She had red hair and no pity. If you mispronounced a word, dangled a participle, concluded a sentence with a preposition or-dear Lord, I tremble in fright at the mere thought of it-hooked a singular verb to a plural subject, all the angels in heaven couldn’t save you. Mrs. Sullivan, my 10th-grade teacher at Huntington East High School in Huntington, W.Va., loved grammar. Loved it with a ferocious, absorbing passion. Loved it from the tips of her pointy-toed shoes to the top of her head, upon which were artfully heaped, like strawberry meringue, swirled dollops of hair.
When declaiming a grammar rule, she would stand in front of the class, close her eyes, bunch both fists in front of her small face and shake them vigorously, as if wringing the wisdom of the universe from the crucial distinction between “who” and “whom.”
When she commanded us to diagram sentences–rather a lost art in these benighted times, I am reliably informed–she would inspire enthusiasm for the tedious task by equating the soon-to-be-filleted sentence with a pant leg brandished before a grouchy bulldog. “You take that sentence in your teeth,” she would say, eyes aglitter, “and you chew it around a while and chew it around some more and then you just take it apart.” There was a kind of sacred relish in her voice, a combination of somber reverence and kick-ass glee that really did the trick: You wanted to go after that sentence. That sentence had your name on it. That sentence was going down.
Yet I wonder: Should Mrs. Sullivan and her maniacal devotion to good grammar be recalled with whimsical affection or withering contempt? Are the formal rules of grammar, that is, really something over which we should be obsessing? Or is the preoccupation with grammar simply the last refuge of know-it-all busybodies?
Isn’t language, after all, supposed to be fluid and volatile, relaxing here and stiffening up over there, assuming the unique shape of each succeeding generation that employs it? Would we really want to still be saying, “Zounds!” or “Forsooth”?
To be sure, somebody somewhere is always complaining about somebody else’s language. Somebody is always carping about how kids aren’t taught grammar anymore, about how political speeches don’t rise to the rhetorical distinction of a soup-can label, about how the planet is imperiled by the galloping inability of people to know the difference between “it’s” and “its”-and it’s a crime, that’s what it is.
Grumbling about grammar is a sport that’s always in season, but it seems to have become even more popular of late. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham Books), by Lynne Truss, was a robust No. 6 on Barnes & Noble’s best-seller list for 2004, beating out “He’s Just Not That Into You” and “The South Beach Diet Cookbook” (Nos. 9 and 10, respectively).
In May, Gotham will publish the American edition of an Australian best-seller, “Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language” by Don Watson, which proves two things: Anxiety about proper language usage isn’t just an American phenomenon, and the anxiety is pervasive enough to make grammar griping a red-hot topic, right up there with breathy dissections of the Jennifer Aniston-Brad Pitt breakup.
But are things really that bad? And if they are-if, that is, language really has degenerated into a cesspool of mangled syntax and inept usage and battered grammatical rules-is that actually such a tragedy?
A brief pause to define our terms: By “grammar,” I refer loosely to the entire constellation of language issues, not simply the agonizing choice between “which” and “who” and “that.” Because when people talk about the decline of something they call “grammar,” they’re really talking about much more than subjects, verbs and direct objects. They mean spelling, punctuation, word usage and the jabbing persistence of slang. They mean not only dependent and independent clauses, but cliches and cant and mixed metaphors and faulty analogies. They mean “it’s” and “its,” but they also want to include a general, pervasive, unsettling feeling that our language is sinking lower and lower. They are vaguely afraid that the image-television and movies-eventually may replace the word as the primary unit of communication; that one day we may all be reduced to using a series of grunts to make our thoughts and desires known.
They mean the plague of dropped “g’s” as in “I’m goin’ to work” and they mean the inflection and usage characteristic of certain members of the African-American community, sometimes referred to as “ebonics.”
Yet an honest and well-intentioned concern for good grammar can slip into a creeping fuddy-duddyism, can easily sound very like an old person’s rant about how the world-thanks to those smart-mouth kids and their crazy video games-just isn’t what it used to be. And have you heard the music they listen to? I’m tellin’ ya!
“There’s always a certain hysteria in language conversations, a very strong emotional reaction,” says William Labov, linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “We all think language is going to hell in a handbasket.”
Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in Florida, a journalism think tank, adds, “In language use, in writing, grammar and spelling, we suffer from the myth of a golden age-a time when writers knew the language-and now it’s an age of lead.”
Ah, the long-fled, half-remembered, Garden of Grammatical Eden: The time when people truly cared about how they wrote and spoke; when gorgeously complex sentences dropped from the honeyed lips of even the lowliest rube like rose petals from a gently shaken bough; when leaders spoke in resoundingly memorable phrases that instantly seemed destined to be etched in stone above archways; when everybody talked like Winston Churchill, with a dash of Frasier Crane (from NBC’s “Frasier”) tossed in. People spoke in measured, thoughtful, erudite phrases with nary a noxious whiff of hated slang, and when they weren’t speaking, they were humming operatic arias. (And no one spit on the sidewalk, either.)
Was there ever such a time? And if it did exist and now exists no more, should we care?
Linguistics, a relatively young science, really doesn’t bother itself much about so-called “bad grammar.” In his classic primer, “Language,” originally published in 1933 and reissued in 1961 by the University of Chicago Press, the late U. of C. linguist Leonard Bloomfield stated: “The discrimination of elegant or ‘correct’ speech is a byproduct of certain social conditions . . . The fact that speakers label a speech-form as ‘good’ or ‘correct,’ or else as ‘bad’ and ‘incorrect,’ is merely part of the linguist’s data . . . [One wonders] why, for example, many people say that ain’t is ‘bad’ and am not is ‘good.’
“Strangely enough,” Bloomfield added, “people without linguistic training devote a great deal of effort to futile discussions of this topic.”
Of course they do. And they fill the mail bins and e-mail repositories of a great many publications and media companies with their persnickety missives, their gotcha!-grams, pointing out grammatical errors with an unmistakable air of intellectual superiority.
One wonders: Do the thoughts of these self-appointed language mavens ever stray in the direction of the large white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in our nation’s capital? The current occupant, after all, is a man who even his most ardent admirers concede is not terribly fluent in the English language. If grammar and syntax are so all-fired important, one may inquire, then how come George W. Bush, the guy who’s been elected twice to the highest office in the land, can get by with a daily assault on verbal communication?
Hold on. It gets even murkier. There are some people who swear that Bush is capable of doing a whole lot better with the language thing than he does. The president, these sharp-eared commentators note, was pretty gosh-darned eloquent back when he was governor of Texas. But he seems to have figured out rather quickly that many Americans don’t trust eloquent speakers. Americans tend to see ’em as phony and stuffy and highfalutin. As James Fallows points out in an analysis of Bush’s debating acumen that was published in the Atlantic Monthly shortly before the 2004 presidential debates, videotapes demonstrate that Bush was a skilled and poised debater back in the Lone Star State.
So what happened? Why, when he set his cap for national office, did Bush become the poster child for twisted syntax?
“It’s useful to him,” says Mark Crispin Miller, author and professor of media studies at New York University. “It makes his populist mask look more authentic. It has enabled his team to depict him as a ‘man of the people.’ He’s not, but he knows how to sound like one,” adds Miller, a longtime critic of the Bush administration and author of “The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder” (Norton, 2001) and other virulently anti-Bush tomes.
So there’s yet another kink in the chain: Even if the language skills of many Americans have deteriorated–a point upon which there is by no means universal agreement–perhaps it is, in some quarters, a deliberate strategy. Language that sounds too polished and perfect comes across as pedantic and sissified. Language is an instant signifier-of class, of race, of ethnic and geographical origin, of educational level-and thus can be easily appropriated to make cultural hay.
The Poynter Institute’s Clark, who has taught writing as well as written for newspapers, observes: “There’s definitely a stream of American culture that is suspicious of eloquence, that associates good grammar and intelligent discourse with elitism. We’re a culture that is still sort of anti-intellectual at its heart. That’s why plain speaking is valued and that’s what gives us the likes of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower–and now George W. Bush.”
The quickest route to the White House, then, may not be the split rails of an Abraham Lincoln, but the split infinitives of a Bush.
Yet Peter L. Patrick, linguistics professor at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, joins Bloomfield in insisting that “bad grammar” is a socially inspired fiction. In an e-mail exchange, the American-born Patrick writes: “In truth, there is no such problem as speaking with ‘bad grammar’ in one’s native language. We occasionally make slips of the tongue, but these are mistakes of processing. We sometimes use inappropriate language-but the grammar of swear words or taboo items is normal grammar; it just contains a few ‘hot-potato’ items.
“Some of us use a dialect which is regularly discriminated against, in an environment where it receives negative attention-but if it is our native dialect, we are likely to be using it in accordance with its own, inherent rules, which are correct for that dialect. Other people may be prejudiced against that dialect, usually because they are prejudiced against the people to whom it belongs-but that is their fault for being intolerant and/or ignorant.”
Patrick’s view summarizes the bitter battle that ensued in the late 1990s over “ebonics”-a vernacular associated with African-Americans. When the Oakland, Calif., school board attempted to recognize ebonics-the word was coined by linguists as a combination of “ebony” and “phonics”-as a legitimate means of expression among the more than 50 percent of its students who were black, it initiated one of the most contentious debates over “proper grammar” in modern times.
Matters weren’t helped by the number of media outlets erroneously reporting that the board was trying to replace “standard English” with “black English.” Board members simply wanted teachers to acknowledge that many of their students came from homes in which a different vernacular was spoken, and that students learned better when that tradition was respected, not scorned. No one suggested that ebonics would or should replace English as it is spoken in universities and workplaces.
But the outcry that greeted even the merest hint that another way of speaking might be a legitimate form of expression proved dramatically how passionate, how emotional, how protective people are about their language. Words are never just words. And language is always more than just a means of communication. We are, like it or not, constantly judged by how we express ourselves. We are evaluated by how well we adjust our speaking and writing styles to a formula that those who get to decide such things–those with power and influence–deem “correct” or “standard.”
Yet, the grammatical “rules” about which people argue so passionately aren’t really rules at all, Patrick believes. There are aspects of language that are inherent, “such as putting the subject before the verb in English-though in many other languages, this is not the rule,” he says, and aspects that are matters of convention, “such as not ending a sentence with a preposition. These are artificial rules, created by people with the social power to enforce them.
“Only the second kind of ‘rule’ is ever taught in school. They are not important for achieving communication; they are only important for impressing other people with your ability to follow directions. Good speakers and writers break them with confidence, when they find it useful.”
But that somewhat laissez-faire attitude toward language doesn’t wash with Dan McCall.
McCall, who has taught at Cornell University for four decades, is a grammar purist. Tell him that rules aren’t really rules but just social conventions, and McCall, normally a pleasant, amiable, mild-mannered sort, is liable to rise out of his armchair in language-loving fury.
“I’ve been fighting a lonely fight here for a long time,” McCall says from his Ithaca, N.Y., home. “My poor students at Cornell are so lost. Nobody helps them out [with grammar]. No one has ever said to them with sufficient conviction: ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem here. You don’t know how to use a comma. You use a lot of junky cliches. You don’t know how to construct a sentence.’ They’re helpless.”
And it’s not just essays and term papers that make him weep. “What breaks my heart is their talk, not their composition. It’s, ‘Like, like, you know.’ Some can’t help themselves.”
Things are worse than ever on the grammatical front, McCall claims, and one culprit is technology. “The chat room, e-mail culture of ours-oh, my,” he says, referring to the common habit of e-mailers to get a bit lax with grammar, spelling and punctuation, not to mention to employ punctuation symbols as hieroglyphs indicative of emotion, such as : ) to indicate a smiling face.
So things are worse than ever, right?
Not if you ask the Poynter Institute’s Clark. “If anything,” he says, “things have gotten better.”
The discrepancy between these two views-the Chicken Littles of language and the grammatical optimists-may be less absolute than it seems. Everyone agrees that people speak and write less formally than they used to; everyone acknowledges that both oral and written communication have relaxed considerably over the years.
The issue then becomes: Is a more informal attitude toward language a good or bad thing? Some people see a loosey-goosey communication style as open and refreshing; others see an anything-goes approach to speech as the ominous herald of the slow decline of traditional standards.
Thus Clark can overlook a grammatical slip or two, while the same gaffes make McCall grit his teeth and grieve for Western civilization.
John McWhorter, author and former linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, believes the distinction between high and low language is critical. And one kind of speech-the formal, black-tie-and-tails kind-is edging closer and closer every day to the other kind: the slangy, open-collared, sleeves-rolled-back variety.
“There used to be a sense in American society that you talk one way casually and another way at a formal occasion,” says McWhorter, author of books such as “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care” (2003).
“We have a different relationship to formality in all ways now. It’s not that our way of speaking is necessarily falling apart. What’s eroding is the sense that, to play a part in society, you have to be bi-dialectical-to use casual language and dress-up language.”
Yet he laments the departure of a certain eloquence. “We’re losing an art. The way one had to learn the language, beyond what came easily, was the mark of civilization. And the reason is, casual speech doesn’t communicate a sustained argument very well. High language can communicate a complex thought.
“But it can’t be stopped,” he adds. “I don’t think it is reversible.”
Still, there are those who want to try. And those people are less rigid and curmudgeonly than one might expect. The popular “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” despite carrying its stern subtitle about zero tolerance toward bad punctuation, is really more playful than narrowly prescriptive. The list of grammatical goofs that infuriates Truss is small and her remedies-“Be a nuisance . . . Send back e-mails that are badly punctuated; return letters; picket Harrods”-amusing. “I have an Inner Stickler,” she adds, “that, having been unleashed, is now roaring, salivating and clawing the air in a quite alarming manner.” Sounds perilously close to my Mrs. Sullivan and that sentence-shredding bulldog.
Truss apparently understands that there is a certain danger associated with a too-rigid stance on language, just as there is with a too-liberal one: the danger of forgetting that words are supposed to convey meaning as well as be correctly deployed.
When you focus only on a narrow adherence to a set of rules, you tend to forget the substance of what’s being said. That is Miller’s issue with those who make a fetish out of pouncing on Bush’s language errors instead of pointing out a
far more serious problem: What is, to Miller’s way of thinking, a jagged break between language and reality.
“It isn’t just that Bush is a poor speaker. It’s far worse than that,” Miller declares. “Bush can say, ‘Freedom is on the march’ even as we slaughter Iraqis. It’s not just a matter of poor schooling or not studying rhetoric. It’s much deeper. It’s a moral and rational failure of profound importance.
“A lot of people are sticklers for ‘correctness.’ But it isn’t ‘correctness’ that makes for eloquence,” Miller continues. “You can be incorrect and be entirely eloquent. I don’t care if you didn’t finish high school-when you speak from the heart, you are eloquent. It’s not about whether your sentences are constructed correctly. It’s about whether your thoughts make sense.”
Labov agrees that critically important language issues often get lost in silly fights over relatively minor points of usage. People are far more eager to correct someone’s grammar, he notes, than they are to engage with a crucial social and moral issue such as literacy.
“People get very excited about the small things in grammar. And we all have our pet issues about grammar,” he acknowledges, noting that nostalgia plays some part in the scolding. “We’ve [he and his University of Pennsylvania colleagues] interviewed thousands of people, and not one person ever said, ‘I like the way young people talk today. They talk much better than we did.’ ” Everyone feels as if “things are going downhill” in her or his lifetime, Labov says.
But the real issue, he believes, is the vast number of children who aren’t learning how to read. We may enjoy penning snotty notes to The New York Times when we spot a grammatical or spelling error-take that, you elitist so-and-sos!-but we ought to be figuring out ways to “teach children to crack the code and learn how to read,” Labov says. “Speaking good, correct, standard English will happen once you learn how to read. Over half the children in our inner-city schools are unable to use reading for any useful purpose. This is a really serious situation.”
In a perverse tribute to the primacy of language in our lives, many of us spend a great deal of time arguing about words and how we use them, engaging in long-winded rants and petty tirades about grammar. We do more than make language; language, in a very real sense, makes us.
And there is an elegiac aspect to language as well, a kind of quiet sadness that attends the recognition of language’s ultimate fragility. Some words are dying even as other words are being born; the new overtakes the old, the fresh supplants the familiar, and the Earth turns.
That’s what makes “The Word Museum” (Touchstone, 2000) by Jeffrey Kacirk so charming. It lists dozens of words that have gone by the wayside, words that formerly glinted in the speech of ordinary folks but now are found only in antique dictionaries and dusty manuscripts.
Words such as “glox” (“the sound of liquids when shaken in a barrel”) and “fribbler” (“a trifler”) and “flamfloo” (“a gaudily dressed female, one whose chief pleasure consists of dress”). Words such as “thrunched” (“very angry, displeased”) and “quanked” (“overpowered by fatigue”). Or my personal favorite: “cramble” (“to walk ill, as with corns on the feet; to hobble”).
Words and the way we use them are forever crambling away from us, moving haltingly but doggedly over the next hill, and while we’d like them to stay longer than they do-just as we’d often like a lot of things to stay just the way they are-the world’s truth is embodied in change. The words don’t want to go but they have to, because words are dynamic, perishable entities. Cramble they do; cramble they must.
– – –
A) who will the blame fall on?
B) on whom will the blame fall?
One of these is grammatically correct. but is it necessarily better?
Irregardless
Word mavens would say that this formal-sounding word is merely a bloated version of ‘regardless,’ whose meaning is identical. others say, ‘so what? the meaning is clear.’
Impactful
Converting nouns like “impact” into adjectives and verbs is evidence, grammarians say, of the irreversible decline of the language.
