This is about what qualifies an individual as a cultured
person. It is perforce so from my particular point of view; from someone
else’s, it may well differ. According to Bryan Garner’s important “Garner’s Modern English
Usage,” a cultured person has a “cultivated mind, well trained and highly
developed.” But just who is that? Here are my views and touchstones, to borrow
Matthew Arnold’s term.
To begin with, we must recognize that “cultured” is not
quite synonymous with “civilized.” A civilized person spits not on the sidewalk
but in the gutter, and lets a lady off the elevator ahead of himself. But he
may very well not know who Pasteur or LaRochefoucauld was. I have my own,
highly subjective criteria of what makes a cultured person, one who avoids the
common mistakes I am about to discuss. It constitutes my notion of someone well-educated,
well-spoken, and presumably also well-behaved, except where wit or irony is
called for.
Take the illiterate pronunciation of “groceries” as
“grosheries,” which some unfortunates consider genteel rather than crassly
ignorant. It displays ignorant spelling, if the ignoramus were spelling at all,
as of “glacier,” with a “ci” rather than a simple “c” as in “groceries” which
is without an “i” after the “c.” You hear it all over television, and just
about anywhere else.
Or take the problem of “lie” and “lay,” with the former
ineptly dropped from the majority of people’s vocabularies. Few persons now
understand that “lay” means movement, as in “I lay the book on the table” or “I
lay me down to sleep.” Yet no such locomotion is involved in “the book is lying
or lies on the table.” At a leading
hospital, I heard all the nurses and even some younger doctors say “Now lay on
your side” or “You should lay asleep by now.” It turns my stomach to hear this
from anyone, but especially from someone who should know better. But “lie”—possibly
as an unfortunate homophone for
mendacity—has pretty much gone the way of the dodo and the hoop-skirt.
What now about the difference between number and quantity, a
frequent pitfall? One should say I now have fewer bad dreams, or its better to
have fewer than three children. Where a number of separable items is concerned,
it is fewer, as in fewer wrong answers on a quiz. But when measuring is
inappropriate or impossible, as in the grains of sand on a beach or in how much
you care about a vote in Turkey, it is a matter of less rather than fewer. But
the ignorant tendency favors “less” incorrectly, as in less theatergoers on
Mondays, or there should be less stations on this train. So it is also less
hair on my head, but the fewer hairs in the soup, the better. The former is
still not readily measurable, hence less (amount); whereas the number of
spoonfuls of a medicine at bedtime is fewer than in the morning. “More” is an
exception that goes either way; hence more cups of coffee with more sugar in it.
Now for a business that affects me more than it does others:
the name of the great writer Bernard Shaw. He dropped the George, and made
amply clear that he did not want to be George Bernard Shaw, as all
semiliterates, have it to this day. But the scholars and fans who know his
explicit wishes, know that every responsible text of his, such as the
seven-volume “Definitive Edition of the Collected Plays with their Prefaces” is
by Bernard Shaw, not George Bernard Shaw. Thus it is that the astute Germans,
who loved and steadily translated, published, and performed him, referred to him, without exception, as
Bernard Shaw. But show me a printed reference, especially in America, that does
not saddle him with a hypertrophic frontal George, to say nothing about this
aberrant form even from literati who should know better,
While we are on improper usage, how about wanting to “have
one’s cake and eat it too.” This, though Bryan Garner in the aforementioned
work accepts it on the basis of current frequency, is absurd. What you cannot
achieve is eating your cake and having it too, as Garner admits that earlier
writers and speakers (less benighted than the current crop), did invariably get
it right. Just think (as most people don’t): you can both jolly well have your
cake on Monday, and eat it too on Saturday. But if you have eaten it, no magic
or fridge or emetic will have it thereafter. So clearly,
both having and eating does not compute. But all it takes is
the one unfortunate who says grosheries or errs about that cake, and before
long the lemmings will follow.
What people say—wrongly—is, alas, catching. This is
particularly blatant in matters of pronunciation. It used to be always that
something was exquisite; slowly but surely it has become accepted also as
exquizite, as the dictionaries, rightly or wrongly have it, going by the vox
populi. My perhaps oversensitive stomach turns each time I hear it, which is
often enough to make my stomach emulate a whirling dervish.
Next we have what the great linguist H.W. Fowler called
genteelism. It occurs when the ignorant speaker says “Between you and I,” or
“Thank you for inviting my wife and I,” thinking that “I” is more refined than
“me,” “less soiled by the lips of the common herd,” as Fowler puts it.
Contributing to this misuse is that English is a noninflected language, a trap
no German with his declensions distinguishing between an objective and a
nominative case would fall into.
Equally repulsive are verbal trends, choices of words and
phrases that have become popular in a given period, from whose constant hearing
no discriminating speaker is immune. It comes in large measure as one of many
blessings showered upon us by television. For some time now the chief offender
has been “amazing,” which, leach-like, attaches itself to just about anyone and
everything. One gathers that verbally deprived persons are amazed by people and
things right and left, whereas one amazing, about human crassness, would quite
suffice. This has grated on my well being, which brings me to something
similarly appalling if done to the word “well.”
It used to be that if someone asked how you are, and you
were, or thought you were, all right (always two words, please), you said “I am
well, thank you.” Now you hear from just about everyone “I am good.” But this
is nonsense, unless you were trying to say you were a good person, which most
people have the sense to avoid. Who knows what would justify calling oneself
good, but this much is certain: if you were manifestly good, you would avoid
the need and boastfulness of proclaiming it.
Another trendy word these days is “conversation.” Formerly
it had one specific meaning: talk between two or among more persons. Nowadays,
however, a seemingly endless number of things, some not in the least positive,
is called conversation, most of which having nothing to do with exchanged
utterances. If you believed what you heard or read, you would think you were
living in a world of ceaseless dialogue—which, come to think, as chatter and you
actually and regrettably are.
A deplorable loss is that of the sweet, harmless word “as,”
which has been pretty much devoured by the omnivorous “like.” No one anymore
says “as I think”; it is always “like I think,” even if you don’t particularly
practice or like thinking. And I am not even thinking of that other “like,” which now infests, like a
horrible disease, almost every conversation. This may stem from insecurity: if
things are introduced with a “like,” it may not be considered as committing, as
binding, as they would be without it. It is making a dreadful virtue out of
imprecision, and out of evasion of responsibility.
I will not go into the problem of “who” and “whom," to which
Garner devotes a goodly amount of print, but I do want to register my
displeasure with one mistake that
occurs fairly often in my morning New York Times, and which may also qualify as
a genteelism. It is what I would call the mistaken predicate, and it goes like
this, to make up an example: “He is one of those poets who is better read aloud.”
What is wrong with this? The subject here is not “He,” which would take a
singular “is,” but “poets,” which requires a plural “are.” Hence the correct
form is “He is one of those poets who are better read aloud.” Tell that to some
reasonably cultured but errant writers one reads.
Let me conclude with two ubiquitous mistakes so common in
past, present, and doubtless future times. They are the nauseating “I mean” and
“you know,” scattered all over speech and hopelessly redundant and useless.
Presumably you mean what you are saying, so there is no need to affirm it. And
if you have reasonable doubt that some knowledge is needed in your hearer; you
simply have to acknowledge that a hopeful “you know” will not generate
understanding; you simply have to be clearer to begin with. Peppering your talk
with those clichés, however, will only annoy a cultured hearer. But if he or
she is uncultured, why bother in the first place?
The trouble with being a cultured person in today’s America
is that you end up underpaid if not unemployed. It helps enormously to be
practical rather than cultured. In my own experience, I was practical only once
in my lifetime, shortly after World War Two in the Air Force, for which I was
useless, having neither the inner ear for flying nor the gift for a grease
monkey. So I ended up in tasks like KP (kitchen police), in this instance chopping
onions for a huge soldiery. As I and my fellow choppers started shedding tears,
I came up with a grand idea: Why in hell were we issued gas masks if we don’t use them? Well, they were perfect for chopping onions, and forthwith there were no more
tears for me and my fellow choppers. We must have been some sight, but, by
golly, it worked: we were as dry-eyed as at those 40s comedies we saw at the
movies.
