A Dead Metaphor: Notes on Grammatical Correctness

I'm reading Harry Blamires' Compose Yourself these days, which is well worth having a look at. I will return to it again to indicate why I think you should read it. Here I want to take up an aspect of it that is more likely to put you off.

Like most books on "good English" it sketches a very conservative looking project, which begins by observing the "increasing faultiness [of] English usage" (p. 2). He goes on to talk about incorrect usage in terms of the "damage" it does, the "decay" (and "decomposition") of usage. "We live," he tells us, "in a verbally infected environment" (p. 5).

This line is not new. Grammarians have long complained that "ordinary" or "popular" usage (and Blamires draws his introductory examples primarily from the media) is somehow flawed. The very durability of this complaint indicates that decay may not be the problem Blamires thinks it. If English had really been in decay as long as its grammarians have been complaining about it, it would have disappeared long ago. Sticking to the biological metaphor he invokes, describing usage as "a decaying mass of squalid remains" (p. 7), we might see in this squalor the hope that a biologist would. You can't have a rose garden without some dirt, even some compost. Out of that decay will come the nutrients of new usage, new forms of expression.

Wittgenstein pointed out that language is rooted in our forms of life and that these change. But language is not, as we grammarians so often would have you believe, a matter of life and death for something we call "civilization and culture" (p. 7). It is a matter of life and death and rot and life and. . .

We are dealing with a "life cycle", one might say. I suppose I'm suggesting a more cheerful view of the matter. Let your metaphors die and decompose and then see what new forms of life emerge from the ooze.

I say this because the vitality of language--which is something that needs to be encouraged, defended and fostered, make no mistake about it--is not served by the idea that there exists some fundamental species of "correctness" that grammarians are the arbiters of. Rather, there is a continual process of "correction", i.e., a reading that passes through a text and prunes it, letting pieces fall lifelessly but not without dignity to the ground in order to contribute to the soil (the language).

Wittgenstein said that philosophy is not a body of doctrine, but an activity. Likewise, proper usage (grammar in a broad sense) is not a code of rules but a practice, a craft. English composition is a bit like gardening. And we should not allow ourselves to stick only to off the shelf fertilizers (style manuals and writing courses). We must engage in the continual cycle of composition and decomposition, writing and correction. We must risk the editorial experience.