We celebrate the birthday of E. B. White on July 11, the famous wordsmith and stylist (and the co-author of The Elements of Style. White became famous for his emphasis on the proper use of linguistic rules. You could almost call him the champion of the modern-day Queen's English.
Coincidentally, July 11 is also Bowdler's Day. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) took it upon himself to rewrite Shakespeare and many of the other classics on the grounds that the verbiage was either indecent or stylistically incorrect.
Whatever you think of classical "style," many of the "rules" are going out the windows these days.
The reason: the Web. The dynamic: The gradual fusion of speech and writing. The "written" word, as a result, is becoming more colloquial, just like talk. Old mandates (like never use a preposition at the end of a sentence, or avoid sentence fragments) are being forgotten. Classical presentation, built around sentences and paragraphs, is giving way to bullet-lists and text charts. Traditional forms of organization are being abandoned in favor of free-ranging hypertext, enabling "readers" to begin and end wherever they want.
Before we lament the passing of the old rules, it's probably worth remembering that the English language is dynamic. And always has been. Today's English vocabulary is three or four times as large as it was 500 years ago. And if you pick up a 500-year old document, theOlde English syntax will often be harder to read than the most obtuse piece of 21st century technical writing.
So what would E.B. White and Tom Bowdler think about our changing patterns of usage and style?
I don't know.
But if they were around today, I imagine they would try to organize the emerging standards of communication into a cohesive set of principles. These principles, in turn, would help practitioners of the art convey their ideas as powerfully and persuasively as possible.
It's only a matter of time before a 21st-century E.B. White emerges - and begins to codify the linguistic changes that are clearly upon us.
