The Bookshelf: Language Change under Pressure

It is not well known to readers of Public Discourse, or even universally known among its writers, that I am the copy editor of all the essays, reviews, and interviews you see here. It may seem to be a curious part-time second career for a semi-retired academic to take up, but it came about quite naturally. Years ago, when I worked full-time at the Witherspoon Institute and wrote occasionally for PD, I fell into the habit of emailing the founding editor, Ryan Anderson, about misspellings, solecisms, and typos that I spotted in its essays. This did not happen every day, but often enough that Ryan thought the best way to get out of the exasperating business of post hoc corrections was to ask me to proofread PD’s content beforehand. This I was happy to do, and it became a very small part of my Witherspoon work.

Successive editors have increased my role in this respect, and regularized a process in which I copy-edit all the pieces we publish, and a Witherspoon staffer (who is also a writer you see here often) does a final proofreading after I finish. Call me odd, but it is work that I really enjoy. I have even taken up freelance copy-editing for a print magazine—and not for the money, because it’s certainly not a living.

I said that this came about naturally, and that’s true in another sense. I suppose I inherited an attention to detail in writing. I still come across the penciled corrections my mother made in the books from her library that I now own; she never read without a pencil within reach, and her neat small marks are there in books she had no reason to believe anyone else would read. Something draws me to do likewise, too. Someone may one day read my old books and find such corrections in them.

When I began to teach college students in the early 1980s, I leaned into this near-obsession when it came to their prose—not just what they said but how well and how correctly they said it. More than once I had a student complain about all my red ink that “this isn’t a writing class,” to which I always replied, “every class in which you write is a writing class.” 

So when I began to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the first time recently, I was immediately a partisan of Mrs. Garth, a former governess who educates her own children and takes in paying pupils as well. Eliot gives us this parenthetical aside that limns her character and won my heart completely: “(Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favourite ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her ‘Lindley Murray’ above the waves.)” Lindley Murray, as I learned from Bryan A. Garner’s 2021 book Taming the Tongue in the Heyday of English Grammar (1711–1851), was the author of English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, first published in England in 1795 and a huge success both there and in the United States.

Come the deluge, I would keep my precious first edition of H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage dry, but if I could tread water without using either hand, I’d try to hold my Garner’s Modern English Usage above the waves as well. The eponymous Bryan Garner, a lawyer and lexicographer, also edits Black’s Law Dictionary, co-authored the legal treatise Reading Law with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and writes a monthly “Garner the Grammarian” column for National Review. And in my opinion, his GMEU is the gold standard of modern usage guides, occupying the summit where Fowler once dwelt. Fowler’s acerbic wit and his opposition to stuffiness and pretense make his work a joy to read, but the evolution of standard written English has made some of his counsel obsolete, and Garner is up-to-the-minute, with a judicious balance between attention to linguistic change on one hand and preservation of valuable norms and distinctions on the other.

Any such balancing, of course, vibrates between description and prescription. Fowler walked this vibrating tightrope in 1926, so does Garner today—and so does any copy editor anywhere. Garner, also the author of the 144-page chapter 5 (“Grammar and Usage”) of the new eighteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), opens with a capsule account of this “axis on which grammar is often discussed,” where “for decades, prescriptivists accused descriptivists of adopting an ‘anything goes’ attitude, while descriptivists attacked prescriptivists as simplistic rulemongers who ignored linguistic realities.” For Garner, the situation is better today, with prescriptivists recognizing the inevitability of change and descriptivists the necessity of norms.

But I think the truth of the matter (as Garner surely knows) is that, everywhere and always, those who describe have prescribed and those who prescribe have described. (Machiavelli, in The Prince, purports to describe the most realistically effective political behavior, but in the course of doing so, he is prescribing a revolutionary new meaning of the word virtù in Italian.) Language does not—cannot—stand still. But it must also be intelligible, in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. As new words are coined and old ones repurposed, the questions that arise about whether to accept these changes—whether, that is, to prescribe as part of standard written English what we describe in the spoken and written language we encounter—are fairly few and basic.

How rapidly, for instance, should slang and neologisms become colloquial or informal language, and finally standard formal English? The parties roughly known as descriptivists and prescriptivists differ on the alacrity with which change is embraced. One reason to go slowly is that innovations sometimes die a natural death, falling out of use or being soon recognized as hackneyed or foolish. The fashion of the last five years, for instance, of referring to slaves, in journalism and historical writing, as “enslaved persons,” and to slaveholders as “enslavers,” is already tiresome, and was from its origin founded on the mistaken idea that the word “slave” implicitly approves of slavery or unjustly purports to describe a human being’s essential nature. This would be news to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. I think “enslaved person” and “enslaver” will drop out of sight in the near to medium term, and they won’t be missed.

Another question is, what is the reason behind some new form of expression? Sometimes a trend in usage seems driven by some writers’ desire to say something fancy or to sound sophisticated. Hence the popularity of the surpassingly ugly “societal,” which is almost never preferable to good old “social.” Another show-off word is “epicenter,” a word from seismology meaning that point on the earth’s surface directly above (epi-, upon) an earthquake’s central tremor. As a metaphor, it can work sometimes in other contexts, but in the vast majority of cases the plain word “center” will be better.

Other times the reason will be simple ignorance. In this way “fraught,” meaning “freighted” or “burdened” or “filled,” went from invariably being accompanied by a “with” phrase (fraught with conflict, fraught with temptation, fraught with passion, fraught with jubilation) to standing alone as an adjective. This may have happened because the commonest “fraught with” phrases tended to be negative descriptions (fraught with stress/tension/anxiety, etc.). Now many writers tell us that a situation was fraught, or a meeting was fraught, and not “with” anything at all. The reader is supposed to draw a negative inference—something was bad about that situation, or that meeting—but the implication is so vague as to be unintelligible. The reader cannot quite see what was bad about the thing, and it may well be that the writer has no clear idea of its specific badness, either. “Fraught,” though now attested in some dictionaries as a stand-alone adjective, has thus become a perfectly useless way to express a vague feeling without any real thought about what one means, let alone clear communication with the reader. Careful writers and editors will want to dial it back to the splendidly versatile “fraught with [something]” usage, which can range across many qualities, positive as well as negative.

Another possibility is that ideological reasons provide the impulse for changes in usage. This is the case with “enslaved person,” discussed above, and it also accounts for the decision of CMOS 18’s editors to plump for capitalization of black, white, and indigenous when these adjectives refer to persons. These stylistic changes, because they are small to the point of being inconsequential, are as easy to resist as to adopt. The reader can see PD’s choice.

But the most obvious example here, where the stakes seem larger, is the current push to adopt “they” as singular—not only as a reference to an indefinite, hypothetical, or unknown single person, but as referring also to known individuals, either to obscure their sex because it is irrelevant or best concealed, or (and this is the real landmine) to conform to their stated preference regarding “their” pronouns. On this matter, I am wholly in sympathy with Joshua Katz, who wrote on this subject six months ago in a City Journal essay about the new edition of the CMOS. Reviewing the evolution of the Chicago Manual from the fifteenth to the eighteenth—a twenty-one-year period—Katz rightly notes that the latest edition’s adoption of they/them/their/themself (!), for known persons who express their preference for such pronouns when others refer to them in the third person, is not at all a “natural development.” It is a political project, and those of us not onboard with it should resist being “bullied” (Katz’s word) into using them. 

I agree entirely. Garner’s GMEU 5 has a long, thoughtful essay on they that explores the issues fairly but, without joining in the bullying, seems to acquiesce in it. But his chapter in CMOS 18, while chiming with the Manual’s editors on using the plural third-person pronouns for individual “nonbinary persons,” offers a guide for “gender neutrality in pronoun use” with nine suggestions for writers, eight of which counsel revisions to avoid the use of singular they, them, etc.! The upshot, then, is this: where a natural evolution of usage might bring singular they from the informal-and-to-be-avoided into accepted formal writing, CMOS 18 advises going slowly, hewing as much as possible to what our grandparents’ grammar school teachers taught. But where a small special interest group of “nonbinary” persons and their more numerous allies insist that change take place rapidly on terms they dictate, CMOS 18 is all for immediate acceptance of the new artifice.

Here at Public Discourse, many of us think that in another generation or two, Western societies will look back on the idea that people can be “nonbinary” or undergo “gender transition” with the kind of horrified wonder we now reserve for early-twentieth-century eugenics or mid-century lobotomies. In the meantime, the copy we publish will move very cautiously around or through the minefield of they and them, employing pronouns simply to tell the truth as we understand it and to be as clear as possible for our readers. And you will never see themself in these pages.

Image by Feng Yu and licensed via Adobe Stock.