"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
The above is not a snippet of the deranged ramblings of a bison enthusiast; nor is it an attempt by an edgy new theatre to replace the use of the word 'rhubarb' as the faux murmured speech used in the background of productions. Rather, it is the longest sentence in the English language which uses only one word. It makes use of the obvious animal, the American city 'Buffalo' and the use of an American slang word, meaning 'bully', which also happens to be 'buffalo'. In simpler, less mono-lexical terms, it means 'Bison from Buffalo bullied by other bison from Buffalo bully, in turn, another lot of bison from buffalo'. It is, in my eyes, quite a wonderful little sentence.
On telling MOM about this sentence (MOM standing here for 'Mother-of-Mine': an acronym that I can only assume Americans and a growing number of other English-speakers have adopted -and made lower case, so as not to appear obtrusive when written- lovingly as a mode of reference for their female parent), an interesting philosophical-linguistic debate (hark!) was thus sparked, as we wondered what a word actually, fundamentally is (I had queried Buffalo and buffalo (and indeed, buffalo) being the 'same word', what with the former being a proper noun. Apparently, according to the OED and others, it is merely spelling and pronunciation that defines 'a word', and not a deeper meaning).
But this is not really the point of what is to come. The point is that a language that can churn out eight buffalo, and nothing else, into a grammatically correct, if a little clumsy, sentence is one of wonder and beauty, and it is thus a crying, terrible shame that this language is being marred and tarred the way it is.
Look around you. Greengrocer's peddle their fruit and their vegetables and their extraneous unnecessary punctuation, clearly stolen from the large range of Mens Wear that is freely available. Internet adverts ask if 'Is it possible that you're blood pressure be too high?', and the existential crisis of identity that follows (could I be blood pressure too high?) does nothing to help the suspected ailment. I could go on.
As should be clear, the point that I am making is not an original one, but it is a desperately important one. Our language does matter, and so does the way we use it. But this is where I become torn. On the one hand, being the bleeding heart, wet, good-for-nuffink liberal that I am, I feel somewhat uneasy dictating how people should speak and write. But on the other hand, I am also linguistically conservative (maybe that's being a tad too kind. I'm, frankly, a linguistic snob) and it pains me to see and to hear our tongue being mangled in increasingly unpleasant ways.
Take the 'splice comma', for example; it remains, for me, one of the ugliest pieces of punctuation found. It joins two stand-alone clauses (where there is no conjunction), such as in "It was raining, I got very wet." or "Kumquats are my favourite thing ever, I could eat them all day.", where a semi-colon is called for. I love the semi-colon: I simply adore it. Yet is being replaced by the comma which, frankly, has enough uses already.
People, my brother among them, say that this is just a sign that the language is changing. But why? Why should it change? Granted, there are certain impracticalities stemming from Latin, such as never splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition (interestingly, Churchill's favourite 'up with which I will not put' is often misinterpreted; it was a response to overly clunky Civil Service documents which avoided prepositions as the ultimate word like the plague. Next to one particularly unsavoury sentence, he wrote that 'this is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put'; he was satirising grammatical fastidiousness, not upholding it) that can probably be sent to pastures new (that said, I will still and avoid doing so most of the time; however, there are occasions when what must be done must be done).
So the tricksier, more anal stuff I can probably understand needs some level of reform. However, what is so tricky about using an apostrophe correctly? Or making sure questions end in a question mark? Or even making sure that sentences start with a capital letter and end with anything at all? It reeks of ignorance and laziness, and these are no things that the language should bend down to and change for their sake alone. You wouldn't apply this logic -this populism born of ignorance, this "everybody's doing it, it's time it should change" (note the splice comma. Note it and hiss) attitude- anywhere else, would you?
"Well M'Lud, I did kill him, yes, but I kind of didn't know why what I had done was wrong, and I kind of didn't bother about it, and anyway, M'Lud: the Law is an ever-changing thing and should reflect the common usage!"
What gets me, at times, is the attitude of other people when you try to stick up for poor old grammar. Highlight the finesse of the subjunctive case, for instance, and you will be branded a 'Grammar Nazi'. That sticking to linguistic rules is enough to get you compared to someone who orchestrated the brutal murder of millions of innocents is bad enough; that this only seems to apply to grammar is another thing entirely. Tell a friend they might want to cut the grass, and they don't turn around to call you a 'Lawn Nazi'. Point out a problem in someone's pipes, and you're not labelled a 'Plumbing Nazi'. No. There's a stigma that's been attached to the decent upholding and championing of our beautiful, glorious, wacky old language and that, my friends, is everything that's wrong with society today.
Well, that and the fact that tax evasion, when done under a dog's name, is fine and dandy... but that's another matter entirely.
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