The Grumpy Grammarian

Return to Index

A dangerous monster stalks the land.  It roams about proclaiming that any usage or grammatical practice that is adopted by a simple majority, however idiotic or misguided that practice is, should become the accepted convention.

This beast lives by a number of mantras.  Among them are:  "If enough people say it, it's right."  "Conventional or traditional grammar is blind to changes in the language and hopelessly behind the times."  "As long as what we say or write can be understood, 'correctness' doesn't matter.  (Besides, correctness is often a matter of opinion)."  "If I want to say or write it that way, I'm entitled.  (That's not a Constitutional right, but it should be.)"  "People who insist on correct grammar are pompous snobs who are out of touch with us plain folks."

Thus goes the crusade for the "democratizing" English grammar and usage, liberating it from the shackles of tyrannical grammarians, who enforce archaic rules that stifle creativity and deny our right to freedom of self-expression.  The monster who leads the revolutionary march declares that the destination is not linguistic anarchy, as the snobbish grammarians in their ivory towers say it is, but is a verbal manifestation of power to the people.

Many of us effete snobs who call ourselves grammarians – and flatter ourselves as self-appointed guardians of the integrity of the English language – have inadvertently given this monster weapons to use against us.  We have insisted on using "It is I," when most normal people (and even some of us, when we aren't watchful) say "It's me."  We have insisted on using the subjunctive mood in even those instances where it has almost universally fallen into disuse.  We have tried to suppress any and all idioms that bend the rules, no matter how widespread these idioms have become, betraying a kind of rigidity that gives credence to the charge that we are blind to evolutionary changes in language.

Some misguided individuals within our own ranks have even invented "nonrules" to impose upon the masses:  Do not begin a sentence with because, end a sentence with a preposition, or split an infinitive.  Serious grammarians, who believe that grammar is meant to be a tool and not a straitjacket, should disassociate themselves from the propagators of such poppycock – and from the adviocates of rules for their own sake.  Still, we must stand firm against "democratizers," especially when educators are choosing to relegate correct usage and grammar to the back burner, except when they have decided to ignore it altogether.

This conflict between the self-appointed guardians of the language and the "democratizers" reflects more than a difference of opinion about language and grammar.  It transcends even the debate between the descriptivists (who hold popular usage to be the sole determiner of correctness) and the prescriptivists (who hold fixed rules to be the sole determiners).  It represents the inevitable clash between individuals who are comfortable only with absolutes – and both extremes are wrong.

In any controversy, there are not only opposing views (it would not be a controversy is there were not) but also a spectrum of views.  That is, absolute extremes of opinion are not the only possibilities.  Indeed, a sensible position in a controversy is somewhere in between the ends of the spectrum, in shades of grey rather than black and white.  Those who adamantly sit at the extremes (and deride any other view as "wishy-washy") are just being stubborn and closed-minded.  They are also probably uncomfortable with anything other than black-and-white thinking because thinking in terms of shades of grey requires decision-making and intellectual effort.

Let's apply this to language and grammar.  The idea that the rules of grammar have some logic to them does not mean that grammar is always logical.  Language is complex and capricious; therefore, we shall always have practices that are counter to logic.  However, the existence of these "illogical" practices does not mean that there is no logic to grammar.  Citing these few (or many) exceptions does not prove that the rules are meaningless or illogical and should therefore be ignored.  After all, if there were no logic to grammar, how would we know that these practices were illogical exceptions in the first place?

Consider the matter of English spelling, which is perhaps the most illogical and capricious of all the characteristics of the language.  We have thousands of words that are not spelled phonically and others that have variant spellings.  Even where we do have spelling rules (for example, "i before e except after c"), we have numerous exceptions.  This does not mean that we should discard all (or even most) principles of spelling or that we may spell however we wish.  Nor does it mean that we should adopt incorrect or phonic spelling of certain words merely because a majority of people have not learned how they are traditionally spelled.  If, for example, 51% of the people become so uneducated in the conventions of English spelling that they spell cat as kat, do we adopt k-a-t as an acceptable alternate?  If so, where do we draw the line?  To cite a more realistic example, since Google produces about 816,000 hits for grammer (only a few of which are intended to show that it's a misspelling), should we adopt grammer as an alternate spelling?

By the same token, if a majority of people start to use "Me and him is going" instead of "He and I are going," do we toss aside the logical principles that guide both pronoun case and subject-verb agreement to accommodate the increasing number of people who are ignorant of the conventions for pronoun case and subject-verb agreement?

It is not true either that insistence on certain grammatical conventions is tantamount to denying that language changes.  Our language is as alive as we, its users, are.  Like us, it grows and changes, discarding what has become useless, creating new patterns, inventing new words to meet changes in the environment.  The English of Shakespeare's time is not the English of the twenty-first century.  Yet the changes have occurred very gradually and have not been brought about by some plebiscite among ignoramuses who are clueless about existing conventions.  Besides, despite the evolutionary changes in vocabulary and, to a lesser degree, in grammar, the conventions of today are similar enough to those of 400 years ago that Shakespeare's syntax and grammar are not markedly unlike our own.

The central question is not whether the rules have exceptions.  They do.  It is not whether the language and its conventions change over time.  They do.  The central question is the extent to which we should bend or discard traditional grammar and usage to accommodate those who have no idea whatever what the traditional rules are and even less understanding of why we have them in the first place.  Let us not call what is essentially a defense of ignorance as a democratic exercise in freedom of choice.  We already have that choice – we may choose to appear ignorant of our language or well-informed about and observant of its conventions.

The Grumpy Grammarian will return with another article in January.  In the meantime, and in the spirit of "democratizing the language, we say, "Hapee, holladayz All; & a joyus nu, Yeer."