language – Thoughts from Rose Avenue

When I bought my first PC in 1984, the salesperson cautioned me that I wouldn’t be able to use it right away. It was missing an essential component — something called a “disk operating system” — which was required for the computer to do any computing. The operating system (more succinctly known as DOS) came on a floppy disk, which was backordered and expected to arrive in a few days. In the meantime, all I could do was play the computer’s demo disk, designed to show off its capabilities on the showroom floor, over and over and over.

Despite that annoyance, once I learned to use DOS, I quickly became a fan. I loved the simple elegance of the C:\> prompt with the flashing cursor, patiently waiting for me to type in a command. But my romance with DOS was doomed. The same year I bought my PC, Apple introduced the Macintosh, with a graphical user interface that allowed users to do much of their work simply by clicking or dragging with a mouse. I dismissed the Mac as a toy — something that was appealing to beginners, but not suitable for serious work — and assumed that it would be a passing fad. Instead, it was quickly and widely accepted as the model for what a desktop computer ought to be.

My friend Brad, an early advocate of graphical interfaces, urged me to come aboard. He said that the Macintosh’s intuitive way of doing things represented the future of computing.

“On the contrary,” I said, “it’s like going back to the Stone Age. Back then, if you wanted to refer to something, you had to point to it. That was inefficient. That’s why we invented language.”

“But it’s easy to make mistakes when you type in commands,” he insisted.

“And it’s just as easy to make mistakes if you’re not good at handling a mouse,” I said, having had that experience in my experiments with using one.

Once I accepted that change was inevitable, I dodged Microsoft’s weak replacement for DOS, called Windows, by switching to a Macintosh. I’ve had nothing but Macs for 40 years now, and I confess that I’ve come to like using a mouse. But one consequence of that industrywide switch from words to pictures that drives me crazy is the need for everything to be represented by a visual symbol, whether useful or not.

The original Mac icons were simple and clear. For example, in the very first version of Photoshop, it was easy to grasp that denoted a brush, denoted a pencil, and denoted an eraser. But as Photoshop became more sophisticated and more features were added, providing an immediately recognizable icon became next to impossible.

For example, how would you visually represent the Content-Aware Move Tool (which allows you to move a selection from one place to another, with Photoshop magically repairing the place it was moved from), or the 3D Material Drop Tool (which allows you to sample the surface texture of a 3D object and apply it to another 3D object)? The answers are and respectively, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that without looking them up first. I find most icons in current programs to be completely useless, such that I usually have to ignore them entirely and just roll over them to see their names pop up.

At least the Mac interface offers a quick way to see the words that define an icon. That’s not true in other environments that have been gradually overtaken by symbols. For example, I recently found myself driving a rental car with “idiot lights” that were identified solely by icons. The most puzzling was a picture of a car ( ) that suddenly illuminated on the dashboard. What could it possibly have been trying to tell me? I already knew that I was in a car. And frustratingly, there was no way to get any further information without pulling over to look in the owner’s manual.

Relatively certain that I wasn’t in the midst of an emergency, I waited until I got home to look it up, at which point I found out that the icon meant that there was a car in front of me. (I’m so glad that that the manufacturer thought to provide that warning — otherwise, I might have had to, you know, look through the windshield.) But even granting that the alert was useful, wouldn’t it have been even more useful if it consisted of the words “Car ahead”?

I seem to remember that prior to the age of icons, car dashboards used to display the warnings “Check Engine” and “Check Oil.” I don’t know about you, but when I look at the pictures that have supplanted them, I see a meat grinder ( ) and a genie’s lamp ( ). This, I still maintain, is why we invented language.

A while back, I began a blog post called “Sound Barrier” with this sentence:

The first Broadway show I ever saw was “Hello, Dolly!,” which had recently been recast with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway in the lead roles.

My wife Debra, who vets everything I write before I post it (partly to catch typographical errors, but mostly to make sure I don’t say anything inappropriate) flagged that sentence. “You can’t follow an exclamation mark with a comma,” she said.

“But the exclamation mark is part of the title of the show,” I said. “It’s not punctuating the sentence.”

“It’s still not right,” she said.

I came away grumbling. I had to admit that it did look funny, but I didn’t want to have to rewrite the sentence. A few days later, I happened to pick up the November 30 issue of The New Yorker, and found the following sentence in an article about William Faulkner:

In these books, no Southerner is spared the torturous influence of the war, whether he flees the region, as Quentin Compson does, in “The Sound and the Fury,” or whether, like Rosa Coldfield, in “Absalom, Absalom!,” she stays.

“The New Yorker did it!” I said. “They put a comma after ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ ” That definitively settled the argument. To borrow a formula from Richard Nixon, if the New Yorker does it, it’s not illegal.

The fact that Debra and I can quibble about the finer points of grammar and punctuation — but not about much else — is one of the delights of our relationship. Mostly, our complaints are not with each other, but about errors we find in other publications: things like the use of “literally” to mean “figuratively,” or the misuse of an apostrophe to form a plural.

Lately, though, we’ve been feeling like members of a rapidly shrinking minority. When she gripes about someone who used “unique” to mean something other than “the only one of its kind,” I have to tell her, “That battle’s been lost.” Meanwhile, I go on fighting for even more hopeless causes. When I complain about the use of “as such” to mean “therefore,” or insist on use of the subjunctive mood to describe a hypothetical event, my Facebook friends invariably tell me that it’s time to give up.

These issues are of more than theoretical importance, because I don’t know how critical I should be of my students’ writing when I teach college courses. I’m not an English teacher, so enforcing the rules of written language is not strictly my job. At the same time, I caution my students that no matter how good they are at what they do, no one will take them seriously if they can’t communicate well about what they do. If they want the respect of their employers, clients, and peers, they need to use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

However, I’m not sure that this is true anymore. When I look at the memos that come from several college administrators, or the classroom materials that are written by some of my fellow instructors, the quality of their writing is not much better than that of my students. Nevertheless, those people have managed to rise to positions of authority. Maybe we’re at the point where not many people pay attention to the old rules. If the people who will be hiring my students don’t know much about spelling or grammar, why should my students have to?

I’m also not convinced that students can internalize the rules of grammar and punctuation if they haven’t grown up reading books that follow those rules. My childhood was kind of unusual in that much of the reading material in our house had been picked up at rummage sales. We had an encyclopedia that had been published in 1912, and a series of fairy tale collections (“The Red Fairy Book,” “The Blue Fairy Book,” and so on) that Andrew Lang had compiled in the 1890s. As a result, from the time I learned to write, my writing had sort of a Victorian style — formal and somewhat distant, with lots of polysyllabic words and compound sentences. (Come to think of it, that pretty well describes my writing style even now.) I don’t see how students who grow up reading tweets and websites can develop a sense of what formal language is supposed to sound like.

So maybe it really is time to give up on preserving arbitrary rules, and just focus on clear writing that communicates clear thinking. After all, when we see a sign that says “Vegetable’s for sale,” we still know what it means, despite the unneeded apostrophe. If someone says, “Tell me if you agree,” we understand that they want us to let them know whether we agree, not to notify them only in the event of our agreement. So far as spelling goes, William Shakespeare famously spelled his own name in several different ways, and yet still seemed to do OK for himself.

In talking to students, I’ve always compared language to clothing. Just as the practical purpose of clothing is to keep us warm, the practical purpose of language is to communicate. But clothing goes far beyond that basic function. What we choose to wear, and how suitable our wardrobe is to the place where we wear it, is how we tell people what we want them to think of us. Similarly, the style of language that we use, and its suitability to the environment we’re in, necessarily affects people’s assessment of our character.

I think that’s still true. But just as the rules about formal attire have relaxed greatly over the past few generations without any great harm to society, I suspect that the rules of formal language might need to be relaxed as well.

Tag: language

Iconoclasm

Language Lessens

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories