LANGUAGE CORRECTNESS AS AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS PROBLEM
Old shibboleths
Complainants about slippage in Standard English sometimes use as evidence the increasing loss of differentiation between two apparent alternatives, for example ‘disinterested/uninterested’; ‘try to/try and’; and ‘owing to/due to’. In the last example ‘owing’ is considered to be normally adjectival but functions as a compound preposition in a sentence such as: ‘Owing to the bad weather we were delayed.’ Traditionally prescriptivists have made the point that in this adverbial use ‘due’ cannot be substituted for ‘owing’. It is therefore acceptable to write: ‘the delay was due to the bad weather’ but not: ‘due to the bad weather we were delayed’.
And yet, as Peters (1995) remarks, this prepositional use of ‘due to’ is not new and there is therefore no need to perpetuate the shibboleth against ‘due to’. Here Peters helpfully reminds us of two fundamental points: first that a standard language changes over time and no power can stop it: what may have once been a necessary distinction between ‘owing to’ and ‘due to’ is no longer valid. The second point paradoxically states that at any one point in time it is necessary for those whose job it is to prescribe (teachers, textbook writers, syllabus planners, newspaper editors and so on) to do just that, prescribe what is acceptable and what is not. How they do that is to use their own judgement, recognizing that there will always be differences of opinion. It is understandable therefore why those whose job it is to arbitrate in these matters tend to be conservative. At the same time those with good sense recognize that constructions which may be considered as wrong by many people now may well be regarded as quite acceptable in the next generation.
It matters that we are sensitive to the way others feel about language use. For example, some people feel strongly that prepositions should not end sentences. But perhaps, as Bishop amusingly reminds us, we should not be too serious about it:
I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, ‘Perdition!
Up from out of in under there.’
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, ‘What should he come
Up from out of in under there?’
(Morris Bishop, ‘The Lost Preposition’)
