Power seems to be a trendy word these days—maybe ever since Michel Foucault’s contributions on this theme—but as a linguist, I am not surprisingly interested in how it relates to language. Who wields power over language? In order to attempt to answer that question, I will start with three language “stories” that speak to the relationship between power and language.
The first story is about a six-year-old boy talking about the revolution that toppled Romania’s Big Brother some 30 years ago, when he was in first grade. When asked at that time how the unexpected change affected him, he said with premature irony: “One day we were calling our teacher ‘Comrade,’ and the next day we were supposed to call her ‘Mrs.’” The Ministry of Truth, responsible up to that point for censorship over words and concepts, was dismantled, and children were allowed to use the language they used at home and among themselves. In other words, it took a bloody coup for language to return to truth and normalcy.
The second story records the vicissitudes of the epicene English pronoun. About thirty years ago, the gender-indefinite pronoun “he” started being perceived as offensively sexist. The suggested and slowly enforced alternative was “he or she,” “he/she” (a strange slashed pronominal form), and various other orthographic variants. Editors created the change and started implementing it, at times mechanically, with hilarious results. For example, the male author of an academic work, referring to himself in the introduction, naturally, as “he,” saw the edited manuscript changed to “he/she!” In general, this pronominal solution, mandated in editorial rooms and classrooms, was felt to be awkward, therefore speakers chose another pronoun, the sex-neutral “they,” to take its place. As the class of pronouns, unlike that of nouns or verbs, cannot be enriched with made-up or borrowed words, the speakers chose an already existing pronoun, the third person plural and gave it an additional function. And the powers that tried to enforce their own pronouns admitted defeat and adopted the speakers’ pronominal choice, in speech and writing. Thus, the circle was closed, as the use of “they” was not new, but can be found in English as far back as the Middle Ages.
The third story is one of Eudora Welty’s accounts from her autobiographical work One Writer’s Beginnings:
The school toilets were in the boys’ and girls’ respective basements. After Miss Duling had rung to dismiss school, a friend and I were making our plans for Saturday from adjoining cubicles [in the girls’ school toilets]. “Could you come spend the day with me?” I called out, and she called back “I might could.”
“Who-said—MIGHT-COULD?” It sounded like “Fi Fi Fo Fum!”
We were both petrified, for we knew whose deep measured words those were that came from just outside our doors….
“You might as well tell me,” continued Mrs. McWillie. “I am going to plant myself right here and wait till you come out. Then I’ll see who it was I heard saying ‘MIGHT-COULD’”… Saying “might-could” was bad, but saying it in the basement made bad grammar a sin. I knew Presbyterians believed that you could go to Hell.
In spite of this early traumatic encounter in the school bathroom, I am sure Eudora Welty continued to use the double modal at home and with friends from the American South, and she, a keen listener to the rhythms of her characters’ speech, put it in the mouths of many a fictional character, but she may not have always used it in conversations with non-Southern-dialect speakers from among her readers.
Changes in language can be brought about by powerful agents: totalitarian leaders, publishers, and teachers. And yet, their changes, coming from above, last only temporarily, for as long as the enforcers stay in power: eventually, the language, through its speakers, rejects them or keeps what they think works best in communication. The changes coming from the speakers eventually make their way into written discourse and are recorded in dictionaries and grammars and style handbooks.
Over long stretches of time languages change in sound, structure, and meaning. They change very slowly, after periods of fluctuation and inconsistency. The agents of change are the speakers themselves, although often they are unaware of language change and, oftentimes, some even deplore it. The history of the English language is a dramatic example of such change: for hundreds of years, since the first attested documents in English dating from approximately the 8th century, to current times, English has changed its very typology, from a language structured more like Latin (with noun and verb endings and a loose word order) to what it is today (most of the endings gone, and the subject+verb+object word order firmly entrenched). This change is so dramatic that a contemporary speaker of English has to learn Old English, the language of the epic poem Beowulf, as a foreign language, and needs some help to understand the Medieval English of Chaucer, and even Shakespeare, much closer to today’s English. How did this happen? Many non-linguistic changes happened over fifteen centuries: increased population and mobility, rising literacy, the Norman Invasion, the printing press, among others. Kings succeeded each other, French almost replaced English, but the English speakers kept speaking English, with little concern about how language changed over generations, and unaware that they were holding the keys to their language in their own hands. With increased literacy and broader availability of books, late in the history of spoken language, self-appointed defenders of language began to raise their voices against chaos and vulgarity in language and to ask for the need for “purification” and “standardization.” This was a continental movement that soon reached the British Isles.
Efforts to mold language by ever-changing ideologies does nothing less than obfuscate communication, moving it away from the truth. They can hardly be enforced for long periods of time, for the language, through its speakers, is bound to reject them sooner or later.
Thus, at the very end of the 16th century, Italy created the oldest European Academy, the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, a group of philological scholars, poets, and lawyers set out to sift bran (crusca) from wheat and give birth to “il piu bel fior,” free from corrupt words and grammatical structures. Starting out on a jocular note, la Crusca soon took its own power to purify language seriously.
One hundred and fifty years later, under the protection of Cardinal Richelieu, the French created their own academy, L’Académie française, the awe-inspiring institution responsible for regulating French grammar and spelling, “to render the language capable of treating the arts and sciences.” The Academy has survived to this day: it has always had only 40 seats, each held for life. The academicians are men and (only very recently) women of letters (Marguerite Yoursenar was the first woman elected in 1980!). They are called “immortals,” because their work is meant to assure the immortality of the language. The first complete edition of their dictionary, Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française dédié au Roi, was published in 1694. Its most recent task has been to clean French of the many words borrowed from English, oblivious to the fact that over a thousand years ago English was literally invaded by thousands of Norman French words, which were gradually and imperceptibly incorporated into the host language the way speakers of a language know how to do it, without the need of an academy.
Echoes of the French Academy soon reached over the Channel. In 1711, Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver Travels’
fame, wrote a letter to Robert, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, known as “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue,” in which he was asking for the earl’s patronage of a manual with rules for correcting “abuses” and “absurdities” in the language, and the many offences against “every Part of Grammar.” For Swift deplored the imperfection of language and its continuous change. He was taking upon himself the task of fixing the English Language forever, of wielding power over English. His lengthy, historically detailed plea did not reach a favorable ear with the earl, although many of Swift’s literary contemporaries harbored the same desires, notable among them Daniel Defoe, well known for his Robinson Crusoe. England’s 18th century was the time when such calls for power over language with the intent of turning English into a perfect language on the model of Latin and logic were heard most loudly. The century witnessed a proliferation of English grammars whose purpose was to “ascertain” the language. They were published in many editions and used in schools across the country, teaching children to express themselves with propriety. Maybe the most influential of these was Bishop Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar, the target of ridicule by modern linguists. Lowth found fault with grammatical points in the language of Shakespeare, Milton and even Jonathan Swift! He is attributed with many rules for the elimination of “false syntax,” here side by side with contemporary examples of use: the double negative (“I can’t get no satisfaction”), the split infinitive (“to boldly go where nobody has gone before”), the gender-neutral “he” (“Everybody should mind their own business”), the superlative of two items (“the best of the two options”)—all of them gradually banished from the English language, at least in speech, with all but the most pedantic speakers.
The only immortal produced by eighteenth-century England was the legendary Samuel Johnson, described by his friend, the delightful novelist Fanny Burney, as the “acknowledged head of Literature in his kingdom.” The quirky, original, versatile, omnivorous, highly knowledgeable Dr. Johnson, published, in 1755, under the sponsorship of the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, A Dictionary of the English Language, with 43,000 entries, illustrated for the first time in dictionary making by literary quotations. No one in the English language had more influence over language than Dr. Johnson. And his dictionary reigned supreme for about 150 years, when the Oxford English Dictionary took up its mantle.
Dictionaries and grammars are important for standardizing language, particularly in writing. Given the changes in English during its tumultuous history, primarily in sound, Dr. Johnson’s dictionary was crucial in establishing uniform spelling. Teachers and style handbooks are the enforcers of these standards, at least in written discourse.
Over the pond, similar linguistic moments followed at great speed. In 1765, in perfect symmetry, Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the first president of what became Columbia University, published An English Grammar; the First Easy Rudiments of Grammar Applied to the English Tongue; and in 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language was published, known to this day as Webster’s dictionary. Webster’s Dictionary was even more open to the “people’s language” than Dr. Johnson’s, for its creator considered that it was better to be “vulgarly right than correctly wrong,” that is to say that his dictionary should mirror the language people spoke. When all is said and done, in the Anglosphere no Academy was ever established.
Just as the 18th century was a prescriptivist century in matters of language, the 20th century was descriptive of spoken language and of the creativity of speakers evident in the many language varieties, from dialects and poetry to slang and jargon. Holding back judgment, modern linguistics acknowledges what has been evident over centuries of language change: that only speakers have control over language. On the assumption that speakers want direct, unambiguous, truthful communication, they are “allowed” to borrow words from other languages or create new words as needed; to change form and structure, many times by similarity with other forms, at other times “incorrectly,” even “inelegantly.”
All along, since the 18th century, there have been in the English language taboo words, avoided by speakers for various reasons, and replaced by euphemisms: religious interjections (gee, golly, geez, for Pete’s sake, holy cow, etc.); profanity-free intensifiers (shoot, fricking, etc.); nouns that acquire a pejorative connotation over time (for example, the many names associated with the words “maid:” charwoman, cleaning woman, custodian). Religious euphemisms have been part of the English language so long that many contemporary speakers don’t even know that they are originally religious in nature; they are perceived as interjections, not any different from other interjections, like “oops” or “wow.” In contemporary colloquial discourse, reinforced in movies and popular music, profanities are no longer euphemized. The last category of euphemisms, however, has lately been enriched considerably, as greater segments of the population are more easily offended and believe that by changing words they will be less so. Thus, “garbage men” become “sanitation engineers,” in keeping with current efforts to erase “sexist language” by eliminating the sound cluster “man” from all words which contain it, even when it does not refer to maleness (“manual,” “manuscript,” etc.). The replacement of words by euphemisms leads to what the linguist Steven Pinker called “the euphemistic treadmill”: euphemisms soon acquire new pejorative meanings and have to be replaced by other euphemisms, and so on. Reality and speaker attitude do not disappear. The whole process is underlined by an ancient belief in “word magic,” that is, the ability of words to magically bring about human attitudes and judgments instead of simply pointing to reality.
The purpose of what the philosopher Paul Grice called cooperative conversation, indeed, of language itself, is to be clear and unambiguous, economical and lucid, and above all truthful. Changes imposed from above, efforts to “purify the language” or make it more logical or a more beautiful language or mold it to a particular ideology by academies and prescriptive grammarians and ever-changing ideologies, do nothing less than obfuscate communication, moving it away from the truth. That is why they can hardly be enforced for long periods of time, for the language, through its speakers, is bound to reject them sooner or later. If the underlying assumption of communication and purpose of language is not truthfulness—witness the proliferation of words denoting lying of all kinds and degrees in today’s discourse!—we would not know what lying is! Humor and satire will die. And communication based in truthfulness and trust will break down.
