The Exclusivity of Scholarship. . . .

Though it is difficult to believe today, there was a time when people were ridiculed by the so-called intelligentsia if they were unable to read and write Greek. It seems almost comical to think that the gate-keepers of high culture once used literacy of Greek as a wall to hold back the swinish multitude of average people. On the other hand, I suppose it is as good a standard as any by which to keep people in their place and marginalize their accomplishments or ability. After all, Western intellectuals have had a long history of idolizing Greek culture, as though a militaristic, slave-owning group of people from over two thousand years ago had some special insight into the mysteries of the universe that the rest of us lack. This is not to say that the ancient Greeks, for all their horrible moral failings, aren't due a certain respect for their positive accomplishments, they certainly are. Greek insights into mathematics, natural science, and philosophy are remarkable - particularly given their place in history. If for nothing else, the ancient Greeks deserve an immense amount of credit for their use of reflective reasoning about themselves and their society. (Though it is often forgotten by Westerners that, for example, Confucius and Buddha both predate Socrates by over a hundred years.)

However, it is one thing to give credit where credit is due, and it is an entirely different matter to idealize ancient Greek culture as Western intellectuals seem to have so often done. I actually enjoy, for example, the stories of Greek mythology, Homer, and I even have enjoyed some Greek poetry in my time. And sometimes I wonder if it is not that intellectuals have idealized the Greeks so much as they have used them as a kind of exclusive club to which you had to gain access in order to be considered cultured and important. Traditionally in Europe, only the rich and powerful had any hope of gaining access to an education that would include Greek studies, and only if you were literate in Greek could you hope to be taken seriously by the cultural elite. Greek literacy was often your 'club card' that allowed you to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful and meant that your ideas and opinions could be taken seriously.

Take John Thelwall as a case in point. Thelwall (1764-1834) was an English radical writer, activist, lecturer, and ground-breaking speech therapist. He was a member of the great London Corresponding Society and was famously tied for treason along with Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy in 1794. Thelwall argued against the monarchy and for a radical expansion of voting rights. He was eloquent, committed, and fearless in his pursuit of justice and equality. And of course, writing in the 1790s, a period of turmoil following the Revolution in France, Thelwall engaged with establishment's premier conservative spokesman, Edmund Burke. One of Thelwall's most famous works was entitled The Rights of Nature in which he addressed Burke's defence of the establishment head on. Because Thelwall tried, to a degree, to emulate Burke's rather grandiose literary style, The Rights of Nature is not an easy book to read and seems rather antiquated today, particularly when read beside, say, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. And, interestingly, it was partly the book's style that drew the attention of some critics (even among reformers) who thought that Thelwall was attempting to speak above his "station." Thelwall tried to invoke Socrates as a symbol of the people's philosopher who addressed regular people and symbolized long-standing principles of egalitarianism and justice. But, unlike Burke, Thelwall couldn't read and write Greek and he was ridiculed for having to rely on translations for his reflections on Socrates. In The Rights of Nature and other works Thelwall makes references to Greek culture that are essentially laughed off because they are not grounded in his own direct reading but are somehow sullied or delegitimized by the fact that they arrive from translations. This, in part, is what critics focused on rather the substance of what Thelwall wrote, and so they portrayed him as an upstart who didn't have the authority to criticize Burke because he hadn't earned his status as a proper scholar.

Of course, Thelwall was also routinely attacked (sometimes physically) for his radical political opinions. But the very fact that his status (or lack of one) as a Greek Scholar could be seen as a legitimate criticism of his thoughts and ideas about politics, is remarkable today. And Thelwall was not the only victim of this kind of bias. Keats, didn't have a classical education and the fact that he wrote classically themed poetry without having read classical works in their original language was seen by many as a perfectly legitimate reason to marginalize his poetical works. There are, of course, still cases wherein you must read works in their original language to be taken seriously. But this is generally only if you are trying to portray yourself as an expert on the works themselves. You would probably wouldn't try, for example, to write a book about Kant's Critique without being able to read German. But it would surely be perfectly acceptable to invoke, say, German Romanticism in relation to the Lake Poets without being literate in German.

But it would serve us well to remember the degree to which people are often marginalized based on their perceived weaknesses in formal education. It is surely no surprise that a white man with almost no education can become president of the United States and be taken seriously by millions of people concerning his thoughts on culture, but a black woman (even with an excellent education) is has to scream and fight to even be heard.

A few thoughts on Grammar. . .

Grammar, as we often think of it, as a set of fairly strict definitions and rules that must be followed if we are to obtain legitimacy as “educated” and “erudite” people, has a fairly short history in the English language. Before about 250 years ago, few people thought of grammar as a distinct set of rules. Rather, syntax was people’s primary concern. That is to say, there were certain conventional ways of speaking and writing that were learned through reading and discourse. And, strangely, the people who first started to talk about and write about English grammar were often Latinists who, having spent a tedious chunk of their lives learning the complexities of Latin grammar began to impose similar ideas onto English. This is why for generations students of English were plied with odd, seemingly arbitrary, rules of grammar. If you are over forty, you were likely told many times in your schooldays that it was a terrible no-no to split an infinitive. And how many old-school English teachers were horrified when they first saw the title sequence to the original Star Trek in which Captain Kirk had the gall to split an infinitive when he said “to boldly go”? The irony, of course, is that the restriction against splitting an infinitive is not a result of the fact that it is frowned on in Latin (or Latin-based languages), but because you can’t actually do it. While in English infinitives are two words (such as “to go”), in Latin (and Romance languages in general) the infinitive is a single word (such as “ire”) so you cannot split the infinitive even if you wanted to. So, just because the early gate-keepers of “proper” English were Latinists and Classicists, generations of English speakers imagined that there was some real reason that they should be restricted from saying “to boldly go.”

Early English grammar primers began to appear in the 18^th century as more and more “middle-class” members of society began to spend years becoming educated. Though I haven’t spent a lot of times attempting to collect these early primers, I have only read about and seen a couple in all my years of book collecting and education. I am sure that before such grammar primers were being properly printed, there were mocked up versions created by private educators, of which there were many in England in the late 18^th century, for their own personal students. I have never seen one of these because I am sure only a handful have survived, but I have read about them in various books about the Georgian Era. I recently got a reminder of how rare technical discourse on grammar was even in the early 19^th century when I was reading a 1809 letter by the legendary political theorist William Godwin in which he was talking about a Grammar Primer written by great essayist William Hazlitt. Godwin writes – “I never saw the parts of speech so well defined (I could almost say at all defined) before.” In other words, Godwin, who was already an accomplished writer and had written one of the most important books in English on political theory, had scarcely even seen the parts of speech defined before. To put it another way, Godwin had never really seen technical grammar, and yet he was a famous and accomplished author.

I have recently thought about this issue a fair amount because of a few rather heated internet discussions. I believe, and there is plenty of academic research to support such a position, that attempting to teach young students grammar doesn’t really make them better writers, and can actually harm their attempts to write. Teaching students grammar not only makes language more antiseptic, but it can make students leery of even trying to write because they become paranoid that they will get something wrong. The best way to make better writers is through a kind of anticipatory socialization process of reading and writing. You don’t need to actually know what a dangling participle is to know not to use one, you simply have to have read a lot. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t really matter what a dangling participle is, what matters is that you can use language efficiently and effectively for what, and with whom, you are trying to communicate. Very few people will ever achieve the stylistic competence of, say, Henry James. But then, very few people are trying to communicate the way James was trying to communicate. What matters, nine out of ten times, is simply that writing is straightforward, not confusing, and easy to understand. I am continually amazed when people complain, for example, about young people using a particular word order or syntax, when there is no question about what is being communicated. Of course, when we are accustomed to certain word orders or grammatical structures, certain things can sound strange to our ears. But much of the time basic exchanges of information are what are really at stake, and there is seldom any confusion about that. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand the “correct” usage of “lay” and “lie,” but how often will the “incorrect” usage cause any actual confusion? Are any of us really confused when Eric Clapton told “Sally” to lay down, even though “technically” he should have told her to lie down? And doesn’t it even sound a little odd when we correctly use the “lie” in the past tense, such as if we said “I lay down on my new couch yesterday” ? Most people would think it sounds more correct to say “I laid down on my couch yesterday” even if it is technically incorrect. Of course, if you are writing your PhD thesis, or addressing some professional group of people, you are going to need (for the most part) to conform to their standards or risk rejection. But by the time you go to write a thesis or address a professional body, you have usually already been socialized to such expectations anyway. And most of the time, people are using language with a fairly straightforward goal of being understood in the moment, so lay down or lie down, whichever you prefer, I don’t mind.