A Word, Please: Stories about the collapse of grammar aren’t new

I received an email recently from a reader named Fred who’s unhappy about the way that language and writing standards have gone down the tubes since his school days in the 1950s and ‘60s. Here’s an excerpt:

“Teachers have told me that punctuation is no longer being taught (considered by students ‘who text’ as a waste of time) and that the grammar that I had to take half of each year through junior and senior high school has gone by the wayside also,” Fred wrote.

“I see bad writing everywhere: awkward sentences, minimal punctuation, misspellings, misuse of words, references to things not previously mentioned, use of acronyms not previously noted, etc. The reason those in my age group fuss about this so much is because we have seen our culture spiral down, which the younger generation can’t see (yet!),” he added.

Fred isn’t alone. Many people have written to me over the years to express the same basic sentiment. Fascinatingly, their anecdotal experiences are echoed by some prominent educators.

Here’s an English professor at a small college talking about the school’s freshman class: “Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically and seem to have been trained to hate mental exercise.… Often they cannot read intelligently and dislike any reading.”

One Connecticut teacher put it even more bluntly: “From every college in the country goes up the cry, ‘Our freshmen can’t spell, can’t punctuate.’ Every high school is in despair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.”

Most damning of all are these words from the president of Harvard University: “Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation, and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of 18 otherwise well prepared for college studies.”

No wonder folks educated in the good old days are so alarmed. Language, or at least propriety in language, is clearly teetering on the brink of collapse, right?

It sure sounds like it. Unless you happen to know the year in which each of those educators was speaking.

That English professor at the small college? He made that observation in 1956 — the height of Fred’s golden age of grammar instruction.

The Connecticut teacher who alleged that college freshmen can’t spell or punctuate was made that statement in 1917. And that Harvard president? His name was Charles Eliot, and he made those comments in 1871.

Lest anyone think this phenomenon is limited to America or even the English language, here’s a tirade about a similar downward spiral in Latin. “Spoken Latin has picked up a passel of words too casual for written Latin, and the grammar people use when speaking has broken down. The masses barely use anything but the nominative and the accusative.… It’s gotten to the point that the student of Latin is writing what is to them an artificial language, and it is an effort for him to recite it decently.”

This little rant was translated from Latin. It was penned in the year 65. Not ’65 with an apostrophe. Just 65.

I pilfered all these quotations from linguist John McWhorter’s 2013 Ted Talk titled “Txting is killing language. JK!!!” And anyone who believes that the language education she got in the good old days set a standard that’s been sliding downhill ever since might want to find McWhorter’s talk online.

Because, while folks educated 30 or 40 or 50 years ago may, indeed, have received a good grammar education, some of them clearly didn’t grasp what they were hearing in history class.

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.