Speaking pidgin helped enhance skills, linguist says

By Wanda A. Adams
Assistant Features Editor

Constance Hale is a language maven of the PC age — a former copy chief at Wired magazine and author of "Wired Style," the irreverent answer to the Associated Press Stylebook, and "Sin and Syntax," about the state of English in the e-mail era.

Headed home for a series of talks and workshops through Saturday, Hale says growing up bilingual in Hawai'i drove her early interest in language. In sixth grade, she lost the storytelling competition at Waialua Elementary to a guy who re-told the story of "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" in pidgin. Though miffed, she had to acknowledge the rightness: "It was funny, it was irreverent, it was above all appropriate, and that small thing made a huge impression on me."

Years later, another story in pidgin marked a turning point. Chatting with an influential professor of poetry who was lamenting American students' lack of appreciation of the music in poetry, she used "Little Lei Puahi and the Wild Pua'a," a '50s-era pidgin retelling of the fable of the three little pigs, to show how Hawai'i's kind of Creole had honed her ear.

"I remember thinking, 'Here I am, literally in the ivory tower — the fifth-floor office of a Gothic building at Princeton, talking to one of the gods of English literature.' And it was like a kind of 'Click!' I saw that the academy can meet the street ... From then on, I've been fascinated by the relationship between the academy and the street."

Hale studied English literature and languages at Princeton and earned a master's degree in journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, and worked as a copy editor before becoming copy chief at Wired.

Now freelancing and working on a book, Hale answered these questions by phone from her Oakland, Calif., home:

Q. So, you wen talk pidgin small-kid time?

A. She hates it when I say this, but my mother was a grammarian; very strict with us about speaking proper English — to the point that when someone asked for me on the phone, I had to say, 'This is she.' ... And then we would go to school and everyone — but everyone — spoke pidgin, including the teachers. I sometimes jokingly call it a reverse-immigrant experience — we spoke pidgin at school and standard English at home. ... What's so interesting to me about pidgin English, now that I study the language, is that it's rhythmic, it's funny, it's to the point, it's colorful and vivid, it uses metaphor. ...

"What makes my blood boil is when people think you can't have both, that pidgin is wrong and standard English right. Even the opposite idea is stupid because we can all be bilingual, or trilingual for that matter. We have the capacity to speak many languages."

Q. How did you become arbiter of the written word?

A. By accident. I do really attribute it to my childhood in Waialua, followed by middle and high school at Punahou. The gift I got from Punahou was that every French teacher I had was a native French speaker. Punahou was very advanced at the time in teaching by an oral method. By the time I graduated, it was clear that I had an affinity for languages, just naturally and temperamentally.

Journalism was another influence. Copy editors are by nature conservative; they're the conservators of the language. Their tendency is to look back, to cite the etymology of the world. At Wired, we were encouraged to look forward, and my willingness to upset the apple cart a little bit kind of took to that idea. We began to evolve a philosophy of language that was different, centered on how it was being used in technology. Then we started getting these calls from other media, who were asking things like, 'Do you capitalize the 'e' in e-mail?" ... After we'd been at it for a while, I suggested that we write all this down. 'Wired Style' was our in-house stylebook writ large, as it were.

Q. So do you believe, as many do, that e-mail and geekspeak are ruining the language and threatening civilization as we know it?

A. Not at all. I think e-mail is wonderful for writing because most people learned how to write in English class, writing compositions in an academic context for an audience of one — Miss Thistlebottom with the red pen. Because of this, we all developed a lot of anxiety about writing. We were writing to fill five pages and get an A. We used dictionary words and padded the sentences, and we didn't learn to write as we talk. ... Then you have e-mail, a medium where gravity is really important. No one will read to the end of the e-mail if it's too long; it's a sea of gray, so you need to get to the point, redraft, revamp, revise to make it shorter. ...

"The other thing that's great about e-mail is the subject header, the haiku of the subject header (in which) people play with metaphor and words. ...

"And finally, there's the whole voice issue. Everyone who studies writing as a craft struggles with finding your own voice. The gift of e-mail is that most of us write e-mail in our natural voice. There's no better antidote to pompous academic writing.

Q. What's your mission here in Hawai'i?

A. The same as always: to communicate the tremendous excitement that I feel about language and the curiosity I have. It's incredible how supple and variable it is, how much it's changed over time, and I want to help people feel freer to play in the sandbox that is English.

Correction: An incorrect date for Constance Hale's free public talk, "Sin and Syntax," was given in a previous version of this story.