BY JOE NUTT
It’s difficult to avoid the sensation as a commonplace citizen, that more and more equally commonplace citizens have become openly prepared to defy the law. Flags have nothing to do with this. Unless of course they’re ornamenting terrorism. Lawlessness began quietly booming some years ago. In world famous galleries, paint is thrown at great paintings, statues are defaced or toppled and at major transport hubs climate change activists deny people that most quintessentially human freedom, freedom of movement. In the US, even the seat of government itself was disrupted not that long ago by a group of determined individuals. You don’t have to look far to suspect that something significant is happening to the way many perfectly ordinary citizens in Western democracies now perceive the rule of law. It’s as though many have forgotten the law exists to protect us all.
After decades of relative civil stability, the authority of law is now increasingly being openly challenged. Predictably partisan commentators and weak politicians will jerk their knees and jab their fingers at recent high profile events or faces, but the current furore is all miles downstream of where it all started. The law is weak because our use of language has changed so radically, in such a short space of time.
English speakers globally are living in an era of unprecedented linguistic instability because political activists of all stripes of the rainbow have decided that the English language is the most effective weapon with which to pursue their personal agenda. From the commonplace citizen standpoint, we should be thankful this conflict is not between entrenched, massed battalions of conscripts, but between isolated foot soldiers hiding behind disparate computer screens; I guess we should all be grateful that the keyboard seems self-evidently now mightier than the sword.
It is no accident that every English speaking courtroom holds several copies of a reputable English Dictionary. Anyone who has ever sat through a business contract negotiation will know only too well that the foundation of every legally binding, commercial agreement, is the primacy of the individual word. It’s almost a requirement for any successful commercial lawyer to be the kind of personality who loves nothing more than a heated, heartfelt discussion about the meaning of a single, otherwise placid word, like requirement or deliver. The rule of law is, at its heart, the rule of language.
The root source of this now international weakness, is the way English has been taught in schools and universities over recent decades. Even in what we would expect to be the most rigorous corner of the English teaching world, grammar, the dominant belief for decades has been the sociolinguistic assertion that language holds no more value than Plasticine; it is nothing more significant than a colourful, infinitely flexible toy we are all free to play with.
Here is the uber guru of English grammar in the UK, Professor of linguistics David Crystal, author of dozens of hugely influential books about the English language; writing about playing with language.
“Everyone plays with language or responds to language play. We play with language when we manipulate it as a source of enjoyment, either for ourselves of for the benefit of others. I mean ‘manipulate’ literally: we take some linguistic feature, such as a word, a phrase, a sentence, a part of a word, a group of sounds, a series of letters – and make it do things it does not normally do. We are, in effect, bending and breaking the rules of language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun.” [1]
But that has never been the whole story. Increasingly, people tinker with language for reasons many of us might wish to question. It would be difficult to think of a less appropriate word than fun to describe adding the otherwise harmless looking adjective tactical to the phrase; nuclear weapons, or the coining of the abbreviation TERF[2] to harass women who refuse to repeat the lie that human beings can change their birth sex. And it really is a lie. If having read this far, you find yourself objecting to the way I’ve just used that word, then you are either a willing, or an innocent victim of sociolinguistic mind games. However much you might wish it, there really is no middle ground for you to cling to.
It is one thing to lie: quite another to try and force others to repeat it. The meaning of the word woman, shared by English speakers since around the eight century, is easily the most high profile trophy of sociolinguistics. To have successfully stolen the word and coerced some lawmakers into legislating such a profound lie into law, is indeed both rapacious and daring.
At no point did the question of risk ever enter into these academic debates about grammar. In the post sixties world of English teaching, there was no such thing as an opportunity cost. The modern day celebrity declaring they were never taught any grammar at school, “And look at me, it never did me any harm,” has become a social media cliché. Grammar is, after all the most basic part of any language curriculum, as teachers of foreign languages will eagerly confirm. Why is it then so often left to them and largely ignored by teachers of English? The answer is because sociolinguistics effectively usurped it.
When I was still teaching English formally in the UK some decades ago now, I remember vividly attending a training session run by a senior English examiner in which they showed a series of examples of pupils’ work which were almost entirely unintelligible, mostly through a combination of uncontrolled handwriting and impossible spelling. We were instructed how to, in effect guess, at what each child may have meant, and then to award them marks accordingly. The successful communication of thought, of meaning from one individual human mind to another; the most basic function of any language, was abandoned as criteria in order to find some way to reward the child’s efforts. And this was taking place in the context of the national school exam for sixteen year olds, supposedly a benchmark for the basic level of language proficiency politicians and employers alike hope all children can reach.
This is what happens when you view language entirely through a ludicrously myopic, sociolinguistic lens; when your entire way of thinking about language is constrained by the simplistic notion that studying the political and social conditions in which language is used, is a valuable scholarly activity in itself.
In English classrooms all over the world, at its most extreme this dominant approach to the rules necessary for any language to function turned into, “If a child says it’s a poem: it’s a poem.” Poetry, the most sophisticated, difficult and disciplined form of communication human beings can construct with language became little more than a word game; a puzzle, not the aesthetically admirable, wonderfully insightful solution it had previously been, before sociolinguists brought sham science to bear on it. If you doubt me, here is my proof.
The epitome of this sixties, chaotic linguistic irresponsibility appears in the children’s author Michael Rosen’s book, What is Poetry? where the author proves so incapable of defining what poetry is, he actually leaves some pages empty so that his readers can decide for themselves. If a visiting speaker on maths to any school talked about his book containing a blank page for his readers to define what an equation is, we would quite rightly consider him excessively foolish, as well as incompetent. Not only was Rosen a children’s laureate in 2007, he has been almost synonymous with English language teaching, as far as the BBC has been concerned, for decades. And the BBC was, of course, the voice of English globally. No surprise that it no longer is.
No one stopped to ask what such adolescent behaviour might be doing to the integrity of language. Yet we all learn from a very young age that when you play with Plasticine too much, no matter how vibrant the colours and varied the shapes you started with; in the end you are left with nothing more useful than a lifeless, grey lump.
At the same time as this was happening, the widely accepted and legally binding requirement on teachers to restrain from proselytising in the classroom has been steadily but definitively abandoned. As politicians insisted on turning schools into political axes to grind and teachers, instead of insisting on their neutral professionalism, joined them; the idea that a text was first and foremost an object worthy of artistic study was usurped by the idea that a text was first and foremost a political lever.
Look at the kinds of books English teachers increasingly choose for children to read in those first few years of adolescence, when ideally and crucially, teachers should be shifting them from simple language decoders to free-thinking, responsive readers. It is far more common to see English teachers asking each other for recommendations of books based on their political or sociological themes, than it is for them to seek books for their literary merit.
Examination bodies are themselves deeply complicit in this unethical behaviour. Even a cursory look at English Literature exam material will demonstrate that increasing numbers of texts are chosen purely because of their focus on contemporary political concerns such as race, post-imperialist guilt or identity.
It’s no accident that with this shift came the extraordinary birth and rise of the Young Adult novel; a form defined not by centuries of accepted literary artistry but primarily, by the ephemeral politics of race and identity. If you select a book for someone else’s child to read merely because it aligns with your personal, political ideology; that is indoctrination, not education.
Here is a flavour of what reviewers recommend as the best YA fiction, all selected from just one mainstream English newspaper article. The point to note of course being to highlight the reasons given here for recommending these books.
- It’s a gorgeous exploration of identity and mental health, as well as friendship and first love.
- The plot centres around the election for the coveted position of president of LGBTQ+ society in Barney’s high school.
- Adjusting to her new school and life, Cynthia finds herself between two brothers – one white, one Black (and adopted) – at her posh new private school,
- It tackles social media addiction, authenticity and pressures, as well as the condition of alopecia, which Barb suddenly develops (and the author herself had as an 18-year-old dealing with stress and OCD).
- The mental health narrative was very powerful and feels exactly like the kind of subject matter we need to be addressing for teens in 2022.
- … are the only two Black students at the elite, all-white Niveus Academy, who are targeted in racist attacks by anonymous texter, Aces.
- …the queer romcom delivers exactly what we’re looking for when we pick up a YA book: a lot of heart and humour, compelling characters and relatable dilemmas (parental pressures, toxic friendships, biphobia and more).
The unethical assumption behind the entire YA genre, is that when it comes to proselytising, young teenagers are simply fair game. That teachers of English literature, of all people; teachers whose entire training should have steeped them in the libertarian ideals of literary giants, don’t question and fiercely resist this trend serves not just to persuade a generation of children that books are indeed merely social levers, but underscores the message that political change is best achieved through changing language.
The first few cohorts of children taught in this crude and reductive way have been leaving universities and entering employment over the last few decades, precisely the period in which we have witnessed this abrupt fragility in the rule of law.
As previously noted, commercial law is in essence all about literally agreeing terms but just as in criminal law, the concept of fairness is at its heart. The law, criminal or commercial, can never hold fast where a sense of unfairness persists. In those extremely high profile court cases in which human rights, race or gender issues become the primary focus, it’s noticeable how quickly emotion undermines legal argument, tainting any hope of fairness and leading to severely partisan behaviour. Words are deployed in such extreme cases not as evidence, but in the same way that activists use them, as weapons. What we are seeing across England today is a reaction, not a cause.
Academic lawyers are very aware of the law’s reliance on language and debates about an increase in the use of dictionary definitions, in US courts in particular, explore the wisdom as well as the efficacy of judges resorting to books which are far from the stone tablets some may be seeking. Dictionaries exist in time as well as their native culture. They can be descriptive or prescriptive, synchronic or diachronic and however much faith one seeks to place in the definitions they offer, a dictionary can only ever be a proxy for the much wider lexicon any language develops over time.
And of course, lexicographers themselves are far from immune to sociolinguistics. The Cambridge Dictionary caused a major stir when it added this definition to the noun, woman.
- an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth:
These kinds of academic debates however, never reach the streets of Birmingham, whether in the Midlands of England or the State of Alabama, and while men and women with considerable experience of the law in practice and in theory, debate the value of textualist analysis with lawmakers and legislators; activists continue to rampage the lexicon in search of words they can redefine or phrases they can weaponise, in pursuit of their own, personal agendas and in so doing, affect us all.
Ordinary citizens meanwhile, stand by in a state of bewilderment, wondering how and why, such and such a word now seems to mean something completely new, the opposite of how they use it themselves, or why it has even become forbidden to use it at all.
The only way back from this precipitous rush towards Humpty Dumpty’s solipsistic dystopia is to radically rethink the way English is taught in schools and universities.
Instead of stressing the idea that grammatical rules are always and essentially fluid; that language is the paintbrush and not the canvas, we need to flip this metaphor and instil the concept in children from an early age, that language is the blank paper of thought; that we all have a responsibility to pursue and insist on high levels of integrity in the way we use the English language. Otherwise, however vivid your colour palette or deft your brushwork, you are painting on tissue paper.
This is not simply an argument about the value of teaching grammar. That is what activists want you to believe and is why they responded a few years ago with near hysteria to even the most rudimentary reintroduction of topics like parts of speech in UK primary schools, branding it reactionary or even ‘right wing.’
What’s needed is a wholescale reversal of the idea that language is in some miraculous way immune to play. Children need to learn that profoundly important concepts like trust and truth, rely entirely on the faith we are all prepared to invest in the words that we constantly exchange.
Writers of great literature may indeed be to some extent rule breakers; but you have to both know and respect the rules in order to be able to manipulate them in ways that create anything that might merit or reward textual study in schools and universities.
If the only framework you have for understanding the English language comes from thinking about it in terms of political or social conditions, then don’t be surprised if you discover you can’t actually read. It’s noticeable that sociolinguists frequently display this weakness on social media. If you really believe language is merely a product of social and political conditioning, then of course you will only ever see and hear in the words a writer uses, what you expect to see and hear from that writer. It’s the most extraordinarily blinkered way of engaging with any text; like walking into an art gallery wearing sunglasses.
International piracy once disrupted and plagued global trade while pirates mocked the many nations who sought prosperity for their citizens through the legal trade of goods. Today’s linguistic pirates also disrespect borders, prey on the innocent and exploit the absence of political will to put an end to the chaos they cause. In a truly civil society, in one defined by the ubiquity and stability of respect for the rule of law, adolescence and play are not intelligent models for language use. Schools and universities across the entire English speaking world, now have a precious, significant and adult responsibility to restore a sense of integrity to the way we all communicate.
Joe Nutt is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry and he writes regularly for a number of magazines.
[1] https://www.davidcrystal.com/Files/BooksAndArticles/-4174.pdf
[2] Trans exclusionary radical feminist.