The Grumpy Grammarian

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What can be done to stop – or at least reduce – the flow of incorrect grammar, faulty usage, and downright sloppiness in the media?  Those few of us who genuinely care are coming to feel that we are standing athwart a torrent of solecism, no matter how loudly and intently we try to dam (and damn) the flow.

When people who make their living with the written or spoken word don't seem to know or care about proper grammar and usage, it's no surprise that other people don't either.  Professionals should be setting better examples, especially since the schools have for decades been doing a very poor job of teaching language skills.  Possibly one reason for all the errors and sloppy usage is that a failing educational system has been producing an ever smaller pool of professional wordsmiths, but that is a classic chicken-and-egg question that we won't try to resolve here.

The evidence of declining standards is obvious.  Gross errors such as incorrect forms of it and you appear in full-page ads that cost thousands of dollars.  Outrageous gaffes in grammar and usage, which were once limited mostly to low-budget, small-circulation publications, now appear with alarming frequency in influential major newspapers and magazines.  Some hardbound books are as poorly edited as pulp novels are – if they are edited at all.  Though I rarely watch commercial TV, I'm told by people who do watch it that the "crawl" across the bottom of the screen in news programs and the like contains so many blunders that it appears to have been written by someone who dropped out of school in the third grade.  These comments, by the way, often come from people who are not usually fussy about proper usage or grammar.  Letters (sometimes mass mailings) that are rife with errors are sent out by major corporations, government and charitable organizations, and even educational institutions.

Although the errors have become so frequent and sometimes so basic that hardly any half-educated person denies their existence, most people consider this trend to be inconsequential.  They take it to be merely the way things are (which it is), the way things have always been (which it isn't), and the way things will always be (which it doesn't have to be).  Certainly, the abuse of language is a matter of far less consequence than many of the problems that beset civilization and our society, but it's not something to be casually shrugged off.

Most people don't see the decline of correct grammar and usage as a problem.  They say that we still manage to convey the message even when many of the words are wrong.  This is only half true.  As instant messaging and "texting" have proven, we can convey simple thoughts ("hi how R U") in text that ignores conventional spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar and that uses a host of abbreviations (provided those abbreviations are understood by the recipient).  However, it is doubtful that any serious "conversation," much less an analysis of something really important, could be sustained in this manner.

Furthermore, though one may eventually deduce the sense of an error-riddled piece of writing, the burden on the reader is enormous.  One may rightly conclude that it's not worth the effort (and therefore stop reading) or that the author is such a dunce that whatever he or she has to say is worthless anyway.  I can't speak for anyone else, but I know that I have often dismissed an Internet posting or a blog as the ravings of an idiot because it has been riddled with basic errors in writing, even though the author may have had some good points.  Conversely, when something is well written, I tend to weigh the thoughts more carefully, even when I disagree with the author's viewpoint.

Sloppy writing is also ineffective because it flaunts lack of attention to details.  All of us are, or should be, aware of where such inattention can lead.  We have evidence of it in other areas of our lives – machines that malfunction because of a missing or faulty part, computer systems that crash because somebody pushed the wrong key, mail that got lost because we entered the wrong ZIP or the post office misread it, a major problem with our checking account because a clerk in the bank made a "minor" error.  Why do we act as if a "minor" mistake with language is unimportant?

I place the blame for much of what is happening in the media today to the excessive reliance on electronic publishing.  It is the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) phenomenon in spades.  The writer sits at a computer keyboard, composes, maybe runs a spell-check, and hits "send."  Almost at once, what we see in the daily newspaper or weekly magazine is produced.  Nobody proofreads or edits it.  Most likely, the writer hasn't even looked it over for obvious errors.  As more garbage of this sort appears in print because quality control is virtually nonexistent, we become accustomed to garbage.  An error-free article is an exception; something that is genuinely well-written and polished is a miracle.

Recently, in a metropolitan newspaper, the entire op-ed page had no apostrophes.  It was bizarre.  It had not only such constructions as "Obamas speech" and "the delegates applause" but also dont for don't, were for we're, and Ill for I'll.  I have no idea how this happened, since several of the columns were syndicated and came to the paper from different sources, but thousands of copies of the newspaper went out that way.  Nobody noticed before the newspaper was published.  I watched the letters to the editor for weeks afterwards to see if anyone would comment on it.  Nobody did.  Of course, I didn't bother to write a letter myself either.  I suppose I figured it wasn't worth my time.  If publishers have abandoned proofreading and editing to save money, nothing I can say will change their minds.

All right, I'm on the verge of becoming a fossil, the remnant of an age that passed long ago, which, to those who are setting the standards anymore, is somewhere around 1980.  I have trouble adjusting to pants that display underwear, to movie dialogue in which every third word is one that not long ago virtually everyone considered obscene, to civilized people who walk around with metallic objects dangling from assorted body piercings, and the like.  I have adapted, sort of.  I understand that there is no accounting for taste and little limit to the weirdness that some people will engage in to express themselves (or hide their private insecurities).

In the past, even in the paleolithic era in which I was brought up, there have been individuals who chronically abused the language.  Even when schools taught grammar and proper English, which was a rather long time ago, some unfortunates didn't get it or chose not to.  However, we always had an influential nucleus of professionals with much higher standards who were the role models for sophisticated, civilized discourse – educators, writers, journalists, and even ordinary citizens who wrote public or private letters.  Their numbers are diminishing, and they will soon be extinct.

"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper," wrote T.S. Eliot in The Hollow Men.  We might now predict that the last words of mankind will not be coherent cries of despair or surprise but an incoherent statement scribbled on a wall somewhere, with every word misspelled and misused.