From @nprnews, via Twitter:\u00a0 \u201cHappy Eliza Doolittle Day!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Indeed!\u00a0 Now, quick: who is Eliza Doolittle?\u00a0 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<\/em>, in the theater.\u00a0 And surely there were at least a few minutes when you weren\u2019t sleeping.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The rest is a rags-to-riches type story:\u00a0 Eliza, under the tutelage\/constant haranguing of Professor Higgins, loses her street-Cockney accent and\u00a0dependence\u00a0upon slang usages.\u00a0 And thus is she\u00a0enabled to be introduced to London\u2019s high society and\u00a0ultimately (finally, after almost three hours of song-and-dance extravaganza) become worthy of Henry Higgins\u2019s admiration and affection.\u00a0 That Higgins\u2019s romantic attention comes across as grudgingly given and annoyingly dependent upon Eliza\u2019s domestic usefulness does little to detract from the didactic point of the story\u2013that those who speak better are, well, better. You can dress \u2018em up and take \u2018em out.\u00a0<\/p>\n As a\u00a0teacher and lover of language, I deeply wish that all of my students would embrace the importance of correct grammar, etc.\u00a0 Research shows that\u00a0those individuals who are more successful in\u00a0business, public service, and research\u00a0tend to have\u00a0large vocabularies and high rhetorical skill.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Like colors on a paint palette, more words means more nuance, a fuller picture with more possibilities.\u00a0 They are also more fun to\u00a0observe. \u00a0People who can speak well are more likely to be witty.\u00a0 I like this.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Slang can be fun, too. And profanity.\u00a0 What a bore my social circle would be without my\u00a0 more \u201ccolorful\u201d friends!\u00a0 The trick is to have all this in your arsenal, along with the conventional language, and to use each in its appropriate environment.<\/p>\n So on this May 20th\u2013Eliza Doolittle Day, to my fellow lit-nerds\u2013I take the moment to appreciate both Eliza, the refined and eloquent beauty, and \u2018Lizer, the poor but spirited dreamer.\u00a0 After all, they are both the same girl.<\/p>\n May 20.\u00a0 tab<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From @nprnews, via Twitter:\u00a0 \u201cHappy Eliza Doolittle Day!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed!\u00a0 Now, quick: who is Eliza Doolittle?\u00a0 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 … Continue reading