If you were a fan of Johnny Carson’s talk show, you might remember that English professor Richard Mitchell was an unlikely but always witty guest.
Mitchell had charmed wordsmiths nationwide by writing “The Underground Grammarian,” a newsletter that exposed any knave who abused the Mother Tongue because “Bad English kills trees, consumes energy, and befouls the earth. Good English renews it.” Carson took note.
Mitchell’s most memorable appearance on Carson’s show aired in 1979, shortly after the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown. Before a rapt audience, Mitchell held the National Council of Teachers of English responsible for the calamity, reasoning that when the NCTE renounced grammar instruction, they “taught whole generations of people that small mistakes don’t matter.”
More specifically, “When people trained that way go into very technical callings, without this habit of precision, they can kill us.”
Mitchell got a big laugh inventing a dialogue between the Three Mile Island technicians whose poor communication skills might have caused the calamity, but there was nothing funny about his reason for alarm. No doubt he had read the resolution the NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication passed in 1974, which included this stunner:
“Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans.”
So began the partial meltdown of communication skills nationwide, and Mitchell was the first to blame the “new priests” who had decreed that requiring students to speak and write standard English is “immoral.”
That same year, Mitchell published a timeless little gem titled “Less Than Words Can Say,” which captures the priests’ new mission:
“They have promised to teach social consciousness and environmental awareness, creativity, ethnic pride, and tolerance … provided, of course, that such skills didn’t involve irrelevant details like spelling and the agreement of subjects and verbs.”
Mitchell was also the first to note that the new priests viewed grammar instruction as “an instrument of imperialist oppression.”
As a grad student in the early ’80s, I watched that new breed of Jacobins stage a hostile takeover of a university English department, then morph into the DEI racket that, until recently, has ruled universities nationwide. I regret that professors in my field were the first to succumb to misrule, but professors at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work can’t even utter the word field because field “may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” USC’s new mandate has professors calling what they do a “practicum” — and providing me with a handy token of their derangement.
Smart journalists have dodged academe’s crackpots, as well as fellow journalists who traffic in nonsense.
Take Helen Betya Rubinstein, for example. In a 2023 article for the Literary Hub, Rubinstein argued “Against Copyediting” because copyediting “is a white supremacist project, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture.”
Rubinstein’s stated goal involves “subverting conventions of narrative,” but she has succeeded instead in subverting the conventions of common sense.
The written word has survived the likes of Rubinstein, who would have us play fast and loose with the Mother Tongue, but the fallout from their misrule shows up almost nightly on national television.
Writers have copyeditors who spare them blunders, but no such safety net is available to impromptu speakers on live TV, where even hotshot pundits make cringe-worthy comments like “He should have ran for office” or “I have swam in the Potomac.”
When my students wondered why speaking correctly is just as important as writing correctly, I always recited King Lear’s advice to his daughter Cordelia: “Mend your speech a little, / Lest you may mar your fortunes,” but I fear that prospective employers who were educated by so-called progressives might also be missing the past participle when they speak.
Lamenting the recent decline in test scores for public school students in blue states, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled “Democratic Politicians Are in Denial on the Education Crisis.”
My fervent hope is that a Republican administration will succeed in its mission to cancel the DEI hucksters and adopt the Underground Grammarian’s motto: “Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education.”
Nan Miller is professor emerita from Meredith College.
