The Natural Linguist

I was driving back from Lexington today, a long but beautiful drive up I-81. To pass the time, I was listening to to the Virginia Insights show on NPR and there was a eye-opening and rather moving show featuring a wonderful lady named Kay Allison of the Quest Institute . Her organization sponsors a program called Books Behind Bars which provides free books for prison inmates. On the show, they mentioned the great need for dictionaries. One thing many of us take for granted is that we have easy access to a dictionary or two. Not so in prison, where these are considered a valuable and prized possession. Here's why: many "on the inside" either have not had (or have not taken best advantage of) educational opportunities. When they arrive in prison and find they have plenty of time to reflect on their lives, some experience the desire to improve their minds and make a better life. So they turn to books. Those who never picked up a book before their time in prison naturally...

This is somewhat a manifesto. English is not Latin. We can put prepositions at the end of a sentence if we want to. And we can start sentences with a conjunction! If we want to boldly split infinitives, then we're perfectly welcome to do so. Why? Because these are all syntactically correct constructs in English; they parse. And even more, they convey meaning to other speakers of the language, which is the real test of whether something is permitted in a language. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Doane, a throwback to the 19th century prescriptivist grammarians, would no doubt sniff disapprovingly and peer with narrowed eyes over her Far Side-style glasses at such goings on. However, now I have the M.A. in Linguistics and can scowl back with gravitas. And so I will echo those marvelous Churchillian words: " This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. " But in the end, I must confess that it was Guy Deutscher who freed me from the pointless tyran...