Happy new year!

Although I am starting 2010 by grading more exams, I am also really excited about this morning's fantastic New York Times review of a new book out by Jack Lynch called The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park. Here is a snippet from Neil Genzlinger's review:

"It is dictionary makers who have to confront most directly the dilemma of Mr. Lynch’s title. Is their job to tell people how the language should be used, or to reflect how it actually is used? Mr. Lynch, as might be expected, gives each view its due, but throughout this very readable book he makes clear that he thinks the grammar scolds need to shut up, or at least tone it down.

“Too often,” he writes, “the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstitions into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing more than prejudice representing itself as principle.”

And, as he notes in his final chapter, the grammatical doomsayers had better find themselves some chill pills fast, because the crimes-against-the-language rate is going to skyrocket here in the electronic age. There is already much whining about the goofy truncated vocabulary of e-mail and text messaging (a phenomenon Mr. Lynch sees as good news, not bad; to mangle the rules of grammar, you first have to know the rules). And the Internet means that English is increasingly a global language.

“All the signs point to a fundamentally reconfigured world,” he writes, “in which what we now think of as the English-speaking world will eventually lose its effective control of the English language.”

While as an English teacher I am probably higher up on the grammar scold scale - evidenced this morning by my repeated slashings of noun-pronoun disagreements in my students' essays (aggh!) - I am still in awe of the English language's endurance and mutability. I appreciate in the review how Lynch traces the split infinitive's trajectory from de rigeur to expletive. I honestly don't know if the split infinitive would make a grammar scold's top ten list in the 21st century. There are so many other issues to contend with. Perhaps what I've noticed the most is the absence or misuse of the comma, and I'm sure this is a direct result of the electronic age. What does it mean when a person cannot pause in a paper or in speech? Seems like some kind of metaphysical condition, really.

On an altogether different note, I have to include a link to Bill Cunningham's report on the fashionable state of silver in clothing, accessories, etc. Be sure to catch the monkey motif while you are marveling over this man's whimsy and creativity as he tells a story about color....
"Quicksilver."