Grammar

I’m talking, of course, about literary fiction, where at times quotation marks can be as hard to come by as a pre-publication blurb from Don DeLillo. Although every style manual you might care to name will tell you that lines of dialogue must be enclosed in these little paired curlicues (or single ones, if you’re British), many writers insist on leaving them out. Authors who have eschewed quotation marks include E.L. Doctorow, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Kate Grenville, William Gaddis and (sometimes) Raymond Carver.

Why do they do this? I once heard Doctorow tell a group of journalists that if a writer knows what he’s doing, quotation marks aren’t really necessary. “You can tell when it’s dialogue,” he explained. Often enough, that’s true. However, to say that an element of written language can be eliminated without rendering the language itself incomprehensible is not tantamount to saying that the element is superfluous and ought to be abandoned.

Written language is inherently redundant, as cryptographers and information theorists term it — that is, every sentence contains multiple cues to its intended meaning. That’s why the moderators of Internet discussions will sometimes “disemvowel” objectionable posts, removing all the vowels from the words without deleting the post itself. Th txt rmns ndrstndbl, fr rdrs wllng t wrk. The moderator refrains from actual censorship, while those who’d rather not subject themselves to the rantings of trolls can simply skim past the resulting pseudo-gibberish unscathed. The point is, you can still read it if you try, you just have to exert yourself.

While it’s less of an impediment than disemvowelment, the elimination of quotation marks does make a work of fiction at least slightly harder to follow. You will need to read it a little more slowly, if only to figure out whether any given sentence is dialogue or narration. Defenders of the practice will insist that such techniques “force” the reader to contemplate the author’s prose more carefully because apparently we need to have our arms twisted to make us do so. And it’s true that the extra effort that goes into reading quotation-mark-free fiction does resonate with the widespread and rather Puritanical notion that reading you have to work at must be serious and therefore literary.

This justification doesn’t, however, take into account the low quality of the labor demanded of readers by the jettisoning of quotation marks. What, exactly, does anyone gain aesthetically from the chore of sorting out lines of dialogue? If the intention is to make the thing harder to read, why not disemvowel it and really give ‘em a good workout? Notwithstanding such avant-garde stunts as Georges Perec’s “A Void” (written so as to avoid using the letter “e”), the proposition that you can improve the literary quality of a text by arbitrarily cutting out some expected element to reduce its readability is, when baldly stated, just plain silly.

Perhaps the most famous shunner of quotation marks is the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred not to “block the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate.” (McCarthy also disdains the semicolon. And it should be added that the 18th century’s most revered English stylist, Samuel Johnson, boasted of writing so cogently he never had to resort to parentheses.) There is a hauteur to such pronouncements; they amount to an assertion of the speaker’s superiority. Lesser writers might have to resort to cluttering their prose with “weird little marks,” but not a master such as moi.

For this reason, perhaps, most readers regard the absence of quotation marks as an affectation, meriting more or less indulgence depending on how much they like the author in question. Some will even patiently explain to you why a favorite writer does this (invariably invoking the ol’ “makes you work at it” rationale). But it’s hard to find anyone who truly believes a novel or short story is improved by the elimination of quotation marks — or that it would be somehow damaged if a copy editor snuck in and inserted them just before publication. And there are certainly readers who can’t endure this particular authorial quirk. I’ve met people who steadfastly refuse to read fiction without quotation marks around the dialogue.

I recently kvetched to a novelist friend that as much as I liked Michelle Huneven’s novel “Blame,” I was irritated by her omission of quote marks and wondered why she’d done it. “Well,” he answered without hesitation, “given the subject matter” — an alcoholic’s determination to redeem herself after being implicated in a fatal accident — “it was probably meant to signal that the book isn’t middlebrow.” With a story line that resembles an Oprah-friendly tale of personal redemption, skipping the quotation marks is a way for Huneven to assert that her novel is not too accessible, and to claim a cultural prestige that’s often equated with simple difficulty.

But there’s difficult and then there’s difficult; a minor yet pointless inconvenience introduced into a work of fiction for no perceptible purpose other than to shore up an author’s wobbly sense of his or her own status risks conveying not confidence but insecurity. More to the point, what writer of serious fiction today can possibly afford to put readers off for the sake of a little highbrow preening? (Cormac McCarthy, I guess.) Disemvowelment, after all, is a technique used to warn readers away from something they probably don’t want to read anyway. Maybe literary fiction should think twice before sending the same message.

Lynch would like us all to calm down, please, and recognize that “proper” English is a recent and changeable institution. “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma” recapitulates the long argument between two schools of thought: the prescriptive — which holds that the job of language experts is to lay down the law by telling us how to speak and write — and the descriptive, which holds that compilers of dictionaries and other guides are in the business of describing, not dictating, how the language is used. The latter group includes most professional linguists and lexicographers, but the former — self-appointed pundits like the late William Safire and Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling rant about punctuation errors, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” — know that the real money lies in validating the ire of purists.

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing — and, especially, the growth of general literacy — led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as “the 18th-century grammarians” have, in some accounts of the language’s history, been set up as “dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons,” who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.

Lynch takes a more temperate view of these “bad guys,” as he does of most matters discussed in “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.” While he leans decidedly toward the descriptivist camp, he believes experts ought to acknowledge the public’s need for guidance on how to speak and write standard English — that is, the lingua franca of official, public and commercial life in the English-speaking world.

Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series “Star Trek”: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: “to go,” “to eat,” “to walk,” etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English — the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example — is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.

Lynch does think that English speakers should be taught to avoid splitting infinitives in certain situations, not because splitting them is incorrect, but because other people, people in a position to judge and exclude, have been taught it’s incorrect. The ability to speak and write standard English gives students “access to power,” he writes. It’s a membership card required for participation in the culture’s important conversations. But that doesn’t mean that standard English is necessarily superior to, say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE or, to use a more notorious moniker, Ebonics), or that deviations from it constitute the downfall of civilization as we know it, as popular curmudgeons of Safire’s ilk like to proclaim.

“Correct” English, as Lynch characterizes it, is basically “the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.” And sure enough, the first guides to English usage promised to teach people to write and speak with greater “elegance” and “politeness,” not greater correctness. These manuals, born of an age of increased social mobility, were intended for “a newly self-conscious group of people who were no longer peasants but still were excluded from the traditional aristocracy.” The suddenly rich children of merchants and manufacturers needed instructions on the elegant grammar (and manners) of the aristocracy in order to blend in with their social superiors. Tellingly, the 300-year history of fulmination against improper usage is marked by diatribes against those “inferior” and upstart groups supposedly most prone to transgression: women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities and, of course, Americans.

To protests that the language police are only protecting the accuracy, precision and clarity of our tongue, Lynch lifts a skeptical eyebrow. Many of the most roundly deplored “debasements” of English are nevertheless perfectly comprehensible: I didn’t confuse you by writing “Ain’t it the truth?” in my opening paragraph, did I? The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today’s usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.

Thinking of the grammar wars in this light helps explain why they provoke such rage. Much as some people might detest seeing the noun “impact” used as a verb, if a lot of people say it and almost everybody understands it when it’s said, then a coup has been effected. The “verbing” of nouns (or the creation of “nerbs”) has been a flashpoint for the past four or five decades with the growth of business management lingo. Complaints about this point to a particularly American social fissure: between the cultured sensibility of the liberally educated and the can-do utilitarianism of striving MBAs.

Does it help to know that the foremost Victorian grammar cop regarded “donate” as “utterly abominable” and “inaugurate” as “high-flying nonsense”? It is in the nature of language to change, and while teaching people to use standard English may help get them into a boardroom or cabinet chamber, chances are they’ll teach English itself a few new tricks by the time they get out, not necessarily for the worse. For every groaner like “mentee” (i.e., “protégé”), there are awesome coinages like “aerobicized,” “blowback” and “crunk” — all recently added to the “Concise Oxford English Dictionary.” Also, I rejoice to learn that “whom” (the objective case of the pronoun “who”) may soon vanish from written English just as it has nearly vanished from casual speech, and students will have one less tedious rule to memorize. But dangling participles? Those I’ll fight ’til the bitter end.