Aldous Huxley argued convincingly that words and the meanings of words are “matters of the profoundest ethical significance to every human being.” And thoughtful people should by now have strong inklings that ethics and morality cannot be prescribed or legislated.

            Jean Stafford, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her fiction, is the latest to make the preservation of the language her own personal vendetta. (N.Y.Times, 9/15/74 )  She, like those before her, will not learn from the fruitless efforts of the French Academy or the lifelong tribulations of uncountable English teachers that individual language behavior, especially speech, results from something much more intangible than knowing and using standard dialect. The causes and motivations are deep seated – as deep seated as Miss Stafford’s felt need to attend “the funerals of decent and law abiding words.”

            She takes on Presidents, newscasters, and advertisers as they allegedly impoverish “the richest language in the world.”  She is apparently unaware that the behavior she condemns has added to the language’s richness throughout history and will not be modified by the wakes at which she wails.

            In a very real sense, a man is the language he speaks. If you tamper with that, if you insist upon more than conformity to the basic conventions of the language, he will strike out in defense; if he doesn’t he may suffer a basic injury as a human being.

            One’s use of language is a creative process, a process of discovery in which he gets to know himself; through interaction he gets to know others. He can be helped in that process, but no one can prescribe the process and choose for him the words that will lead to that discovery.

            What Miss Stafford fails to understand is that we get to know a man as he behaves in language. Any change we might consider desirable must be effected on something else, and that change will be made manifest in his language behavior.

            President Ford has been cited as a man who “believes in the basic decency of the English language” (Harriet Van Horn , N.Y. Post, 8/14/74 ), and by implication Mr. Nixon does not. Mr. Nixon’s long hours of seclusion before he made important decisions testify to his conversations with himself in which he gained insights into who he was and what he should do. It is well known that his final decisions were his own. His use of language revealed nothing about his attitude about language, but rather revealed something about the size and shape of his self. If President Ford speaks the “real language of America ,” he reflects those personal qualities which Americans find admirable.

            “We do not speak and we do not write,” accuses Miss Stafford; “we communicate.” “So do dung beetles communicate with one another,” she informs us; “so do sheep and rattlesnakes and so do jackasses.”

            Evidently Miss Stafford is unaware that there are among us (figuratively speaking, of course) dung beetles, sheep, rattlesnakes, and yes, jackasses. Our task, it seems, is not to insist that they speak standard English, but rather to somehow get them to assume their responsibilities as human beings. 

                        Bill Reynolds