There’s no shortage of topics that divide people. No topic is more combustive (okay, maybe only in the teacher workroom of any high school English department) than the “right” way to use words. If you’ve previously characterized your former English teachers as mild-mannered peaceniks, I am here today to spill the tea. Almost nothing gets an English teacher’s dander up like non-standard use of punctuation or something equally as offensive; as I prepare to push off from the starting block of year 28 as a teacher, I feel qualified to speak to this truth. If you want to fuel an English teacher’s lunchtime-in-the-lounge diatribe (and not to worry, this “break” tops out at approximately eight minutes and so the vitriol will be short-lived), send them a holiday newsletter in which you refer to your family as the Smith’s or the Jackson’s or Khan’s.
It’s an occupational hazard that I read the running scroll on newscasts, signage for local businesses, and social media posts for grammar and usage errors; it’s a habit as reflexive to me as pouring my fourth cup of coffee or shuffling my feet at night as I walk from the bed to the bathroom to avoid stepping on Best’s tail. Entering a department store dressing room several weeks ago, I saw a handwritten sign imploring patrons to “Please” return unwanted garments to a store associate. A local restaurant marquee announced a new playground for boy’s and girl’s. Clearly the authors of these communications found their teachers’ instruction on the English language uninspiring and so decided to spice things up with their own brand of conveyance. I imagine most pay no mind whatsoever to these linguistic crimes; in truth, most, myself included, fully understand the messages of these innovative scribes. Why then, one might ask, do we even need rigid rules of standard English usage when it’s easy enough to suss the meaning of what is being communicated without them? If texting has taught us anything, it is that our decoding skills are Gr8, FWIW.
The lesson that I begin each semester’s classes with is the importance of communicating to both understand as well as to be understood. It’s a lesson that transcends content matter and applies to our lives each day. Many students, especially those who communicate with only one language such as English, have never considered that even as users of one language they still possess a variety of versions, or registers, of it, and each of these versions is correct in different contexts. Their communication with peers differs from (or should, anyway) that which they have with potential employers, for example. Diction, tone, and syntax combine to produce an overall effect. Imagine, I ask students, if they were to submit an essay to me that used the colloquialisms of Gen Z, or if I relied on the Southern regionalisms of my youth to impart information to them; the results might range from comedic to frustrating. This, I say, is why it is important that when we speak or write to listeners or readers whose language background we don’t fully know, we use standard English. Those of us who completed even a year or two of a foreign language while in school learned the standard form of that language, I’ll bet. If I were to take my knowledge from five years of Spanish class to any Spanish-speaking country, I would be lost the moment native speakers began using slang or regional parlance.
I wish I had always explained the importance of standard English usage this way (although I am sure there is still much room for improvement in my delivery). Historically, cultures have tended to identify a dominant, “correct” way of living, communicating, or believing and suppressed anything that deviated from it. Consequently, there are untold numbers of people who lost touch with parts of their native cultures, along with those in their family and friend circles who adhered to them; in the news recently has been the atrocities of the deceptively innocuously-named “residential schools” to which indigenous children were forced to move in the 19th and well into the 20th centuries in the United States and Canada. One of the many inhumanities they experienced was the systematic stripping of their natal tongue (and, by extension, a huge part of their identities).
On a smaller scale, our schools and teachers have often unintentionally insinuated to students that their words, their voice, do not have a place in the classroom and in their writing. What I wish I had made clear from my first day of teaching is that the purpose of language is to communicate, to forge connection, and we should choose the language that best serves that purpose in different situations. I tell my students that when I am around my relatives who are country through and through, my own language matches theirs. If someone’s subject and verbs don’t agree, I don’t dare “correct” them because I’m off the clock; my grammarian hat is removed at the end of the school day. However, if I didn’t provide effective instruction on such topics as verb conjugation and parts of speech to my students, I would be remiss. This language fluidity isn’t duplicitous: we can maintain citizenship in a number of linguistic countries with complete legitimacy and sincerity; all of us are both/and, not either/or in many ways beyond how we speak, write, and think. Communication should never be weaponized, especially not by people whose job it is to encourage the identity discovery and growth of students of any age, no cap.
PartWolf 