Mastering our languages

Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm's book Accidence Will Happen reminds us that most of us who speak English have actually mastered multiple forms of English. We use one on some occasions, another on others. It's like the guy who ordinarily can't seem to say two sentences without using the f-word at least once but sounds very different when speaking with his boss, his mother or a priest.

Linguist John McWorter has made the same point with his metaphor of the four language boxes. One box is labeled formal speech, another informal speech, another formal writing and still another informal writing. Being able to check off each of these boxes is a good thing, he argues. We need formal speech for when we speak in public, informal speech with our friends, formal writing for a letter applying for a job and informal writing for e-mails and texting.

Within each of the boxes we probably have smaller boxes. Most of us speak differently to children than to adults and differently to friends than to strangers. I wrote several days ago about the college professor who wrote one way in his newspaper columns and another in a scholarly book. And I've written before about the receptionist where I worked who spoke in a very refined way to visitors and when on the telephone with a stranger, informally with her white colleagues and with a very different kind of informality with other black people.

Then there is the language we must learn for our jobs, lingo that may sound foreign to outsiders but is necessary in our chosen fields. Thus we sound different at work than when we go home.

Kamm's term for formal speech or formal writing is "conventional English." There are occasions when we want to use grammar that even our pickiest teachers would have approved. Other times we can get away with less conventional usages and might even sound stuffy if we did use conventional English.

He speaks very highly of Emma Thompson, the British actor, who visited her old school and urged pupils to learn to speak without using slang terms like innit and I was, like. "Just don't do it," she said. "Because it makes you sound stupid and you're not stupid." Becoming educated means learning several forms of our own language.