Dollars and Sense

LANGUAGE IS LIKE money. It is an acceptable medium used to communicate and conduct business with others. A five dollar bill is useful because it is always accepted and recognized. Standard English is important, not because it is intrinsically better or more pleasing to the ear than slang, but because--like legal tender--it is universally accepted.

Every time someone says "Where's it at?" it is as if a counterfeit dollar enters the nation's money supply. Gradually, people lose faith in the currency until it is as worthless as the German mark in the '30s. When it takes a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread, the monetary system is no longer useful as a standard for trade. When "don't" follows "he" and "doesn't" follows "I," language is no longer a useful standard for communication.

Our schools perform a seemingly trivial service in teaching kindergarteners that there are 100 pennies in a dollar and 12 inches in a foot. These lessons are vital, however, because currency and measurement systems are useful only to the extent that they are universal.

Americans would not tolerate a society where only those who could afford the best education could figure out the nation's currency, leaving the rest to develop a substandard bartering system. Similarly Americans should not tolerate the rapidly developing situation where the majority of the public communicates in a substandard slang and standard English is the property of the privileged. Slang confines those without a decent education to lives of limited expectations. Without a mastery of standard English, they will never be able to hold any but the lowest level jobs or to appreciate fully American culture and heritage.

Standard English will play an even more important role in the post-industrial society when Americans will trade not tangible goods but information. Words, not engines, will drive our economy. Many industrial workers will need retraining in standard English before they join the ranks of the information economy.

As global economic ties bring the world closer together, the international role of English will be increasingly more significant. With so many of our trading partners speaking English as a second language, standard English may soon be more common in foreign business capitals than in the United States. Americans have the luxury of speaking the universal language from birth, but we are rapidly sacrificing our birthright on the altar of slang.

LANGUAGE AS A sign of class--a la George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle--is contrary to American traditions. Colonial Americans, notes historian Daniel Boorstin, prided themselves on the almost universal use of proper grammar. There were no discernible differences in patois between rich and poor. Unlike their British cousins who developed the language, Americans did not have to look to the upper crust for guidance on the proper use of the King's English. We have traditionally had to look no farther than our neighbors. Now, if we ask to see our neighbor, his son might reply, "I don't know where he's at."

Our nation has always celebrated diversity and flexibility, but language demands conformity and rigidity. Just as the schools teach weights and measures or dollars and cents, they must do a better job of teaching standard English. Let's not shortchange our children--or jeopardize America's future.