[A reader mentioned a post in which I had talked about Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House. Couldn't find it on the blog; discovered I'd reverted it to a draft, for reasons I now can't remember. Am republishing since it seems a shame to suppress discussion of LIECH. Just a reminder that when I say, for instance, that I've just been reading LIECH, this was written back in 2012 or 2013.]
I mentioned to Michael Miller, in the historic meeting at the Tik Tok diner, that the production manager and copy-editor of The Last Samurai had been uncomfortable with having the numeral 15 appear in a work of fiction, because they thought numbers under 100 should be spelled out. My impression is that Kevin Guilefoile (who has been commenting on the Morning News Tournament of Books) thinks this is trivial, a matter of house style. Also that a writer who insists on having it one way does so from a conviction of absolute certainty. It's a bit trickier, hence possibly less boring, than it looks.
I've just been rereading Mark Girouard's Life in the English Country House. Girouard comments:
In the Middle Ages learning, and even literacy, were not considered necessary acquirements for a great lord. The qualities expected of him were bravery, dash, a certain magnificence and easiness of style, perhaps the practical sense of a man of the world, but not learning. Such men set the pace for lesser landowners, and their style tended to be imitated even by those who had made money as lawyers, merchants, or sheep farmers. The reactions of one particular gentleman, as reported in the early sixteenth century, were reasonably typical: 'I'd rather that my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, to hunt skilfully and elegantly, to carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics.'
Girouard mentions some exceptions - Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, younger son of Henry IV; Richard II; Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester. He then adds:
A much more important exception was provided by the spiritual lords -- both bishops and mitred abbots. Though often coming from relatively obscure origins they rivalled the lay lords in wealth, power and style of life, and much exceeded most of them in education -- for which reason they were employed by the Crown to fill the major administrative posts in the government. ...
The Reformation, by altering the balance of power, contributed to the spread of education among the upper classes. The power, wealth and numbers of great clerics decreased. Instead the Tudors created their own secular bureaucracy. It was mostly recruited from the lesser gentry, but it acquired wealth and possessions until it became a new hereditary governing class. These Tudor bureaucrats were strongly under the influence of Renaissance ideas. They took books and learning very seriously : and as a result of the spread of printing, there were increasing numbers of books for them to buy. ...
Girouard has less to be say about numeracy, but readers will no doubt remember that before Fibonacci's Liber Abaci (1202), which disseminated the Indo-Arabic system of numerals using positional notation and 0, calculations which we see as elementary (multiplication, division) were immensely complicated and requiring advanced study.
We're now at a stage, I think, where programming occupies a place similar to that of literacy in mediaeval England. It is necessary both for government and for business at all but the smallest level, but it is not a skill whose lack would be shameful in anyone with pretensions to social standing. On the contrary, it is associated with qualities of character that carry no prestige, are even socially stigmatised (we may think of the way Mark Zuckerberg is presented in The Social Network). One can get a lot of mileage out of deploring grammatical ignorance, especially in public figures; one can get a lot of mileage out of ranting over deprecated punctuation; one wouldn't get very far deploring ignorance of the difference between a number and a string, haphazard use of white space or of capitalisation in the naming of functions and variables.
I don't know whether such ignorance will ever be an embarrassment to a presidential candidate, but I do think the basics will be common knowledge within 10, at most 20 years. Meanwhile, how can I put it? Language evolves through changes in the usage of individuals; before a usage is widespread, it may turn up first in a specialised context, later be attested in isolated instances outside a technical field. The Last Samurai is more inclined to distinguish strings, numbers and floats than is currently common in a literary text. It's not fanciful of me to use 'number' now in this technical sense of its numerals: the argument I made to the production manager was that the characters were constantly using numbers for calculation, and that the numeric notation was not only what they would use for this purpose, but marked this as their characteristic practice. (In other words, I would now say, loosely, that the text marked characters whose minds made use of an equivalent of the kind of programming language that observes these distinctions.)
The point is, though, that this analogy isn't one that I made at the time - it wouldn't have occurred to me, since I did not know any programming languages myself. It was just something that felt right. The copy-editor asked me over the phone whether it was all right to spell out numbers, and I said I wasn't sure, I didn't have the text in front of me, I'd have to see what it looked like. She said I could always change it later; I said OK. I got her mark-up, and it just looked wrong.
I think if you're a writer much of the time you are going by your feeling for what's right, which may come from influences you yourself don't wholly understand. It's not that you claim to be infallible -- if someone can present a compelling case for a change it may be right to make it. But if the only 'argument' is that they like it better another way, or it's the house style, or the Chicago Manual of Style says something or other, I think it's better to go with the author's feeling. Otherwise you may be tampering with evidence of the evolution of the language, which in some cases, at least, may mark significant social changes. (In this case, the fact that the characters are not programmers may in itself be significant.)
Language Log has many posts on the fallacy that the words in a language tell us whether the culture using the language had a particular concept. But it is sometimes the case that words can mislead speakers into drawing false distinctions. The Gospel according to John begins with the statement EN ARXH HN O LOGOS, which is normally translated as 'In the beginning was the Word.' But the Greek word 'logos' covered a much wider range than 'word' - it included narratives, speeches, arguments, dialogues, logic, reason, calculation. If you talk to editors or agents they will often say of writing that in the end it's about sentences - that is, concatenations of words. Well, in English words do seem to be what writers deal with; a writer is something different from a logician or a mathematician or a programmer, which all have quite different connotations.