English teachers assure us that Standard (white) English is the social sorter that determines who will rise in the social hierarchy and who will not, and they continue to use this claim to justify imposing white English on African-American speakers and other ethnic groups. But we know they lie. We know from our experience that Standard English is an excuse for denying those of us who aren't white, or men, or both access to wealth and social mobility. We know from our experience that white men, regardless of how they speak, can rise above us, however pitiful their intellectual prowess, however meager their linguistic resources. Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, for example, both former presidents of the u.s., acquired tremendous political power and social prestige, yet both spoke "sub-standard" Southern dialects stereotypically associated with ignorance and bigotry. Shirley Chisholm, in contrast, an articulate presidential candidate known for her political integrity, was never considered a serious threat to male hegemony because of her sex and race. In spite of her command of Standard English, Chisholm didn't have the credentials to be president. She wasn't white, and she wasn't male.
If so many people know that Standard English is a lie, why haven't we risen up, exposed that linguistic hoax, and refused to go along with it? Because those responsible for our linguistic training have made us feel incompetent and powerless, forcing us to learn their false version of English and abandon our own social, ethnic, and regional dialects, using the promise of upward mobility to herd us into linguistic conformity.
The irony of my preceding discussion has probably not been lost to my readers. It is well-known that women excel in the study of prescriptive grammars. We learn those false rules much faster than our male peers, and we learn them well. In Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1921), the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen observed: "Woman is linguistically quicker than man: quicker to learn, quicker to hear, and quicker to answer." If we are more articulate than men, men are linguistically slower than women. Granting this, however, Jespersen didn't hesitate to turn men's inferiority into a plus for them!
A man is slower: he hesitates, he chews the cud to make sure of the taste of words, and thereby comes to discover similarities with and differences from other words, both in sound and sense, thus preparing himself for the appropriate use of the fittest noun or adjective. (249)
There's no way we can win the patriarchal grammar game. Women may be fast learners, for example, but men, because they are slow, remain linguistically dominant. The social construction of sex differences supports male dominance, and our well-attested linguistic superiority becomes yet another bit of evidence of our "inferiority."
Men have used our alleged linguistic conservatism against us—in other words, our ability to use the rules of languages they've developed—at least since Cicero, who, describing his mother-in-law's speech, said, "It is more natural for women to keep the old language uncorrupted" (Jespersen 242). Jespersen, less certain that women are more resistant to linguistic change than men, nevertheless claimed that
[w]omen move preferably in the central field of language, avoiding everything that is out of the way or bizarre, while men will often either coin new words or expressions or take up old-fashioned ones, if by that means they are enabled, or think they are enabled, to find a more adequate or precise expression for their thoughts. Woman as a rule follows the main road of language, where man is often inclined to turn aside into a narrow footpath or even to strike out a new path for himself. (248)
By this clever turn, the linguistic abilities of women are made a fault and we are stripped of our linguistic creativity by the conceptual dipsy-doodles of male logic. If women speak Standard English, we're unimaginative and stupid. If we don't, we're sluts as well. Male ineptitude becomes, as usual, a virtue.
Women are so good at prescriptive grammar that we enter college, major in English Education, and go out into the public schools to perpetuate "good English" as male grammarians have formulated it. For learning men's rules better than they, female English teachers have been caricatured by male linguists as the stereotype of linguistic evil, "Miss Fidditch." Miss Fidditch, according to male linguists, is responsible for stifling the linguistic "creativity" of generations of little boys. It's mean Miss Fidditch who coerces and browbeats them into learning the rules of prescriptive grammar, fails them for misspelling words, chastises them for saying "ain't," and makes their lives miserable because she polices their use of English. Not only are we not rich or powerful because of our control of Standard English, but men ridicule and make us culpable for our complicity in perpetuating and enforcing the rules that keep us "in our place"! In what Mary Daly calls a "patriarchal reversal," men make women responsible for the "rules" of prescriptive grammar, as though we made up the rules, viciously ridicule us for practicing and teaching the rules, and whine about how hard we make their lives!
Trying to follow the twists and turns of male thought is confusing. One fact, however, stands out from their contradictions: the reality of male power. That, and their determination to exercise it at any cost, including extermination of the species.
-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues
