541. ENGLISH - On The Living Language

On The Living Language

 

A few months before accepting the job of revising The Elements of Style (the "little book" composed 40 years earlier by Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr.), E.B. White contributed this comment to The New Yorker:

Through the turmoil and the whirling waters we have reached a couple of opinions of our own about the language. One is that a schoolchild should be taught grammar--for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases. We knew a countryman once who spoke with wonderful vigor and charm, but ungrammatically. In him the absence of grammar made little difference, because his speech was full of juice. . . .

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs.

From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was and where it led to.

Children obviously do not depend for communication on a knowledge of grammar; they rely on their ear, mostly, which is sharp and quick. But we have yet to see the child who hasn't profited from coming face to face with a relative pronoun at an early age, and from reading books, which follow the paths of centuries.

You don't have to be a fan of The Elements of Style to appreciate White's principles and prose. But I have to challenge his remark about "the absence of grammar" in the countryman's speech. It might be nonstandard or unconventional--but never absent. When it comes to grammar (or to cows, for that matter), there's always some sort of path.