A discussion over at Language Log about a legislator’s statement that measures should be taken to prevent the “devaluation of the language” has led the linguists to the conclusion that making English our official language would be, at most, a symbolic gesture.

One interesting piece of the linguists’ discussion is the way in which this perennial topic has shifted emphasis in recent years, to which I would like to add some additional perspective.

Hysteria about The Danger to English is no novelty. Jonathan Swift, writing in an essay in The Tatler in 1710, bemoaned “the deplorable ignorance that hath for some years reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.” He went on to say, “These two evils, ignorance and want of taste, have produced a third: I mean the continual corruption of our English tongue. …” He favored the establishment of an English Academy to govern the language, an idea that, fortunately, gained no traction.

There was an almighty carrying-on in 1961 when Merriam-Webster had the audacity to produce a dictionary that recorded the English language as people were actually using it, rather than as the self-appointed authorities prescribed. Dwight Macdonald wrote a scolding essay about Webster’s Third International, “The String Untuned,” which can be found, along with “The Decline and Fall of English” and an attack on modern translations of the Bible, in Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture.

In more recent years, as the Language Loggers point out, George Orwell worried in the 1940s that control of language by totalitarian governments would control the way people could think. That is the nightmare of 1984 and the concern that occasioned the famed essay “Politics and the English Language.” Well, he was mistaken, as we saw in the mordant cynicism that was widespread in the Soviet Union (“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”) and in the ultimate collapse of the regime.

In the 1970s, Eric Bakovic describes, the threat to English was seen as coming from the inside, from ill-educated native speakers unthinkingly succumbing to fads. You may recall that The Threat to Civilization in the 1970s appeared to come mainly from people who used hopefully as a sentence adverb. A New Yorker cartoon, linking the shibboleths from two generations, showed a man saying to another at a bar, “Hopefullywise? Did I understand you to say hopefullywise?”

Today, though there is a growing apprehension that teenagers sending text messages will damage the language, the major apprehension about English is linked to the hysteria about illegal immigration — all those people sneaking into the country to take away coveted jobs picking fruit, slaughtering cattle and mopping floors. Our main protection apparently lies in legislation to make English an official language. That’ll show ’em.

I had a little innocent fun a couple of years ago when Taneytown, Md., considered making English its official language: I suggested that the municipality’s own English usage could stand some improvement.

It would be a good thing if government could find a reasonable way to deal with the immigration issue (an effort recently attempted by President Bush and thwarted by his own party) and leave the English language alone.

Unless someone is proposing a return to the purity of Anglo-Saxon, we are left to deal with English as it is: a language developed mainly by illiterate and despised peasants over four centuries when the ruling classes, the Normans, used mainly bad French and Latin; a promiscuous language that has taken on bits of every other language it has ever rubbed against, including Latin and bad French; a world language through the historical circumstances of British and American imperialism; a language that has its own dynamic and goes where it will, despite the feeble efforts of legislators and usage commentators.

It’s possible that the undergraduates assumed that we simply didn’t read their work, a suspicion that may have been justified in certain instances. But I think that there is a deeper reason: that people who are not inveterate readers do not perceive the written text as we bookworms do. That is, they do not hear echoes from one text to the next. They do not imagine that a passage in one text will strike the reader as being similar to a different text previously read.

It is not that they are dim. Well, not all of them. They recognize allusions and echoes in music and movies. But as readers they are deaf.

There is a passage bearing on this in Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings:

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, that the feeling the resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers—to read as listeners—and with all writers, to write as listeners. …

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.

Neither do I know whether any research bears out this sense of the reader developing an inward voice located in the printed text, but I think that readers who enjoy reading — not those who find it laborious and unrewarding — replicate mentally and silently the rhythms of speech embodied in prose. This is analogous to the ability of a musician to look at a printed score and hear the music, mentally and silently.

Thirty years ago in Syracuse — this is a concluding digression — I was the host of a weekly spoken-word show on WONO-FM. It aired on Sunday nights at 11:30 or so and had an audience conservatively estimated in the dozens. On that program I once read Eudora Welty’s hilarious short story, “Why I live at the P.O.,” a textbook illustration of the unreliable narrator. I was startled and pleased, some years later, to hear a recording of Ms. Welty’s reading of that story. She read it with the same cadences and emphases that I had. We had heard the same voice in the text.

There are two great tectonic shifts in English writing. One occurs in the early eighteenth century, when Addison and Steele begin The Spectator and the stop-and-start of Elizabethan-Stuart prose becomes the smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style that dominated English writing for two centuries. Gibbon made it sly and ornate; Johnson gave it sinew and muscle; Dickens mocked it at elaborate comic length. But the style—formal address, long windups, balance sought for and achieved—was still a sort of default. …

The second big shift occurred just after the First World War, when, under American and Irish pressure (Flaubert doing his work through early Joyce and Hemingway), a new form of aerodynamic prose came into being. The new style could be as limpid as Waugh or as blunt as Orwell or as funny as White and Benchley, but it dethroned the old orotundity as surely as Addison had killed off the old asymmetry. … Writers like Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic and complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and understood as such by readers. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader.

One area with promising prospects of cost containment and/or reduction is feline staffing. Scout has been a valued member of the team for 10 years, but the costs of kibble and litter add to overhead in our operations, not to speak of the labor involved in dealing with all the shedding on the red chair.

The same costs in India are a fraction of the U.S. costs, and so You Don’t Say, having offered Scout a generous separation package, is contracting for feline support with a firm in Chennai. Billi, the new cat, will be available 24-7 on closed-circuit television, providing many of the feline support services we previously enjoyed. Watching a cat sleep for 75 percent of the day on television is much the same as watching one across the room, and the cost savings are substantial.

And you, the reader, will enjoy uninterrupted service from You Don’t Say, at the same level of quality that it has been our pleasure to offer you since December 2005. We value your patronage and hope that you will return to this site often.

In eastern Kentucky as I was growing up, to speak (vi) meant to acknowledge an acquaintance in passing, without uttering words: “I saw John Early on the street yesterday, and he didn’t speak.” Not acknowledging someone in this way was a minor affront.

Speaking, in this sense, is performed in motor vehicles by raising the fingers of one hand casually from the steering wheel. In a rural area like Fleming County, Kentucky, where everyone in theory knew everyone else, some drivers would “speak” to every driver they encountered so as not to risk giving offense.

 I offer this word, without charge, to the Oxford English Dictionary, which does not yet record this sense — though perhaps the dialect specialists may have gotten hold of it.

Three or four decades ago, The Sun had hundreds of printers in its composing room — Linotype operators, proofreaders, compositors. Members of the International Typographical Union had lifetime jobs with solid benefits, and they ruled their domain. God help the editor who happened to touch a piece of type.

By my time at the paper, technology had eliminated most of those jobs, the computer rendering the Linotype obsolete. The compositors remained, using X-Acto knives or razor blades to cut type printed on photographic paper and paste it on the pages.

The composing room was still their domain. An editor assigned to work makeup had to undergo ritual hazing. If you kept your temper, endured some taunting, remained courteous and respectful, you would get along with them. They would even help you. If you were snotty and condescending, you would pay for it. Repeatedly.

The printers were richly scornful of the college-educated types in the newsroom upstairs, and they delighted to spot errors in headlines and text. They found many of them. The number of errors caught by Bill Gay, Marck Mulligan, John Shanklin and others, and the number of fixes they got me out of, are too numerous to count. That some needling took place along the way doesn’t signify.

The compositors were precise. The page had to look right, with every element in place and in alignment. Though it would have been gauche for them to say so, they took evident pride in their work and in the paper — the more so that they knew that their time was running out.

It was inevitable that technology would advance to the point — as it did some years ago — that entire pages could be composed on computer screens in the newsroom, making the compositor’s job redundant. They knew that the company had long since stopped hiring apprentices and that as printers retired, they were not replaced. Eventually, the last few were offered buyout packages, and a craft with a history stretching back to the invention of movable type was gone.

The technology that eliminated those jobs enabled newspapers to remain highly profitable by cutting labor costs. A similar calculus drives the recent and current reductions of news staffs around the country.

She foresaw the burning towers of Ilium and Agamemnon hacked to death in his bath, and no one paid any attention to her.

"I told you so" has never been a source of much comfort.

Today, overtaken by a collapsing business model, skidding revenues, a shaky economy and a history of corporate strategies that didn't work out, American newspapers are abruptly cutting pages and shedding staff. The Hartford Courant is cutting its newsroom staff by 57 positions, the Palm Beach Post by 130. The Washington Post has just conducted a round of extensive buyouts. The whole industry is desperately seeking to find a new equilibrium.

And now it has come home, and in a few weeks we will be saying a wrenching farewell to several dozen colleagues in the Sun newsroom.

There is no denying the ugly realities of the metropolitan newspaper. Circulation has been on a steady decline for years. Every time I read in an obituary that the deceased served in the Second World War, I think, “We’ve lost another reader.” The Greatest Generation was a devoted reader of newspapers, the children, not so much; the grandchildren, nearly not at all. But the greatest threat has been the sharp and accelerating decline of classified advertising in recent years as that revenue has migrated to the Internet. Classified advertising essentially constituted the profit margin for the metropolitan newspaper.

It will now fall to those of us who remain to find a way to preserve the core integrity of The Sun’s journalism with diminished resources.

What I fear is that some papers will make bad decisions out of a misunderstanding of the value of editing, particularly copy editing.

I have said so before, at “Upholding Editing” and “Editors: The Future of News” at poynter.org. I’ve said so here at “Just sack all the editors” and “I’m not dead yet.” There’s something funny about that big wooden horse outside the walls.

Now the Orange Country Register has just announced that it is outsourcing the editing of some of its local copy to a company in New Delhi. I suspect that this will save money while compromising content. If local news is the franchise for daily newspapers, the information it provides that is not duplicated on the Internet or in broadcasting, how is a copy editor on the Indian subcontinent going to recognize what ought to be fixed in a story about Anaheim?

Lawrence Downes in a New York Times op-ed piece has expressed his dismay at the decline of copy editing in an elegy for the copy desk, and Gene Weingarten has expressed his affectionate regard for our obscure and endangered craft at The Washington Post. Able responses have come from two of my most valued colleagues and friends, Kathy Schenck at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and David Sullivan at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

But before you put the coin in my mouth to pay Charon’s fare, let me say it one more time.

Copy editing is not a frill.

Yes, we do still have some obsessives in the ranks who busy themselves distinguishing between since and because and other time-wasters. And we have more who, under pressure, have abandoned editing and resorted to processing. But where we still actually edit, we make a difference. We add value, if you as a reader consider accuracy and clarity to be of value.

When reporters get people’s names wrong (something that occurs with alarming frequency), if it gets caught at all, it will be caught on the copy desk.

When a writer makes a schoolboy error in grammar and usage, it falls to the copy editor to make the correction.

When the assigning editor moves a story that is five column inches longer than the available space, the copy editor is the person who cuts what can be sacrificed while preserving the essential information.

When a writer comes up with a metaphor that would leave readers rolling on the floor, clutching their sides in mirth, the copy editor will step in.

When the reporter writes a dozen introductory paragraphs before getting to the point of the story, which turns out to be something other than what those dozen paragraphs appeared to be leading up to, an editor has to address the issue.

Copy editing is not merely some trivial manipulation of commas and the spell-checker. It involves substantive editing. It makes a difference for the reader, who, if irritating errors of fact or lapses in clarity turn up regularly, is free to seek information elsewhere. And will.

Remember, I told you so.

Styrofoam packing peanuts

tie a Styrofoam cup to a long string

ornaments made of Styrofoam and peas

nary a Styrofoam clamshell or piece of plastic wrap in sight

200 tons of debris in the harbor each year …much of it Styrofoam and light plastic.

eliminating Styrofoam containers

replacing Styrofoam coffee cups with "ecotainers"

The problem: It is unlikely that any of those references are actually to Styrofoam.

The Dow Chemical Co. manufactures a product called Styrofoam, an expanded polystyrene foam used for thermal insulation. It is a blue material that you can see being applied to the sides of houses under construction.

Disposable drinking cups and food containers, packing peanuts, coolers and similar products are not made of Styrofoam, but of an extruded polystyrene foam, typically white, made up of tiny beads.

Colloquial usage may have made styrofoam the common term for plastic foam cups, but anyone who aspires to be an exact writer will avoid it.

This is not an exact parallel with cases of other trade names that turned into generics. A xerox or a kleenex may not be a Xerox or a Kleenex, but in both cases the name brand and the generic product are the same kind of thing. Styrofoam and the plastic foam used in drinking cups are different substances, and we generally find it convenient to have different names for different things.

To Oxford is to micturate* into the wind, because lexicographers are immune to lobbying. They add words to the dictionary based on frequency, locations and staying power. And the words they add are usually those that have sprung up spontaneously, like mushrooms after a rain.

I understand exactly what he means when Stuart Froman suggests a new word, conjobulation, at That’s Write: “the state of having so many projects to do and so many errands to run and so many familial pressures to manage and so many interruptions to recover from that sober individuals can be sitting at a stoplight and suddenly have no idea where they are supposed to be going, that they can be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly have no idea what they are talking about, that they can wake in the middle of the night in a panic but have no idea which problem woke them up.”

He has appealed to me and a select group of other bloggers to popularize the word. Despite his touching faith in my influence, it’s doubtful that I could be much help. For one thing, Technorati indicates that there are 69,081 blogs on its rolls more popular than this one. For another thing, such campaigns tend to fizzle. In the early days of his late-night show, David Letterman occasionally tried to popularize catch phrases invented by his staff — “They’re pelting us with rocks and garbage” was one I thought particularly evocative. But despite his vast audience, nothing ever caught on.

Language, like Old Man River, just keeps rolling along, going where it will, thwarting attempts to harness it.

* Come on, surely you can guess. From the Latin micturire, if that’s helpful.

Why settle for pessimism when you can have fatalism?

Here's a Q i've always wanted to ask a journalist. . . why, even when a priest is convicted of child sex abuse, do reporters routinely write "Fr. Smith served at parishes in New York, New Jersey. . ."

Why not 'worked at?' Why 'served?' The only other occupation that gets this deferential treatment: the military.

The answer is that the language of service is conventional for certain occupations. The clergy serve their congregations, the military serves the country, government employees serve the populace. That is why we speak of military service, public service, public servants and the like. The language is so ingrained that we continue to use it when priests are convicted of abuse, officers are cashiered, elected officials charged with corruption. The cant of service has something to do with our discomfort with ambition overtly displayed.

People do not become priests because they want to dress in fancy vestments and be the center of attention; they enter the priesthood because they are called to service. In much the same way, they receive a divine call to move from one parish to another, more prosperous or prestigious parish.

People do not go into the military because they want to wear gold braid, order people around and fire off guns; they want to defend their country.

People do not run for public office because they lust for power (and perhaps graft). They have to be cajoled, called to serve the people, even though they would much rather be back on the farm with their children and livestock. In American politics, it’s best to go back to the farm when you leave office, even if you didn’t come from one.

We want to avert our eyes from ambition too nakedly displayed. It makes us uncomfortable, just as people too openly desperate for our affection make us shy away.

No doubt there is genuine interest in serving in the church, the military and government. If talk of service were entirely hypocritical, it’s doubtful than any of these institutions would function at all. But human nature being the mixed creature it invariably is, we have to think that the cant of service also coves up the parts best not displayed in public.

“You’re out of date because you know a lot. They really think you do, Richard.”

“You mean they respect me for it?”

“Of course not, but they don’t mind. Every department is likely to include someone who knows a lot, even now. You get that, as they say.”

From Vivian Laxton:

I am a regular reader of your blog, as well as a recovering copy editor. I thought of you when I saw this paragraph on a CNN article online today:

NEW YORK (CNN) — Politicians. They're just like us, or at least, that's what they're desperate to have us believe, particularly during a campaign season in which the word "elitist" has been lobbed about like a lit hand grenade.

Now, I never served in the military, but I’m pretty sure that grenades haven’t had to be lighted for several centuries. …

Correct. The original grenades were explosive shells lit by fuses. The mechanically exploded grenade made its appearance during the First World War. Live hand grenade was probably meant.

The word grenade derives from the French pomme grenate or the Spanish granada, or pomegranate, the early grenades bearing a resemblance to the fruit. It came into common use in English during the late 17th century, when the soldiers who specialized in the use of grenades were called grenadiers. The modern hand grenade is familiarly called a pineapple.

An etymologically allied word is grenadine, the syrup made from pomegranates. Its effects, however, are not explosive.

An Hispanic? A hispanic? An historic moment or a historic moment? It seems older folks go with an while younger ones use a.

There’s no problem with a used before certain words: a hat, a history, a hood. The h is sounded, or aspirated.

There is no problem with an used before certain words: an heir, an honor, an hour. The h is not aspirated.

The problem comes with words beginning with an h* in which the consonant is aspirated weakly, particularly if the stress is on the second syllable rather than the first. Thus the reason that many people have preferred an hotel, because they do not pronounce the word as HO-tel.

Here’s advice from the late R.L. Trask in Say what you mean!:

Should we write a historical event or an historical event? The second derives from the days when many people pronounced these words with no h; that is, they really said an ’istorical event, and so that’s what they wrote. Today, though, almost everyone pronounces an h in such words, and you are firmly advised to prefer a historical event. The other now looks strange or worse to most readers. The same goes for a hotel, which is better than an hotel.

So going with a Hispanic is consistent with what most readers and writers would expect. An hotel, despite a respectable pedigree, now smells of affectation.

* Of course it’s an h because an is used before words beginning with vowel sounds even if the spelling presents a consonant; the letter h is pronounced aitch.