A gentle seed of language prejudice

Being character-driven means that I take in a lot from how people move through the room, who they make eye contact with, and how idiosyncratic or – conversely and worse – how generic their speech patterns are. Business-oriented spaces make automatons of most of us, but you can still tell who’s considerate and plucky.

‘Considerate’ and ‘plucky’ are E M Forster’s adjectives, not mine, and he was cited in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style with this passage:

I believe in aristocracy, though—if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based on rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.

When the chair of the board of Enron entered the stage in a plain Houston conference room, in a plain Houston hotel, it was time to clap politely. This was a year before the stock of the eighth-largest company on the S&P?500 began its drop from $90 to nothing, and if there were any murmurings about the upcoming fall, then the largest Chapter?11 bankruptcy in history, I hadn’t heard them. I was new, it was my first job, and even the company name was unknown to me before my application.

The walk-on of Ken Lay elicited the sort of intensity of attention reserved for?… whom? I didn’t understand it. Some of my cohort were sitting up particularly straight, and the applause was loud and loyal. To me, here was a well-spoken, reasonable gent talking about financial results while a hundred and fifty employees hung on his every word. A bit of business-speak was all it was.

I make no claims of insight into the then-imminent scandal, and I was never asked to do anything untoward – unless you object to mark-to-market accounting, I suppose. But sitting there in an aggressively air-conditioned hall I was embarrassed for the audience, and I remember this cogent thought: “But you don’t even know him.” It felt like my brain was saying each of those words.

A good distance in space and time from the heat and drabness of the US’s fourth-largest city, an audience of editors at Birmingham’s Aston University in 2019 listened with the same polite though less rapt attention as Erin Carrie introduced herself. Then a senior lecturer in linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, Carrie was self-possessed, fluid and clear in her speech, and she broadcast the sort of authenticity I find lacking when business leaders relay their financial results on Texas stages. We relaxed into the session until she asked us calmly on what basis we were making corrections to language.

Okay, now I was rapt. Carrie was putting to us, a room full of copy editors and proofreaders, that the calls we made on language being good or bad, right or wrong, high or low, formal or colloquial, were on shaky ground. ‘Where linguists merely observe differences,’ explained Carrie, ‘society has a tendency to impose hierarchy.’

Well, yeah, I thought, if by hierarchy you mean securing a better manuscript.

I don’t enjoy controversy or public screaming, and LinkedIn is as close as I get to social media, but the immovable-object-versus-unstoppable-force paradigm supercharges my curiosity when it plays out in polite milieux like that one in Birmingham. Something’s gotta give, right? That day it seemed to me that it was either Carrie’s scholarship or the very underpinnings of editing practice and ‘good’ English. I trusted Carrie to make her case, but I was still indignant. Were there to be no standards?

The academics weigh in

Standards originating from the southeast of England were at work as Kingsley Ugwuanyi prepared to be an examiner for IELTS, the International English Language Testing System. An English speaker his whole life, Ugwuanyi failed to score a 9, the highest possible, on the selfsame test, a threshold for examiners. Gearing up for his PhD years later, he tells the OED that ‘personal pride’ kept him from applying to select US universities because of their requirement that he take the TOEFL, a standardised test of English in the vein of the IELTS. Again, Kingsley?Ugwuanyi is a native English speaker.

Rosemary Hall was born in Bermuda, and Bermudian English represents the smallest population that her Oxford team examines as a variety of English. Hall considers Bermudian through an academic lens; she doesn’t speak it. ‘I spent the largest proportion of my life living in the southern UK,’ she says, ‘which actually makes me a very privileged speaker in that I speak something like a sort of standard southern British English variety, which, interesting if you think about it, is actually a variety with a very small number of speakers relatively.’

Hall studies the effect of dialect parody, or dialect mocking, whereby imitations of how you speak are used for humour or othering. And this has real-world implications, according to Hall: ‘You might be subject to discrimination that actually affects your access to things like jobs and housing.’

When the question of why people are prejudiced against variations of English, whether accent or vocabulary, is put to Kelly Wright, a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics at the University of Michigan, she gamely takes it on. ‘When we start to think about the types of language that we call proper or we say is pleasing to the ear or we want to label as appropriate for certain venues or for certain forms of address or we feel just is better in some mouths than others or what sort of language is legal – none of that falls out of the natural evolution of a linguistic system.’

‘We create linguistic stereotypes in our minds,’ explains Wright, ‘but they’re really the product of patterns of oppression that pre-date the printing press.’ Much of it is and always has been about social control. ‘Who has been in control?’ asks Wright. ‘The able-bodied, the moneyed, and men.’

Yikes. The analysis of the academics above need more room than I’m giving them here. (Their comments come from the webinar ‘Language prejudice and the documentation of minoritized varieties of English’.) Creating workable frameworks for discussing complex or controversial ideas is its own skill. Even the well-intentioned may see their careful-language car careen into disastrous insult without meaning to. Personally, I avoid engaging with these ideas outside spaces like the one Professor Carrie created in Birmingham in concert with a roomful of conscientious editors. For one thing, such spaces let me be silent without penalty; for another, I am mistrustful of the prevailing narrative, whatever it’s about, and I need time to pass before jumping in. Here, I seek only to seed the minoritisation of language with you as an idea to do with what you will.

Here’s the danger: on Saturday night, more like Sunday morning, I presented this shapeless thesis to an energy professional with three Western passports and to a lawyer with one, from Ireland. Describing to them uses of certain language as beyond the pale as I was, the lawyer pounced. ‘How can you,’ he intoned, with enough of a smile on his face that not quite all of the air was sucked out of the room, ‘be writing about the use of acceptable language while invoking an expression that labels Irish customs as inferior?’ He wasn’t kidding. He considered my hypocrisy to be on display.

A quick look at Wiktionary tells us that beyond the pale ‘is a reference to the general sense of boundary (outside of the palisades), but is sometimes understood to refer specifically to the English Pale in Ireland.’ In this case my use of idiom was absent any historical understanding, an occupational hazard that never goes away completely. Thank heaven my accuser vocalised a mocking French accent a mere three minutes later – dialect parody in action! My revenge was swift.

It is risky discussing language prejudice, even in the relative safety of my kitchen, and I am not a foil for ideas that are complex and new to the general public. Forster’s sensitive, considerate and plucky aristocracy, however, would handle them with grace, as did Carrie’s lecture in that Birmingham classroom. Then, I wasn’t personally ready to take on the idea of English language standards being used as a cudgel, however paradigm-shifting or necessary that exploration may be. I was defensive – an ironic stance given that my own English had nary been challenged – and trying to understand what my new responsibilities were as an editor.

I reached out to two council members of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, vice-chair Vanessa Plaister and equality, diversity and inclusion director Luke Finley to get their take on what I was supposed to do. The writing was on the wall, and most of it wasn’t in Oxford English. Now what?

The lesson, it seems, is not in using this reference book of World Englishes, not in elevating or eschewing this or that specific English, but rather in paying attention.

When it comes to adjusting for linguistic prejudice, Plaister asked whether it wasn’t more about a listening and learning mindset, ‘about reading widely and outside of our lanes, and reflecting on what we hear.’ Finley observed that ‘you can’t just write a lesson plan for teaching that – you can only keep exposing people to these discussions until it becomes part of our culture to think a certain way, just as it’s been part of the culture in the past to think that our role is as guardians of standards, bulwarks against all those dreadful, sloppy alternatives.’

Forster’s people would enjoy Mr?Finley’s irony, I expect, and avoid coming down on one side, as if there were a side. Their wisdom dictates taking things in, watching and waiting.

Join them in quiet consideration, plucky reader. Read up, take in an introduction to linguistic prejudice, watch what people who’ve both lived it and study it say. Perhaps you are adept at creating space for the exploration of ideas, and some day you’ll be livening up a Houston conference room stage with your thoughtful examination of language as a cudgel. It’s too big and controversial a job for me, but if you’re authentic, and careful, you’ll have my rapt attention on the day.