Students

As I am now a minor official of the hegemonic state, part of my job is to inform future cubicle workers about how they will never be members of the educated, technocratic elite.

Today I tried to inform my students that pronoun agreement was important--that there are people out there (not just English teachers) who actually know something about grammar and who make judgments about people based on their writing ability and their knowledge of grammar. Is it true anymore? Perhaps not. Still, is there any way to respect the language and its logic? Is representing the educated elite the only way to stand for clarity and humanity in language? One side of me wants to agree with my students, ignorant as they can be, that it's all right to rebel against the arbitrary strictures of grammar. Yet another part of me wants to insist on the logic of grammar (and I'm not talking about the prejudices of style--splitting infinitives and the like). The corruption of language by the state and its advertising minions depresses me. I like the ambiguity of metaphor, the possibility of disordered creativity found in the oddities of language. Yet I also like the purity of grammar, the way that logic informs a sentence. Either language has meaning or it doesn't. Either it reflects the world--and tells the truth about the world--or it doesn't. Orwell comments in an essay that he had the capacity to face unpleasant facts. He also decried the corruption of language. Put them together.