From @nprnews, via Twitter: “Happy Eliza Doolittle Day!”
Indeed! Now, quick: who is Eliza Doolittle? If you are my friend KG, you probably know, because I once forced you to sit through a full-length, AMC-restored My Fair Lady, in the theater. And surely there were at least a few minutes when you weren’t sleeping. At any rate, Eliza Doolittle is, of course, the heroine of the musical, played beautifully but not sung a bit by the lovely Audrey Hepburn. In the beginning, she is a subsistence-level flower vendor, selling violet poseys in a street market in London, where she is noticed by a professor of linguistics for her particularly atrocious pronunciations (read, accent) and slang. The rest is a rags-to-riches type story: Eliza, under the tutelage/constant haranguing of Professor Higgins, loses her street-Cockney accent and dependence upon slang usages. And thus is she enabled to be introduced to London’s high society and ultimately (finally, after almost three hours of song-and-dance extravaganza) become worthy of Henry Higgins’s admiration and affection. That Higgins’s romantic attention comes across as grudgingly given and annoyingly dependent upon Eliza’s domestic usefulness does little to detract from the didactic point of the story–that those who speak better are, well, better. You can dress ‘em up and take ‘em out.
As a teacher and lover of language, I deeply wish that all of my students would embrace the importance of correct grammar, etc. Research shows that those individuals who are more successful in business, public service, and research tend to have large vocabularies and high rhetorical skill. Further, in my private life, I prefer to have conversations with people who speak clearly and use words effectively so that I am able to understand as closely as possible the meaning of what they are saying. Like colors on a paint palette, more words means more nuance, a fuller picture with more possibilities. They are also more fun to observe. People who can speak well are more likely to be witty. I like this.
But none of this means that I think it is always imperative to use standard English, or that those who do not always use perfect grammar are somehow unworthy of respect or even affection. Slang can be fun, too. And profanity. What a bore my social circle would be without my more “colorful” friends! The trick is to have all this in your arsenal, along with the conventional language, and to use each in its appropriate environment.
So on this May 20th–Eliza Doolittle Day, to my fellow lit-nerds–I take the moment to appreciate both Eliza, the refined and eloquent beauty, and ‘Lizer, the poor but spirited dreamer. After all, they are both the same girl.
May 20. tab
