June 8, 2012

Are the English better at English?

Greg Cochran brings up a topic that seems like it has disappeared over the last generation: reading speed. In the old days, the immense velocity at which Democratic Presidents like JFK and Jimmy Carter could read was part of political lore. Skeptics like Woody Allen joked that he had speed-read War and Peace: "It was about Russia." 

Has reading faster simply failed? Or has America just lost interest?

Cochran also asks whether different languages are read faster and slower: e.g., Mandarin versus Spanish? When I was a kid there was still some remnant of interest in the early 20th Century movement to reform the English language to make it more efficient. A century ago, for example, George Bernard Shaw, the dominant cultural intellectual of the time, campaigned hard for radical spelling reform. (Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady reflects some of GBS's numerous concerns about the English language and social equality.) The first time I ever won a prize in a Speech tournament was around 1970 for an original oratory making fun of the complexities of English grammar. Is anybody still amused by that kind of thing?

In a comment, Education Realist brings up an interesting point: based on SAT and GRE scores, 21st Century, white Americans appear to be better at Math than at Verbal relative to mid-20th Century white Americans. When the SAT was started before WWII, it was normalized based on Eastern Seaboard preppies with 500 as average for both the Verbal and the Math tests. As it expanded to a broader market of students, average Math SAT scores dropped dropped only slightly, but Verbal scores fell substantially. In 1995, the SAT was renormed to make 500 the means again, but the same process is visible again, with Math scores now notably higher than Verbal scores. (The Asian impact obviously affects this gap, but this trend is visible just among whites.)

The Graduate Record Exam has never been renormed, and today white men average 593 on the quantitative part and 508 on the verbal part of the GRE. Education Realist, who is a teacher and test tutor, then raises a number of interesting points:
Why do we appear to have fewer high verbal achievers than math achievers? I think Murray and Herrnstein were correct when they wrote that “a politically compromised curriculum is less likely to sharpen the verbal skills of students than one that hews to standards of intellectual rigor and quality” annd that “when parents demanded higher standards, their schools introduced higher standards in the math curriculum that really were higher, and higher standards in the humanities and social sciences that really were not”. (Bell Curve, page 432-433) Without question, we have lost a couple generations of cognitively able students who weren’t given the opportunity to really achieve to their fullest capability, and we stand to lose a few more. 
But I also wonder if verbal intelligence is less understood and consequently less valued. If one is “good at math”, there’s a logical progression of courses to take, problems to solve (or spend a lifetime trying to), and increasingly difficult subjects to tackle–and plenty of careers that want them. But if one has a high verbal intelligence without good spatial aptitude (which seems to be necessary for higher math) it is often described as “good at reading”, a woefully inaccurate characterization of high verbal intelligence—and then what? Apart from law, there aren’t nearly as many clearly defined career paths with a wide range of opportunities for all temperaments and interests. Most of the ones I can think of involve luck and driving ambition just to get started (journalism, tenured academia, political consultant). 
For a good twenty years or so, people with high verbal skills who were indifferent at high-level math went into technology. It’s hard to remember now in the age of Google and after the heyday of corporate computing, but IBM and mainframe shops were filled with bright people who had degrees in history and English and humanities who just “didn’t like math” but were excellent programmers. I routinely worked in shops where all the expert techies making six figures came from non-STEM majors. But that time appears to be over. 
Of course, doing anything about this lack of clearly defined career paths for smart folks with less spatial aptitude would involve acknowledging it’s a problem, and I might be the only one who thinks it’s a problem.

As Education Realist points out, we have lots of prestigious national science and math fairs for high school students (which are now dominated by Asians), but little of the same fame for the reading and writing set. Everybody who is anybody in America seems far more obsessed with cultivating Math and Science than with raising our verbal ability. Yet, a native command of English would appear to be a prime asset of Americans in a future globalized (and, thus, English-speaking) economy.

Presumably, it's easier to raise math test scores in school than reading test scores, since reading scores depend heavily on how much reading the students do out of school. Still, nobody seems all that interested in trying to figure out how to improve our children's advantages in English. It's almost like we think it's unfair to the rest of the world that we speak English, so we should have our children bash their heads in to compete with Asians on the culturally level playing field of math. That strikes me as a noble but stupid response.

But I want to go in a different direction with this topic and ask if there is any objective test evidence to support this idea I've had ever since I took American Literature in high school: historically, Americans are not as good with words on average as the British. Somehow, the Brits seem to inculcate better command of English than we Americans do. Perhaps that's not true up and down the social scale, but it would seem to me that, traditionally, Oxbridge graduates, say, had better vocabularies and better prose styles than Ivy League grads.

This notion first dawned on me in the 1980s when I noticed a London-based firm called WPP, run by a former Saatchi & Saatchi executive named Martin Sorrell, started buying up advertising agencies and other marketing services firms. While Britain seemed economically down and out back then, it struck me that they still were better at English than we were, and that had to be worth something in an increasingly English-speaking world.. Today, WPP employs 158,000 white collar workers around the world and even owns a large fraction of all the lobbying firms in Washington D.C., Democrat and Republican.

Throughout the 18th and 19th Century, American writing just wasn't very good compared to what the Brits were doing at the same time. Compare, say, The Federalist Papers or the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Life of Johnson, or even The Wealth of Nations. Compare American stinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson to his British contemporaries. Granted, we had people who were geniuses in their own way, like Poe and Lincoln and Twain, but they didn't come from a culture that was as good with words as the Brits. 

Even in the 20th Century, when Americans were catching up, the home team still seemed awkward compared to the visitors. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a fine book, but compared to the seemingly effortless clarity and fluency of Evelyn Waugh's early novels of just a few years later, its prose seems provincial and striving. 

I recently re-read Great Contemporaries, a collection of articles for Sunday newspapers that Winston Churchill wrote (or, to be precise, dictated) in the 1930s about celebrities he’d known. Allow me to express in my own crude, tongue-tied American way my reaction to the command of the English language exhibited in Churchill's commercial journalism: Holy cow! For mastery of English, for vast and precise vocabulary, I can’t imagine any major American politician of the last century coming close. Teddy Roosevelt had comparable mental energy, but few read his books for fun these days. Henry Kissinger is a very smart man who writes well in his second language, but he is more functional in style. 

Churchill was recognized as exceptional in his own day, but, still, other British politicians were pretty handy with words, too. In Britain, Churchill was the champ but compared to American politicians, he's in a league of his own. (By the way, I have a vague hunch that, from the perspective of the 21st Century, the 1930s was the peak era for English prose: it's not so far in the past that it's difficult to decipher, but it's far enough away that its superiority is noticeable.)

Another anecdote about the superiority of the English: A number of years ago, I dropped in on John Derbyshire and family in Long Island. We went to a Blockbuster to pick out a movie for everybody to watch that evening, so I suggested the documentary about the Scripps-Howard national spelling bee, Spellbound, which had been a big hit in my household. 

Now, I'd always figured that while John is obviously my superior in math and computer programming, we're fairly equal in verbal skills. But, when I watched Spellbound for the second time (with the closed captions off), I discovered that John could not only outspell me on words I'd already seen the first time I watched the movie, but he also knew the definitions of almost all the absurd words in the competition. 

I attribute this to his having the unfair advantage of being born English.

220 comments:

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walter condley said...

But an English gentleman would have felt stupid as a farmer in the Midwest or Wild West.

Or, as a I once heard a brotha state it, "where I come from we only talk for a little while - then we start to hit."

Anonymous said...

"Steve doesn't mention Melville"

And another gay, Walt Whitman. And Dickinson.

Anonymous said...

And another gay: Henry James.

Perspective said...

Simon in London said:
"English person", please. My Ulster accent has plenty of rrr's! :)

Mind you the Cornish 'pirate' accent is also known for its ARRR!!"

I've noticed from watching episodes of the British soap Coronation Street, that many don't pronounce their 'Ts'at the end of certain words/phrases. The expression, 'you what', sound like, at least to my Canadian ear, as you whaa. 'Isn't' is often pronounced as 'innit'. Is it a regional dialect (ie Manchester)? Or is this common pronounciation across England?

Anonymous said...

Sailer: "The British have won a huge number of hard science Nobel prizes, and their engineering creativity seems pretty good, as well. My impression is that their weaknesses have been in things like getting their mass produced manufactured goods to be durable, the crucial but kind of obscure challenges that the Germans and Japanese worked out well, but, say, the Italians didn't."

A great example of this is Dyson vs Miele. German Miele's focus and engineers are engineers after my own heart - they think of everything in order to design the best possible product. They take into account why you would be buying it and what you really want it to be like (i.e. reliable) after owning it for 10 years. And they manufacture it to do just that. Over the 10-30 year lifespan of the product, it will end up being both better and cheaper than buying the lower priced alternative.

On the other hand, British Dyson is the PT Barnum of household appliance manufacturers. Their ads scream hucksterism: "5 times as fast as a formula 1 engine!" when referring to a vacuum cleaner motor/hand drier motor, as if that has any relevance outside of F1. About a year ago, I noticed that the local airport had changed all their hand driers to the Dyson ones. 6 months later, they are all marked "out of service". But hey, they sure had funky color schemes!

This is yet another example of the success of the high verbal/low math huckster. The reality is that the market is composed largely of people without either the math or the verbal IQ to tell the difference between quality and crap, or a sound argument and a fraudulent one. But what they can tell: price, and whether the salesman (of the good, service or argument) is nice and tells them what they want to hear.

To a large extent, the online review sites had launched a major offensive for truth and honesty - good engineering was being rewarded with great ratings. With the advent of astroturfing, the hucksters have mounted a counteroffensive. Now you have to virtually read every review to be guaranteed that what you are getting is quality.

However, the strategy of providing what the consumer actually needs as opposed to what will get him to shell out cash for once only - it's still effective because consumers buy multiple things over their lifetimes. Car owners know that if you want reliability at a fair price: buy Japanese. And because this is what car owners actually need, once they go Japanese they keep buying Japanese. This has been the case since the 1980s at least.

Simon in London said...

Matt:
"I think also the corruption of the respectable parts of the academy may be more of a phenomenon in the US than in the UK (where the contagion is more quarantined to less respectable parts and the "studies" subjects)."

My impression is that individual British academics are at least as left-wing on average as their American equivalents. BUT British academics seem almost embarrassed to force cultural Marxism on their students, where the Americans do so proudly and with great vigour. The idea of forcing every new student enrolling to read some deconstructionist novel just would not be possible here, I think.

I remember once seeing a very senior academic putting up flyers for "Black History Month", not a big thing here. She seemed noticeably uncomfortable, almost embarrassed.

BTW my students seem very conservative, and I often find myself on the 'left' of arguments with them. They almost all seem to despise Political Correctness,for instance.

Simon in London said...

Perspective:
"The expression, 'you what', sound like, at least to my Canadian ear, as you whaa. 'Isn't' is often pronounced as 'innit'. Is it a regional dialect (ie Manchester)? Or is this common pronounciation across England?"

Those can be found in various lower-class accents across England. 'Innit' would be Estuary English (popularised Cockney), I think.

Simon in London said...

Anon:
"About a year ago, I noticed that the local airport had changed all their hand driers to the Dyson ones. 6 months later, they are all marked "out of service"."

OTOH, Dyson hand driers, when working, are the only hot-air dryers I have ever encountered that actually _dry my hands_.

JI said...

Well, Steve, I think this is a nice little essay you've written. For an American, of course.

Anonymous said...

I think there's probably two parts to it. One is that elite British culture has been more verbal than elite American culture, at least since the late 19th century -- debate at university, debate in Parliament, etc. The other is that there were generations of British children who were made to memorize a lot of excellent poetry and prose when they were in school. If we want our children to be good at playing with language, I don't think there's anything better than rote memorization of reams of great poetry and prose. But it really does have to be great poetry and prose -- the kind that will teach a sense both of what phrases will stick in the mind and the rhythms of the English language. I.e. most modern poetry, which tends to fall short on both these points, would not work.

Re: Anonymous:

Brits wrote as if sitting upright to keep good posture OR as if relaxing in lounge in some colonial outpost drinking martini.

Americans write as if conversing in a tavern or among close friends
.

Except these are totally untrue. British authors write in a whole range of styles, but novelistically, they've had casual, chatty, intimate narrators a lot longer than we have -- think about Saki or Wodehouse or Jerome K. Jerome. Or, indeed, the Brontes ("Reader, I married him.") American authors have tended to be a lot more staid, a lot more stiff, a lot more boring. I mean, just compare Henry James vs. Dickens. Not that I particularly enjoy Dickens, mind, but he's at least more entertaining than Henry James.

Twain and Poe are remarkable among American authors of the 19th century precisely because they managed to avoid the defects which characterised so much American fiction until the mid-20th century: a self-serious tone and the mistaken belief that a complicated sentence structure was the mark of a sophisticated writer. And it's not just the 19th century Americans, mind -- Tarkington and Dreiser are just as bad.

Re: Jeff Burton:

BTW, this is another great opportunity for all the four sigma isteve readers to post their SAT scores. Can't wait to read all of them.

1600. That was at the age of 15, mind. I don't think I'm 4 sigma, though. 2 sigma maybe. (haha)

Anonymous said...

Americans are much more succinct in their writing. I suspect our language differences reflect the difference in the history of the two countries over the last couple of hundred years. Americans were men and women of action, forever pushing west, DOING rather than practicing talking and writing. The British stopped DOING a long time ago. Then, the public schools which developed to serve this spirited, man of action called an American, emphasized substance over style, clarity and conciseness over loquaciousness. We had few schools that mimicked the academies serving the British elite.

Anonymous said...

Simon: They do (mostly) dry your hands, though not without buffeting both your hands where thousands of other hands have been buffeted before.

Kylie said...

"Steve doesn't mention Melville, who was an absolutely extraordinary writer."

That was the omission I noticed, too.

"An eccentric and difficult one, knotty but profound, very dense long poetic sentences -- reminiscent of Shakespeare at times."

Mercy, yes.

"I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun - slow dived from noon, - goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron - that I know - not gold. 'Tis split, too - that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain- battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night - good night!"


Maybe not Shakespearean in tone but towering nonetheless. I'll never forget reading Moby Dick as a junior in high school. I truly felt I was on a voyage of discovery. I can recall that feeling in all its wonder and freshness whenever I think of the novel.

Kylie said...

"American authors have tended to be a lot more staid, a lot more stiff, a lot more boring. I mean, just compare Henry James vs. Dickens. Not that I particularly enjoy Dickens, mind, but he's at least more entertaining than Henry James."

I couldn't disagree more.

I always laugh when I recall James's description of a voluptuous woman in a very a décolleté dress as " it might have taken the last November gale to account for the completeness with which, in some quarters, she had shed her leaves." He goes on to have his caddish character remark on her dress, "My dear child, YOU seem to have lost something,
though I'll say for you that one doesn't miss it."

His work is full of similar humor, subtle and circuitous maybe but very pointed.

And while Dickens is justly famous for the colorful names he gives his characters, so far as I know, none even comes close to James's "Fanny Assingham" from The Golden Bowl.

Ex Submarine Officer said...

OTOH, Dyson hand driers, when working, are the only hot-air dryers I have ever encountered that actually _dry my hands_.

That is a lot like my old MG, it was the most wonderfully fun car to drive when it was actually up and running.

Rohan Swee said...

jody: "i deliberately type everything in lower case, without capitalizing. this is faster to write and faster to read."

Unlikely, at least for the latter. The point of conventions is that they're conventional. That is, the brain (well, my brain, anyway) deals automatically with the symbols and I pay conscious attention to the content only. Get cute with the unconventional typography, and I'm consciously distracted from the content. AKA "annoyed". Put another way, I only read this comment of yours because it was quoted by conventional typists. So yeah, I guess I did save time there, by not having read your full comment at all.

Mr. Anon said...

"CJ said...

This was at the time then-Opposition Leader Tony Blair was saying that if elected a Labour government would be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime."

Or, as some people characterized Labour's actual policies once they were in office: "Tough on crime and tough on the victims of crime".

Anonymous said...

"Simon: They do (mostly) dry your hands, though not without buffeting both your hands where thousands of other hands have been buffeted before."

And I thought I was the only one who noticed. I tried several times to keep my hands from being blown into the surface of the air outlets, but i couldn't. Paper towels and the old fashioned blowers are more sanitary. At least the you can use your elbow to push the button on a conventional blower, and come to think of it, whatever happened to the really old fashioned hands-free blowers which had a light beam, they were around 40 years ago and there hasn't been an improvement.

Balfegor said...

Re: Kylie:

His work is full of similar humor, subtle and circuitous maybe but very pointed.

I find it stilted and laboured myself, but de gustibus etc etc. That said, it does pretty well disprove all of these people claiming that Americans have a direct, unadorned, plainspoken literary style. That is about the farthest thing possible from the truth.

Anonymous said...

http://fora.tv/2007/09/25/Film_Historian_David_Thomson_on_Hollywood

Brits better writers.

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