistic prescriptivism (and proscriptivism), sponsored by those who would otherwise see themselves as progressives and natural descriptivists.

  20

  Unholy shit

  Censorship and obscenity

  Political correctness is an invitation to practise self-censorship: to conform to a model of fairness. This brings us to the larger issue of what we are not permitted to say, what we are discouraged from saying, and what we elect to say only in very particular circumstances.

  Censorship has a long history, and so does opposition to it. Indeed, it is the practice of policing what people are allowed to say that creates opportunities for subterfuge. The main concern of censorship is smothering ideas, yet because language is
the vehicle of ideas censorship has often seemed to be above all else an attempt to muffle language or extinguish it. You can jail a person, but not an idea. There are two forms of censorship. One is interference in advance of publication – by the state or by some other authority such as the Church. The other is action after publication: lawsuits and financial penalties.

  In Britain it is the Crown that has usually taken responsibility for censorship. Henry VIII published a list of banned books in 1529, and in 1545 the first permanent Master of the Revels was appointed, with responsibility for licensing playhouses and approving the works staged there. Later this role passed to the Lord Chamberlain, whose responsibility for theatrical censorship continued until 1968. There is also a tradition of self-appointed moralists: early ones included William Prynne and Jeremy Collier, who attacked the decadence of the theatre in the seventeenth century; the type is perhaps best represented by Mrs Grundy, a character mentioned in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798) who embodies the idea of bourgeois propriety and is name-checked in novels by Dickens, Thackeray and Dostoevsky.1 The moralists’ indignation is always no more than a step away from intolerance, and part of it stems from the conviction that the authorities should do more to repress profanity and depravity.

  It is well known that whole books have been suppressed on the grounds of obscenity: for instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain, the United States and Australia, and, less famously, a guide to euthanasia called The Peaceful Pill Handbook in Australia and New Zealand. Sometimes, too, a regime has outlawed literature on political grounds. A current example is North Korea, where the arts are expected to instruct people in socialism; educated North Koreans are unlikely to have read anything published outside their own language or before 1948.

  More often there have been small acts of suppression. Parts of books have been cut or amended to avoid causing offence, and certain books have been kept out of schools. Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle titles have been purged of words such as coon and darky – favourites of Dolittle’s pet parrot Polynesia. Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, which has been interpreted as an indictment of censorship, was expurgated for distribution in high schools; among other things, an episode describing fluff being removed from a navel was changed to a description of ears being cleaned. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was widely banned in schools in the 1960s and ’70s; in 1960 a teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was fired after assigning the book to a class of sixteen-year-olds. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that the most challenged books in the 1990s included Huckleberry Finn (because of its use of the word nigger) and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (because they allegedly teach witchcraft). Common reasons for challenges are allegations that books contain ‘sexually explicit’ material and ‘offensive language’ or are unsuited to the age group to which they are ostensibly addressed.2

  Probably the most celebrated example of censorship in English is Thomas Bowdler’s The Family Shakespeare (1818). As its subtitle announced, this edition of Shakespeare’s plays omitted any words that ‘cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’ – stripping away anything sexual, yet retaining the violence. The edition was Bowdler’s completion of work done by his sister Henrietta Maria; ungenerously, the title page omitted her name, though it did advertise his position as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Bowdler was also a member of what became the Society for the Suppression of Vice. His text, in which vice was diluted rather than completely effaced, led to his being accused in one review of having ‘castrated’ Shakespeare and of having ‘cauterized and phlebotomized him’.3 But The Family Shakespeare was popular, and went through five editions in twenty years. (Less well-known is Bowdler’s attempt to do the same thing with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from which he excised ‘all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency’.) The verb to bowdlerize has passed into everyday English vocabulary.

  By contrast, an atmosphere of the alien clings to the title of John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) – a work often claimed as a pioneering defence of free speech, although it would be more accurate to call it a wartime defence of the freedom of the press from government interference. The name of this tract is an allusion to the Areopagus, a hill where the Court of Athens met in the fourth and fifth centuries BC. Maybe we should read something into the fact that the name Milton chose for his defence of a free press remains so obscure. We may find many acts of censorship ridiculous, especially when we reflect on them from a distance yet the defenders of free expression are often thought of as superfluous bores, or are simply forgotten.

  Sometimes a single word can cause outrage. George Bernard Shaw wrote several plays that, while apparently apolitical, addressed controversial issues; of these the best-known is Pygmalion, in which Shaw pokes fun at the social purity movement. For a bet, Henry Higgins transforms the Covent Garden flower-seller Eliza Doolittle into a ‘princess’, which chiefly involves purifying her pronunciation. This is also, covertly, an attempt to ensure her moral probity. At the start of the play Eliza is mistaken for a prostitute – a matter dealt with obliquely, but not obscurely – and in learning a more refined style of speech she reduces the chances of this kind of thing happening in the future. However, the refinement is robotic, and there are moments when she escapes from it, expressing her true personality in vivid terms. One of these exercised the press. Before the first performance on the London stage of Pygmalion, the Daily Sketch warned that ‘One word in Shaw’s new play will cause sensation’. Its preview continued: ‘It is a word … certainly not used in decent society. It is a word which the Daily Sketch cannot possibly print.’ The word was bloody. On 11 April 1914, the first night of the run, Eliza’s use of it did indeed cause a sensation: in the theatre there was a stunned silence followed by more than a minute of hysterical laughter. Newspapers responded with dramatic headlines such as ‘Threats By Decency League’. Both bloody and pygmalion became catchwords of the moment. Shaw made a statement that was printed in the Daily News: ‘I have nothing particular to say about Eliza Doolittle’s language … I do not know anything more ridiculous than the refusal of some newspapers (at several pages’ length) to print the word “bloody”, which is in common use as an expletive by four-fifths of the British nation, including many highly-educated persons.’4 Almost a hundred years on, news media continue to play an ambivalent part in censorship, reporting events that have caused scandal, and often thereby drawing attention to acts or statements that might otherwise have gone largely unnoticed.

  The practice of censorship is closely linked to the concept of taboo – behaviours that are prohibited or strongly inhibited by the belief that they are improper, and things that are considered unfit for mention because they are sordid or sacred. The first recorded use in English of the word taboo – usually said to be of Tongan origin – is in Captain Cook’s 1777 account of his Pacific voyage. Sigmund Freud gave the word greater currency. In paying attention to the social role of taboo, he noted that we can feel guilty not just about things we have done, but also about our wishes (even subconscious ones). He identified this ‘creative’ kind of guilt as an important part of the machinery of our psyche, and went so far as to suggest that swearing, easily dismissed as mere catharsis, is an expression of wishes that exist below the threshold of consciousness, conveying a primal disgust.

  We frequently censor ourselves. I may sweeten a salty anecdote when relating it to a friend’s parents, or modify the way I talk about religion when I am with someone I know is a believer. While there is nothing that is at all times taboo for all people, we typically restrict or suppress parts of our vocabulary for fear of violating common taboos. This may well feel not like fear, but more akin to reverence or courtesy.

  The words and expressions most tabooed in English-speaking society are to do with sex, excretion, ethnicity and religion. Elsewhere there have been other prohibitions. Bandits in Republican China did not use the names of animals they considered dangerous. The linguist Leonard B
loomfield reported that a Cree Indian would not mention his sister’s name. In Japan, taboo terms are known as imi kotoba; at a wedding, one is expected to avoid using a common verb meaning ‘to repeat’, because it hints at the idea of divorce and remarriage. The Zuni of New Mexico will not use the word takka, meaning ‘frogs’, on any ceremonial occasion. Traditionally, Faroese fishermen refrain from using the word for knife (knívur), and, in the Yakut language spoken in parts of the far north of Russia, the word for a bear is avoided.

  For most readers of this book, though, the four taboo subjects I have mentioned will be to the fore. In Britain until the 1960s the use in print of fuck or cunt could result in prosecution. Speech, of course, has been a different matter. Michel de Montaigne observed in one of his essays that the words most rarely or warily spoken are among those most readily recognized. There is justice in this, but in the English-speaking world the rarity and wariness are doubtful. William Hazlitt had it right when he remarked that the English are ‘rather a foul-mouthed nation’. I don’t think of myself as a heavy swearer, but elsewhere in the English-speaking world – except in Australia – I seem to pass for one, as taboo terms trickle from my lips.