John E McIntyre Is Not Gonna Fix Your Sentence, And Then He's Gonna Make Fun Of You!

A video illustrates very well what I dislike about some -- by no means all -- people who write about writing and speaking English well.

Congratulations, John E McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun: I cannot figure out how to embed your video in a short time, and within a moderate time the Sun's website with its many advertisements threatens to freeze my computer. And so, you've bested me: instead of embedding your video, the most I can do is link the page containing it.

Follow that link if you will, with that warning about the many advertisements. It may be that my PC is far more vulnerable to freezing than are others, because it is old and weak, or who knows why. Or maybe my device is not unusually vulnerable, and we have merely entered an age of great stupidity in Internet advertising, an age in which not just I, but people in general will avoid the websites of great newspapers like the Baltimore Sun, because they're infested with computer-crippling amounts of ads. Ads which thus defeat the very purpose for their existence. I've never believed that advertising people are generally as smart as they're generally thought to be.

Onward.

McIntyre begins the video by describing how Latin is highly inflected -- it has different word endings, not to mention completely different words in the cases of pronouns and irregular verbs, for different quantities, cases, tenses and so forth, and therefore word order is not crucially important to comprehensibility, because inflection in Latin performs some of the functions performed by word order in English -- and then points out that because English is much less inflected, misplaced modifiers can lead to all sorts of spectacular misunderstandings in English sentences. And then he reads a bunch of sentences in which awards appear to be skating on mantelpieces and British MP's to be marauding Vikings and so forth.

Of course, no-one reading those sentences would actually think that the awards were skating or that the MP's were Vikings. McIntyre reads them to the audience of the video because considering what the sentences communicate is not as important to him as making fun of their hapless authors. He is completely correct that the positioning of modifiers is very important in writing English well and comprehensibly. The problem is that he's being a complete dick in a bow-tie about it. If, instead of just reciting all of those sentences like a sneer with legs and concluding, "If you can't tell what's wrong with these sentences, find an editor and ask," he had taken a comparable amount of time to suggest improvements upon a smaller number of examples, I, and other non-language-snobs, might have been less put off, and more inclined to hear or read other things he has to say, and clicked on the link to his column on the Sun website. As it is, it seems that sneering and feeling superior to those whom the positioning of modifiers confuses are far more important to him than being helpful. The world doesn't need more sneering and less helping.

It's possible that John E McIntyre and I would be quite capable of becoming great friends with one another. For one thing, I'm very much interested in the Latin language, it's not exactly as if people with intelligent things to say about Latin are growing on trees these days. Also, in perusing the titles of some of McIntyre's other columns, it seems that he may actually be opposed to some aspects of language snobbism at some times. But this video was my introduction to him, and he got off to a bad start.

PS, 2:06 PM: I myself have language-snob tendencies. I'm trying to overcome them. For example, after writing this post I liked a comment on Facebook which made fun of someone for writing "should of" instead of "should have." I shouldn't of liked that comment for that reason, you know why? I'll tell ya why: 1) The purpose of language is to communicate, and everyone knew what was meant by "should of." No clarity, none whatsoever, was gained by ridiculing the use of "should of." 2) "Should of" and "should've" sound about exactly the same.

"Since A Long While [...]"

No. Not "Since a long while" -- "FOR a long while."

But I suppose it doesn't matter. That is to say, it matters to me. "Since a long while" bothers me -- but it shouldn't, according to whose principles? Mine. I'm the one who's always opposing those who insist upon one standard English spelling which, they claim, is "correct."

I'm the wun hoo spelz thingz "rong" on purpose just to annoy those people who insist on "correct" spelling. I'm the one who's constantly insisting that they're missing the whole point of language, which is to communicate, and that we all know exactly what was meant however it was spelled. Do we all know exactly what the non-native speaker of English meant when he said, "Since a long while"? Yes.

It has never bothered me that, when Latin became an international language, a second language spoken by people with many different first languages, it changed quite a lot, so that the international version often sounded quite strange to someone born and raised in Rome whose native language was Latin, or to someone today who insists that the Latin written by Caesar and Cicero and Vergil and Livy is "correct" Latin, the only "correct" Latin. Medieval, international Latin bothers some of those people quite a lot.

I suppose it must be very much the same sort of deal when adherents of Classic Attic Greek become appalled by the international Koine version. Or when Castilian purists from Spain insist that Latin American Spanish is wrong.

And exactly the same thing is happening to English today: more and more people are speaking it and writing it as a second language and forming an international version of English which may often sound somewhat strange to a native English speaker.

It's not all that different from the way that we Americans and the British and the Australians have all sounded odd to each other for centuries now. Not to mention various Canadians, Scots, Irish, Welsh and New Zealanders.

I've always laughed at those British folks who took their own arbitrary habits so seriously that they actually became angry at how Americans speak English. And here I've caught myself do the same thing I've laughed at. It IS "since a long while" now in addition to "for a long while," you know why? Because language is much too big and powerful and moves and changes much too fast to have any reason to stop and ask for my opinion about how it's doing.

Profanity

Seen on the Internet (and seen by me elsewhere before there was an Internet):

"If you can't be interesting without profanity, then let's face it: you're not that interesting."

My reaction to that is: I'm sure glad I wasn't driving a car or operating a fork lift when I heard that, because it put me straight to sleep!

Yeah, I think I can be interesting without profanity. I think so. I think I can be interesting with profanity too. Sort of the way I can cook an edible meal with or without pepper. I say "edible" instead of "good" because I'm not a sophisticated cook, and I'm sure that some things I cook which taste good to me won't taste particularly good to everyone, especially not to someone who's used to 3-Michelin-star cuisine. My point is that I can do about equally well with or without pepper, and that some people will probably prefer the dishes with pepper while other will prefer those without. But my point also was that I think that "dirty" words are about as dirty or evil as black pepper. Sure: just like pepper, they're not for everybody. Just like pepper, sometimes a little goes a long way. But please, please don't act, in my presence, as if they're the end of the world, unless you're prepared to risk my rolling my eyes and perhaps even muttering under my breath.

But my point especially was this:

If you can complain about profanity and be the slightest bit interesting while doing so, you'll be the first one. Ever. In the world. Since primates first began using words.

Don't Be Afraid Of Foreign Languages

I know that fear of the unknown is one of the most basic and primal human fears. And I also know that horrible things can be said in any language. But I also know that paranoia usually doesn't make sense, because most people have other things on their minds most of the time, than you. And whether they speak a language you don't understand or not, if you're nice, you greatly reduce the chances that they'll say nasty things about you. Does it really make much difference if they say something to your face in a language they assume you don't understand, or in your native language when you're out of earshot?

There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?

Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."

Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.



I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:

The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."

But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.

Wot Thuh Eff?!

Why was this comment removed? The only explanation I can conceive is that some moderator has taken a special personal dislike to me, and removes some of my comments as soon as he or she sees that I am their author, without bothering to read them very carefully first. Yeah, I think I'll just post all of my comments here first from now on, then cut-and-paste into the HuffPo readers' comments.

I'm responding to This Huffington Post article about language "mistakes" :

“This obsession with spelling rules is only a couple hundred years old.

"Thiss ubseshun wth speling rools iz onnleeuh uh kuppel hunndrid yeers oldd.

"'Or how about a word that really gets under your skin when mangled or mixed-up?'

"Wot gits unnder mah skinn izz thuh unnderlai-ing uhssumpchun thut langwuj rools r evur more thn sumwuns arrbatrairee pursunul uhpinnion.”