If I Ran the Zoo…(Just how important are proper spelling and grammar, anyway?)

(This is a repost of an entry I wrote on 21 Aug 2008.)

This morning, I was reading an excellent entry by Deb Punctuality Rules! Using Grammar and Good Manners to Save the World. The article is entitled “Do We Need New Spelling?” I was moved to write a sufficiently long comment that I would like to expand on a bit here. Deb refers to Laura Fitzpatrick’s article “Making an Arguement for Misspelling”(and, yes, that hurt to type) in the current issue of Time. I strongly suggest you read both the article and Deb’s entry so you have the context for what I am sharing below:

Okay, there are a couple of things going on here.

First: While the grammar geek in me screams at improper usage and spelling, the plain fact of the matter is that - for most of linguistic history - there was no such thing as standardized spelling. That has only come about in the last couple of centuries, with the collections of words that eventually developed into the dictionaries we know and love. Language is not something dead that can be codified completely. It lives and evolves o fit the needs of its users.

Second: I started screaming about this back when people started claiming that it was too difficult to understand how to use a semi-colon; I saw that as the first step down a slippery slope, and I still do. I am comfortable with the language as I have learned it. Hell, I still get upset about omission of the final comma in a series. That is my preference. I’m not sure it means I have the right to force that preference on others, though.

Third: If I recall correctly, the first country to start doing away with punctuation in addresses - and in print in general - was Great Britain, so I find it difficult to swallow when someone from there now complains that spelling is too difficult. When I was an administrative assistant at a major corporation, and America was first starting to adopt this trend from the British, I used to go crazy fighting with bosses over which was the proper for to use. My all-too-provincial American bosses could not believe that their European clients did things differently than we did, even though they had the evidence on every envelope addressed to them from Great Britain.

Fourth: Anyone who thinks the primary aim of the American education system was really to educate people well is fooling themselves. It was designed to shape a very diverse group of people into a relatively homogeneous workforce. It succeeded in doing that for a while, maybe; but is not even succeeding at that small aim these days, sadly.

Fifth: I do realize that what seems to me to just be laziness might very well be a real difficulty with learning the rules. I work in a school (and, no, I am not a teacher) where most of the student body are immigrants or the first generation children thereof, and I can understand the difficulty a lot of these kids have with English (even our watered-down American version). In fact, though, many of these kids are illiterate in their native languages as well. And since I do not believe that all of them were born “stupid,” I’m not sure how this can be dealt with.

Did I want to sit and parse sentences as a kid? Heck no. Am I now glad I had to? Absolutely. However, the sad fact is education has become even less about education than about making kids feel good about themselves.

My questions are: If it will hurt a kid’s self-esteem to fail a subject or lose at a gym activity now, how much more will it destroy his or her self-esteem to not be able to get a job that pays more than being a counter-person at a fast-food joint? In a society moving ever more rapidly toward information services and technologies, how will a person who cannot effectively communicate survive?

Standard spelling and grammar evolved for the same reason manners did: to ease interactions between people of a society. Should we toss that away just because it might be difficult for some to master? I think not. Should some variation on them be allowed? Well, language evolves. That is a fact. If it didn’t, we would probably still be speaking some form of Old English (if not some form of the languages that Old English developed from).

Is it distressing to see this happen in our lifetimes? Absolutely; in the same way that it’s distressing to go back to the neighborhood where you hung out as a teenager and find it has changed entirely (mine was New York’s Greenwich Village). People long for certainty and permanence. When something they grew up believing in changes, it can be shattering. This doesn’t mean that all change is bad, but neither does it mean that all change is good. Things do change, however, and since we are all different it is, perhaps, ridiculous to expect us all to adapt at the same rate of speed.

I don’t know what the solution is. I’m not sure that letting language evolve is “giving up the fight to educate our kids.” I’m not sure that spelling and grammar matter as much as *I* was taught they did (as much as it pains me to admit that). I do know that, whether I like it or not, language will continue to evolve and mutate long after I am no longer here to protest it doing so.

There is a game, played among science fiction fans, called “If I Ran the Zoo.” It’s about running a science fiction convention, and how you would handle the various problems and situations that come up in doing so. I am so glad this is not my zoo to run.