Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company  
The New York Times
May 25, 2003, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 4; Page 8; Column 1; Editorial Desk

LENGTH: 628 words

Whose Language Is It Anyway?

 By STEPHEN S. PICKERING

As a career language guardian, I was more than casually interested in the College Board's decision to throw out a grammar question on its PSAT after a high school teacher pointed out that the desired answer was not technically correct. The question asked if there was a grammatical error in this sentence: "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured." The College Board thought the sentence was correct, but a journalism teacher in Maryland told the officials that the word "her" did not refer back to Toni Morrison but to "Toni Morrison's" -- an error in grammar.

The teacher certainly was right on the technical question. Those who take a dark view of where the language is headed can only stare open-mouthed in disbelief that the College Board experts, specifically focused on composing a grammatically correct sentence, wrote an error into it. But as one who has always viewed American English as a sort of junk shop, stacked with bins of curious rules and tools useful mostly to journeyman quantum mechanics, I saw another way to look at the sentence. The first three words, "Toni Morrison's genius," are understood as "The genius of Toni Morrison," and thus the true antecedent of "her" is, correctly, Toni Morrison. That reading at least has some common sense on its side.

American English's genius lies in its ability to accommodate such quantum logic -- to exist in two places or forms simultaneously -- and, instead of imploding, actually thrive and grow. For immigrants it is surely one of the easiest languages to get by in -- no genders, and easy verb forms and noun and pronoun cases. If their English is peppered with phrases and words from their mother tongues, you can bet those terms will eventually be absorbed as well.

But under all the latter-day immigrants' offerings lie Germanic foundations from the Saxon and Scandinavian eras, then layers of Latin and Greek words from those cultures' wide European influence, especially in the church, and Norman French residue dating from 1066. This jumble of liturgies makes modern English, despite its stripped-down workings, hard to learn well. Survivors of remedial classes cite, with a shiver, the insane variety of letter sounds, most infamously the supposed 22 ways E can be pronounced. But the language blunders on, and errors and misuses either get corrected or institutionalized -- like the term of disdain that I first heard in an Army barracks: "I could care less," which of course means exactly its opposite.

None of this is to imply that the disputed PSAT question, or by extension good grammar, doesn't matter. It matters a lot for the transmission of precise, nuanced information, and at its best, English, with that junk-shop vocabulary thousands of words larger than those of other Western European languages, can cut and shape like a scalpel.

Having made a living for several decades trying to hone that blade as a copy editor, I ran across problems like the one in the PSAT question a dozen or more times every night. And just between us, solving them depended not so much on how many grammar rules I knew, but on determining the clearest, briefest way to get to the next sentence; that is, on good syntax and common sense.

George Orwell wrote an essay in 1946 on politics and language contending that the clarity of one's writing mirrored clarity of thought; that if a person could not state his position clearly in print, his views were probably similarly muddled. It is not a bad caution for managing this largely unmanageable language: Grammar is important, clarity is more so. Maybe that's the lesson for those PSAT students.   

STEPHEN S. PICKERING  

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LOAD-DATE: May 25, 2003