The Word "Grey"

I love English. I love it for its flexibility, its utter fluidity, its idiosyncracies, its formalized improprieties, its arcane grammar, its thoughtless appropriations … it's truly a melting pot, so much so that we still call it English even though the language spoken in England itself is subtly, seriously different. But like any other agreed-upon way of doing something, its strength is in its rules, and the same way that a nation of sports fans knows instinctively, intuitively, instantaneously when a player has broken a rule — one foot was in-bounds but the other wasn't; that stutter-step was traveling; the ping-pong ball bounced twice — so have we become acclimated to these rules and come to understand them reflexively. And, sure, many of us are more closely acquainted with a sport's fine points than a language's, but the sports fans will be the first to tell you that strict adherence to the rules is the only thing that makes the whole affair worthwhile. Let the rules slide and what have you accomplished?

Given, it's somewhat different with language. Among linguistic rules, particularly for English, there are errors but also just warnings, strictures but also recommendations, denotations but also connotations. Undoubtedly, the heart of style is moving away from the simple subject/predicate constructions prescribed for us in elementary school; in learning, when we're young, that there's more than one right word for something; and then learning, when we're older, that there is in fact only one right word, but it's a good thing that we used to think otherwise because it built our vocabulary.

But all those variations from the norm still abide by the rules. Only the very upper echelon of wordsmiths, having truly realized that rules were meant to be broken, can succeed by setting them aside. e.e. cummings' abandonment of punctuation and capitalization was precise; the formal issues he raised were often part of the point. Less successful is Prince (2 whom nothing compares, U know); he doesn't abuse the language nearly as elegantly, although he does it in an archetypally curious attempt at liberation.

But for a majority of us so overwhelmingly large we may as well call it "all of us," we can only hope to best express ourselves by playing within the rules. Grammar. Punctuation. Capitalization. Spelling.

This particular microcosm of misguided erudition is rampant in American letters, by which I do not necessarily mean the big guns but, instead, us. I'm sure that a synesthete would have marvellous things to say on the difference between gray and grey, but those of us with more simply aligned senses can give it a go as well.

To look at them, gray seems very gray, as in concrete dust, where as grey seems much warmer, as in fog, and sleeker, as in greyhound. Gray comes stumbling out of the pen, as if it's going to wind up being gravel or gravitas or the governor of California … but, most likely, not grace. Grey, on the other hand, is poised to drop its y and become, say, great.

High-mindedness is important to the argument; the variant spelling shows that its user is schooled in the finer things. But that's just wankery. In my seventh grade Earth Sciences class, I was paired off with another student to tackle an assortment of mineral chunks — we were to catalog each rock's characteristics and then compare these to some master spreadsheet to determine which elemental rock ours were most like. For the color of one of the rocks, I wrote down "grey." My partner, who was not much of a scholar, said, "That's not how you spell it." I put on all of my 12-year-old airs and said, "You can spell it both ways."

Horse puckey. It's an easily countered argument: You aggravate a reader's innate scepticism and hinder language's capacity to normalise if you disregard the acknowledged rules of engagement and just choose your favourite spelling of certain colours. I tell you, this way madness lies.

There is a great, albeit mildly fascist, strength in internal consistency. This may, in fact, be the wrong time to pose this argument for that very reason; there's a lot of mild fascism rampant today, a lot of questionable stress being placed on a national internal consistency, and I don't want to add to that. Besides, if we learned nothing else from "The West Wing"'s Very Special National Tragedy Episode, it's that there's nothing our foes hate more than our ability to "have two thoughts" — i.e. embrace pluralism. Maybe what I'm supposed to say is that if we can't let people spell it both gray and grey, then the terrorists have already won.

But I don't think so. The message cuts the other way: We need to vigorously defend our rulebook, the Constitution, now more than ever because we need those rules to give us our freedoms, and it's by the abridgement of the latter due to the scrambling of the former that the terrorists may actually win. Our language — and by this point I'm badly overreaching — is the same way: All of its myriad powers come from the fact that we all understand it, which is to say that we're all cognizant of its rules, even and especially things as simple as spelling. That's why there's power in breaking those rules — by turning America into Amerikkka, for instance. And we lose that power by breaking them meaninglessly. In time, the highest contrast will seem very gray.

This is not a screed against people who don't preternatually spell well, or against dialects — the language of hip-hop may often be grammatically unsound, but it has evolved in such a way that it's unquestionably more affecting and, frankly, proper for DMX to sing "Who We Be" than the alternative — or against "bad speech" like ain't or y'all — those improprieties are given a pass because they're anthropologically utile, culturally charged. But to intentionally misspell, not out of politics or poetry but a backward grab for elegance, is to be off by a few inches in your dictionary. It's not sophistication; it's sophistry.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)