Peach Joyce

[Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu>]

>> These are not the first Joycean references in Kate's work.

> [IED:] This statement intrigued IED, also. Could you enlighten him
> about any other possible Joycean allusions?

Since IED is such an expert on the intricacies of my interview with
Kate, it should not tax his memories very much to recall that Kate's
lyrics to "My Lagan Love" were based on "The Dubliners" by James
Joyce.  Of course, these lyrics were mostly written by John Carder
Bush, not Kate, but they are a definite Joycean reference in one of
Kate's songs.

> [IED:] Finally, IED didn't take umbrage against you, Julian, for
> correcting his spelling of Vaughan Williams's name. On the contrary,
> he shares with you a respect for spelling which often leads him into
> breaches of the sad protocol devised by our present social order,
> which has become so complacent in its illiteracy that it actually
> views bad English as a virtue, and the consciousness of error as a
> sin.

This is a complete misrepresentation of the truth, Mr. Marvick.  No
one (whom I know) "views bad English as a virtue".  What I have been
saying (and it's also the truth) is that language is a means of
communication.  As a means of communication, it is something that can
be used well, or it can be used poorly.  But it can't in any real
sense be used "correctly" or "incorrectly".  The perfect use of
language, if such a thing could exist, would communicate exactly what
you wanted to communicate.  The rules of "Standard Written English",
one particular dialect of the English language, are argued by its most
reasonable supporters to be the dialect which will allow clear
communication with the greatest fraction of the English-speaking
populace.  However, this argument (even if it were true) only holds up
if your audience is the entire English-speaking populace.  If your
audience is only a subset of the English-speaking populace (e.g.
inner-city blacks), then the prose that will communicate the best
might stray significantly from Standard Written English.  In this
case, following the rules of Standard Written English might very well
be a poor use of language.

Regarding "correct" spelling, there was not even such a thing as
correct spelling in English until the invention of the printing press.
Is it IED's claim that all writers that wrote before the invention of
the printing press wrote "bad English"?  Before the printing press,
the "correct" spelling was whatever could be readily figured out by
the reader.  Every writer was allowed to spell a word however he
wanted, so long as the reader could make sense of it.  Shortly after
the printing press was invented, people decided that if a lot more
people were going to be reading, it made sense to make it easier on
people by having words always look pretty much the same.  That way the
reader wouldn't have to spend as much effort figuring out what each
word was and could devote more effort to what the book meant.

It is certainly a better system to have some standards for how common
words should appear, than to have them appear in a myriad forms.  Life
would be more painful if the word "the" might be written "thugh",
"thuw", "thu", "tha", "thuh", etc.  For longer, more esoteric words,
the need for a standard spelling is not as clear.  It certainly is
useful in some ways: it means that there is a definite place we can
put the word in a dictionary.  It also means that the range of
spellings that people actually use is likely to be more constrained,
and thus easier to figure out by the reader when the spelling used
does stray from the standard spelling.  However, it seems to me that
much more damage to good communcication is caused by pedants
mindlessly criticizing others for their spelling than is caused by the
masses "incorrectly" spelling "paralell".  In the later case, I think
that almost any reader, unless they are very dim, can figure out
without much thought what word was intended.

The following is a good paragraph on prescriptive grammar from the
Linguistics book *An Introduction to Language* by Fromkin and Rodman
(second edition, p. 10):

     With the rise of capitalism and the emergence of a new middle
     class, there was a desire on the part of this new social group to
     have their children educated and to have them learn to speak the
     dialect of the "upper classes".  This led to the publication of
     many prescriptive grammars.  In 1762 a very influential grammar,
     *A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes*,
     was written by Bishop Robert Lowth.  Lowth, influenced by Latin
     grammar and by personal perference, prescribed a number of new
     rules for English.  Before the publication of his grammar,
     practically everyone -- upper-, middle-, and lower-class speakers
     of English -- said "I don't have none."; "You was wrong about
     that."; and "Mathilda is fatter than me."  Lowth, however,
     decided that "two negatives make a positive" and therefore one
     should say "I don't have any," that even if "you" is singular it
     should be followed by the plural "were", and that "I" not "me",
     "he" not "him", "they" not "them", and so forth should follow
     "than" in comparitive constructions.  Because Lowth was very
     influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak
     "properly," many of these new "rules" were legislated into
     English grammar, at least for the "prestige" dialect.  Note that
     grammars such as Lowth wrote are very different from the
     descriptive grammars we have been discussing.  They are less
     interested in describing the rules people know than in telling
     them what rules they should know.

|>oug