If Strunk & White had started a religion, maybe I could be religious

In my quiet moments lately I've been thinking a lot about grammar and ethics. I thought I'd had a great revelation in seeing a connection between the two (as grammar being but the ethics of speech, and ethics but the grammar of action), but it turns out the idea is at least as old as the Modistae, a bunch of medieval grammarians (speculative grammarians!). There's much more on the history of the idea at the always instructive Language Log, for the interested.

The next phase of my revelation was preceded by an extended interlude of my usual rage against the modern world and the idiots in it who can't speak or think or behave in a principled manner at all. These interludes happen to me fairly regularly, and I don't expect much from them but elevated blood pressure and afterward the sinking feeling that I am each day following the petrified footprints of my father as they lead towards the dark side. (I wouldn't so much mind all this fury if it led to something constructive - see for instance David Foster Wallace's excellent and hilarious article [ostensibly a book review] about the difficulties of being a grammar nerd.) Jeepers, it's not as if I'm unaware that language changes and what-not, and I even know that this is neither a good nor bad thing but just a thing that is.

But this time after some minutes of silent fuming I had the thought that in much the same way that descriptive and prescriptive ideas of grammar exist, descriptive and prescriptive ethics should also exist. By this I mean that we can either set out to tell people how they ought to speak or act (prescriptive) or try to describe how people actually do speak or act. And Lo! other people had already thought of this, too! See normative ethics and descriptive ethics. See also Herodotus (Histories, 3.38) for good measure.

Next I thought, well, we know that with grammar for instance not only is adherence to old-fashioned rules less common than it once might have been, but also the importance of correctness has decreased. I think this has to do with the pervasiveness of a descriptive approach to grammar (and with the general decline in belief in appeals to authorities [at least authorities that present themselves as authorities, rather than those that present themselves as facts of nature]. Combined with the curious conjunction of rising narcissism and the falling value of individual selves, this leads us to treat our own language as a phenomenon as worthy of description as any other and no more able to be constrained by prescriptions. In short, there is no longer anything to be ashamed of in poor speech. Oh, and this goes for ethics too.

So this is my (rather poorly expressed) idea. As far as I can tell, it did not occur to any classical, medieval or more recent authors, which means that I have probably strayed from truth (or not looked hard enough).

Anyway it turns out that the important connection between grammar and ethics is this: I don't know how to act because I don't know how to speak; I don't know what to say because I don't know what to do.

Designed to vex the mortal frame

There are of course also free men, and not a few of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line between man's and woman's dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.

Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter 7: Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture

I am saddened to admit that it has been some time since I have seen a gentleman as well dressed as a footman. But then it has also been some time since it was common to write as elegantly as Veblen does - not in a showy or especially talented way, but rather as you or I might with a decent education and a justified assumption that our readers expected our sentences not only to be sturdy enough to support our arguments but also to serve as ornaments. But whatevs; there's no point trying to emulate the leisure class circa 1899. As Swinburne said around the same time (well, probably not that close in time) in an essay on Shakespeare:

Each century or so, if we accept the convenient and casual division of manners and of styles by the rough and ready reckoning of successive dates, has its own natural conventions of life and art, from which none can entirely escape but by servile affectation of an obsolete manner or fatuous affectation of an unnatural style.

And since there can be few things worse than servility, fatuousness and affectation I'm going to have to refrain from using the expression "designed to vex the mortal frame" in conversation, but have been unable to refrain from typing it no less than three times in this post.