No, that isn’t “Bad English.”
The obligatory lecture that needs to start every English class
You are probably expecting that we’re going to spend the next several months learning “proper” English, with me telling you how all sorts of things are wrong, and you getting in trouble every time you say “ain’t” or say “to boldly go” or something like that. That’s not what we’re here for. I want to take this time to talk about the difference between bad English and bad writing and what we’re actually here to do.
First of all, what’s a language?
A language is a way of communicating. It’s a bunch of words for things, and rules about how we can put words together to pass ideas from one brain to another. And what makes something a language, the difference between speaking English and speaking French, is that two people who speak a single language can understand one another. That’s it; there’s nothing more complicated to it.
That means that “I have twenty-six pens in my briefcase,” “y’all got any smokes?,” and “she done buy twelve hamsters” are all English — because I’ll bet that nobody in this room had any trouble understanding what any of those meant.
So OK, why do people say that “I have twenty-six pens in my briefcase” is “good” English, and “she done buy twelve hamsters” is “bad” English? If you want to understand this, you need to understand two more things: a dialect and prestige.
A dialect is simply a way some group of people speak a language. If there’s a large group of people who all speak English in roughly the same way, with the same words, the same grammar, the same pronunciation, that’s a dialect. The way you speak when you’re hanging out with your friends isn’t the same as the way I’m speaking now; and if you can speak both like I am right now and like the way you do at home, that means you speak at least two dialects. Most of you probably speak at least two. That ability to switch between the two of them when you want to is called “code switching,” and it’s something important that we’ll come back to a lot.
Some dialects are so common that they have their own names. The one I’m speaking right now is called “Modern Standard English,” or “MSE” for short; it’s close to what a lot of people call “good English.” Phrases like “she be goin’ to the store” are part of “Black English,” whose formal name is “African-American Vernacular English,” or “AAVE” for short; we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about AAVE, too. Did you notice how I said “she be goin’?” In MSE, I would have said “she’s going.” AAVE is famous for having a lot more verb tenses than MSE — a lot more ways to tell the difference between something that’s still happening, something that happened in the past but just finished, something that finished a while ago.
That’s one of the ways dialects can be different. The common kinds of differences are:
- Different words for things, like “ain’t” or “isn’t.”
- Different ways of pronouncing the same words, like “goin’” and “going.”
- Different kinds of grammar, like “I’ma go out” to say that you’re about to go out right now.
So if I say “y’all got any sugar?” you can tell that I’m speaking in a Southern dialect, because I used the word “y’all” for “all of you,” “you” meaning more than one person, and because of how I put so much stress on the “su-” in “sugar” and just ended it with a sort of “uh” sound, instead of saying “shugar” like I would in MSE.
OK, so why am I talking so much about dialects? Go back to what I said before, that MSE is what we call “good” English. What’s really “good” about it?
MSE is what’s called a “prestige dialect.” And a prestige dialect is simply the dialect that gets all the prestige: it’s the dialect of the upper classes, of people with money and power and importance. If you’re in the US, the prestige dialect is MSE; in the UK, it’s something called the “Queen’s English.” And that should give you a pretty good idea of why that dialect has the prestige — it’s literally the kind of English that the Queen speaks. If the capital of England had been in Manchester instead of London, you can bet that the kind of “good” English you heard on the BBC would be pretty different.
This is the most important thing you need to understand: a prestige dialect is important because it’s the dialect of power. And I want you to learn the prestige dialect of English, and be able to speak it and sound pitch-perfect in it, not because I think you shouldn’t be speaking any other kind of English, but because the ability to speak the language of power gives you power. It means that you can walk up to people who speak that dialect and speak it right back to them, and they will treat you differently because of it, and I want you to have that choice.
There’s another important thing we haven’t talked about yet, and that’s writing. I didn’t talk about that yet, because it turns out that written language is as different from spoken language as MSE is from AAVE. Even if you’re writing in “good” English, you aren’t writing in MSE — you’re writing in a different dialect called Modern Standard Written English, MSWE. The differences there are pretty small, but they’re important: for instance, when people are writing, they use longer sentences, and there are more parts to each sentence, because when you’re reading, it’s easier to see the parts of a sentence than when you’re listening.
Now, there’s an interesting thing about writing. Until a few years ago, with the rise of the Internet and texting and so on, most people didn’t write very much. If you were writing, it was a letter, or a business matter, or something like that, and that meant that writing was already a prestige occupation — which meant that writing was almost entirely done in MSWE. Different written dialects almost didn’t exist, and hadn’t for hundreds of years.
But starting in the 1990’s or so, more people started writing, and they started writing more like the way they talk — which meant that we started seeing a lot more written dialects. That’s everything from textspeak with “u” and “l8r,” to emoji, to the ways people put together sentences on-line. And because different dialects of written English are new and unfamiliar, a lot of people think these are signs that their speakers are somehow stupid and can’t write English properly.
They’re not — we’re seeing different dialects.
And going back to where we started, I am not here to teach you that one kind of writing is good and the other kind is bad and you should never do it. I want you to be able to write and to speak in all of these ways, but most importantly, I want you to always do it on purpose. If you choose to use a prestige dialect, or a non-prestige dialect, or if you choose to mix them, I want you to do that because you know what that’s going to mean to the person you’re talking to. What I want you to be able to do is use English to get across not just the ideas you want to get across, but the impressions, the subtle meanings, the implications of saying something this way or that way, and to always have the power to choose which one you want to use and have every one of those tools in your hand.
That’s what we’re here for.
Now, there’s one more thing you need to know. While there’s no such thing as “bad English,” there most definitely is such a thing as bad writing. Bad writing has nothing to do with dangling participles and everything to do with not expressing your ideas clearly.
Have you ever been around someone who takes ten minutes to get to the point? Do you want that person explaining something to you? By the time they get to the point, do you even still care what the point is, or even remember what the hell they were talking about?
I don’t want you to write like that, or to speak like that. I want you to be able to make your words jump off the page, grab someone’s attention and hold it, get the idea to them so briefly and perfectly that they are saying “damn, that’s right.” And writing like that isn’t easy: it requires practice, and attention, and a brutal editor — that’s me — who’s going to look at what you wrote and say “no, you used two words where one could do,” or “nothing here makes sense, try again,” and generally kick your collective asses until your writing is clean and crisp.
And how does this tie in with dialects? Because dialects are a tool you are going to use. If I tell you that the difference between a flawless command of the nuances of the English language and jumbled, inarticulate writing is the difference between a racehorse and a pile of horse shit, then I will have made you stop and pay a lot of attention at the end of that sentence, because I suddenly switched from using a careful, fancy English to a very different kind of English. And I did that on purpose, to trip you up and make you wake up and pay attention to that point.
It’s like a certain biology professor I once knew, who was teaching his class about the brain. He described the hypothalamus as being responsible for “the four F’s — feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating.”
I can promise you that everyone in that room remembers to this day what the hypothalamus does.
But how do you do that? You do that by knowing all the dialects well, by knowing what are called “registers” — that’s “high” and “low” English, or “fancy” and “casual” English, by knowing all sorts of things like that and having enough practice with them that you can choose between all of them whenever you need to, and do it on purpose.
One last thing: There is, actually, something that’s legitimately “bad English.” If I said “English bad something that legitimately is,” you would have no idea what the hell I was talking about. It’s a sentence that English speakers wouldn’t understand, and that no fluent English speaker would ever say. That is legitimately bad English — in fact, it’s not English. If we ever talk about sentences that are genuinely bad English, I’m going to mark them with a star, like this:
*“English bad something that legitimately is”
I’ll also use a question mark for things that aren’t quite total gibberish, and you can probably understand them if you squint a bit, but no native speaker would ever say — something like
?“You give sandwich, please!”
But if it’s not one of these — if it’s a sentence that a native English speaker might say, and that people will understand without having to stop and figure it out — then it’s not bad English. It may be inappropriate English, someone using the wrong tool and giving off the wrong impression by accident, and that will get your ass properly kicked, but it is still English and we will put it to good use.
So. Any questions?
