From linguistic to moral degeneracy

By Gary Simon

I was teaching English Composition at the University of New Orleans when, during one session, my students literally stationed a mini riot because of my refusal to accept poor writing. They were angry at my insistence that good composition adhere to the proper rules of grammar and in particular PMLA. Few in attendance that morning took my side. Even my colleagues undermined my position by passing students who could not complete a simple sentence. Outside the classroom, professional and business persons alike were committing the same errors my students refused to correct. All too quickly our language was suddenly in harm’s way and no one, it seemed, wished to address the problem. As a result, the more we failed the language, the further our morals and thinking declined. The more we relaxed the rules, the greater the price we paid. Persons like myself were plagued by blunders and embarrassments created by the misuse of language and our vacuous moral state. For me the link between today’s moral abandonment and the neglect of our language can be traced back to that morning in my class of English 101.

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There is such a fascination with our English language that when a young mind first encounters its literary giants, the temptation to fall in love with words, if one is so inclined, is irresistible. By the end of my sophomore year in college I was convinced I would one day teach in some small, idyllic university. The less than promising salary offered assistant professors in the 70’s was never viewed as a stumbling block. Nor was my happiness ever dampened by the obvious hardships inherent in such a profession. I wanted to teach regardless of its drawbacks; I wanted to reach minds and have an impact.

It was not long after this that I was given the opportunity. I eventually accepted a position as instructor in a southern university and immediately set about filling my students with my own enthusiasms. I was more than ready for the challenge and never doubted my abilities. One of my mistakes, however, and this one was a granddaddy, was in accepting the notion that everyone enjoyed our language and that most had an abiding ambition to express themselves correctly.

At least this is what I reminded myself and not once did I ever consider anything to the contrary. Then it happened. It finally occurred on that infamous day when my class’s Real and my Ideal actually squared off for a not-to-be-forgotten confrontation. Naturally, I was ill-prepared for what was to transpire. It was during this one period, over 25 years ago, that I became transfixed overnight from being a marginally-mild optimist to a kicked-in-your-butt defeatist. It wasn’t so much what they sounded; it was how they sounded. They were riled, and at me, and their attack could definitely be colored ugly.

Once I put their backs to the wall, not a moment was lost before they counterpunched. They consumed me, but not piece by piece. They went after me full-force where their pounce was as frantic as their bite. It was so sudden, as if someone had whacked me from behind, when a chunky freshman interrupted the class and challenged me to a mental duel over our mother tongue.

I had only been teaching two weeks when, almost immediately, he and his peers began frying me over the statutes of the PMLA handbook. The consensus of the world’s grammatical thinkers was suddenly being contested by this seedy field of anti-thinkers. From the outset this outburst had the earmarkings of a major mental clash and somehow I knew my hour would be filled with carpings and innuendos. Their chieftain obviously had it in for me, and more particularly, academia. Bit by bit he revealed his own baggage and made it clear that any intellectual showing on my part would set off an adolescent fireworks on his. Within minutes our discourse had passed beyond mere dialogue and now, fully out of control, my class’s insulting jabs had turned into full frontal assaults.

The reasons this homogeneous revolt had ignited on so many fronts were, at my inquiring, explained by different voices, and mostly all at once. Primarily it seemed to their head instigator that no one in MY eyes was capable of earning high marks unless he embraced the language of the classicists (or something to that effect). His arguments meandered widely and ended by attacking MY criteria of what I considered art. He noted that simply because I found Hamlet to be more suited to MY imaginings, that this did not allow me to accept, let alone consider, the more modern forms of expression. Whatever standards I applied to art were based on MY own conclusions and should not be applicable to anyone but myself. Given this premise, the class should not be bound by MY antiquarian ways and must be allowed to draw its own opinions regarding art since all art is examined and internalized according to personal taste. All guidelines must come from within, (grammatical standards and regulations would, of course, cease) and no individual should be bound to conform to what I consider proper. After all, who was I to tell them how to think? If Peter Max or Kiss appeased their sense of art and music, it was not MY position, or even right, to impose my Kingdom of Rules over their House of Ruin.

Keep in mind, this rebellion was the emotional outburst of a class reacting to its first graded papers. My comments, if I recall, were not flattering to their run-on sentences, fragmented thoughts and gross misspellings. I knew that the majority of my colleagues’ grading scales were not as stringent as mine, and consequently this outburst was not directed at the system, but at me. They were angry because I refused to denigrate my standards and I was equally frustrated with them for their wanting me to be more lenient. I would have thought that the novelty of having a teacher who vehemently contested the misuse of our language would have some appeal. Unfortunately, nothing was farther from the truth.

Suffice it to say, I was being accused by a fresh crop of academicians of alienating myself from the constraining jargon of my classroom. I was judged, without peers, of shunning those elliptical sounds that were now playing across America and which spoke directly to them. I was fingered a traitor for turning my back on every fad and nuance that inspired their Age. I was reprimanded for refusing to sidestep the awkward syntaxes and choppy clauses which choked their writings. In other words, within these four walls, I was handed the chance to bear witness to the steepening demise of America’s spoken word and instead walked away.

For no conceivable reason, there seemed to me this unchecked mind-set that slang, misguided predicates and vulgarities was now the proper etiquette of the decade. This was not the first time I spotted a crack in the grammatical rules. It was so grossly apparent that more than a few persons had somehow banded together, and in a clandestine move voted grammatical slovenliness more convenient than exactitude. I did not want to say it, I did not wish to think it, but there it was and there I stood mimicking, no babbling, to myself “the horror of it.” From the Pillars of Education to the Halls of Radio City, sprawling across newspapers and broadcasts, business communiqués and English 101, the language I fell in love with was under severe attack and with its major players about to surrender.

It was pretty clear at this point that I had become privy to a full-blown riot when all I wished to discuss that morning were transitional and linking phrases. What a reversal of fortune that I, and not them, had been placed center stage to be crucified. Over their rantings I asked myself, “What had gone wrong and why? How had everyone’s standards plunged so fast? Why was academia, aside from its financial motivations, drowning itself? And why wasn’t anyone screaming but me?”

Already the eroding changes in our writing were hastening my departure from education. I was beginning to feel estranged from my colleagues and bewildered by what I construed as a mixed bag of standards. I could never explain to my pupils the value of proper prose when so much of their community was determined to undermine its significance. Nor could I, at the time, measure the long-range effects of a society gone amok without its literary graces.

All too quickly I realized I was in the midst of a major crisis and was sorely reaping any support from those who should have known better. I was appalled by the irreverent way we were treating our language. It was inexcusable for those in the know not to be outraged. In fact any thinking American who was not moved to question this sudden masquerading was guilty by his mere silence. By the time I looked around that included almost anyone I knew. There was no quelling it. Everyone was a participant, or so it seemed, and on the wrong side. Every ill-spoken, ill-written, ill-digested bit of verbosity had finally crawled through the system.

If this were the worst that was to be – an outbreak of illiteracy – maybe I could have dealt with it. But there were consequences to consider in the wake of such a debacle. To me, the twisted jargon and abandonment of rules was all it took to set in motion an approaching wave of mediocrity.

Yet, how could we have even thought that we could decimate the rules without it affecting our thinking? Such a weathering must consider its losses as well as the harm to our morality. This only follows since everything we do and say are mirrored images of each other. Given this duality I did not hold out much hope for either since the wreckage that took place and the correlation which my students could not comprehend – their denouncement of art appreciation and grammar’s specificity and its relationship to language and morality – was already reality.

I would never be so conceited to even suggest that my own peers, or others before me, had any firmer grasp over the symbiotic relationship of art, language and morality. I never entertained that proposition then, nor do I now. But what scholars prior to my own bore was that necessity for exactness to thought and grammar. Within their times, within their temperaments was a marked alignment to clarity, precision and higher ends. Such elevation could only be attained, and eventually sustained, through the practical usage of our language. To violate its standards would denigrate one’s thinking.

Had such a time arrived? I believed it had and I counted myself as one of the privileged few to stand watch over my country under fire. While it was a war with words as arsenals, the consequences were just as deadly had they been fired from a gun.

It seems strange that I should still be addressing such a matter now. My own words sound anachronistic to me. I feel like a rebuffed plaintiff. The opposition, on the other hand, fills entire blocks with cheapening defenses. The fact remains that any mention of a correlation between a declining language and the demise of today’s thinking would probably not shock the average citizen. There is so much evidence to support the current corruption of our morality that it is inconceivable we are not chastising one another, more than we do, for its perpetuation. After all we’ve been through – Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, the Constitution, Lincoln, Emerson and King – and we still believe we can treat our language as torturously as we do.

I don’t know where it all began, this penchant for speaking poorly, but whenever I witness the suffocating way we speak, I am more exasperated by the miniscule effort we make in stomping out these ear sores than I am by the ear sores themselves. Try for the moment to forget that we’ve become outlandishly abusive in expressing our simplest impulses. Even overlook our lame failures in matching the precise words to the action we are describing. Ignore all the broken predicates, hammered infinitives and waylaid prepositions in our restaurants, shops, schools and institutions. Turn aside from the punctured conversations between student and teacher, the unfinished sentences among families and associates and the fractured English between friends. But in doing so, just remember that for every action there is a price to be paid and we are dearly paying our dues.

Note: This article was first published by JUST Response on July 3 2004. Gary Simon did doctoral work at Wayne State University in the early 1970s and owns an advertising agency in New Orleans. Much of his time is spent writing and strategizing for clients although his personal passion is a commitment to a healthy environment and protection for all wildlife.

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