The eloquent vernacular
Notes from Underground
Adam Roberts
Issue date: 3/2/09 Section: Opinion
We all have that friend. We spend all day baking cookies. There's only a minute left on the timer. We exclaim, "Hooray, the cookies are almost finished!" Instead of sharing our joy, our ungrateful friend can express only contempt. "Your cookies are almost done. Your cookies are not people. Moron."
Our friend is a Grammar Nazi.
Grammar Nazis (or "radical linguistic prescriptivists," for those of you who prefer the academic term) believe it is their mission in life to force everyone to conform to their vision of "proper grammar." Like Henry Higgins on steroids, Grammar Nazis spend so much time studying their rulebooks and straining out gnats that they forget what English is actually like.
Double negatives should be perfectly acceptable in most situations. No one really thinks that Mick Jagger gets satisfaction, so why not let him say it how he likes? We all understand what the word "dont" means whether I put the apostrophe in or not, so why make it an issue? No one has ever been confused because I replaced "it's" with "its." Why not just treat pairs like "fewer" and "less," "who" and "whom" or "good" and "well" as synonyms?
The word "like" has acquired a large number of widely accepted meanings, like it or not. Like, many of us like enjoy being able to like use like like five or six times in like every sentence.
Every English speaker who read that last sentence out loud understood exactly what I meant. Every time I used the word "like," it seemed natural and made sense. My words were given a different emphasis and a slightly different meaning because of where I chose to place "like."
For example, the phrase "like every sentence" used "like" as a hedge to alert the reader that my next word was an approximate count and not an exact rendering. The reader then knew that I didn't literally mean "every" sentence, but that I was exaggerating for comical effect.
This sort of versatility, however, is lost on the Grammar Nazi. The Grammar Nazi wants to keep the English language in its original plastic package, high on a shelf and out of the reach of us common folks. Grammar is a thing to be looked at and studied, but never to be played with. Interaction and innovation are the enemies.
I'm not calling for grammar anarchy. It is important to maintain good grammar. What I'm saying is that we need to replace the subjective, artificial regulations that the Grammar Nazis promote with the more rational standards of intelligibility and coherence.
Most of the debate over what constitutes "good grammar" is really just a debate about style. Sane, normal people recognize that different styles are appropriate for different situations. If you write for a newspaper, you use Associated Press style. If you write a paper for class, you might consult Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style." If you text message your friend, you use a much more informal style, with lots of abbreviations and acronyms.
Grammar Nazis are unable to negotiate these sorts of social nuances. They treat arbitrary constructs about prepositions and double modals as if they were mathematical universals.
If a Clothing Nazi went to Ozark Natural Foods and started loudly chastising everyone there for not wearing double-breasted suits with Windsor-knotted ties, he'd be seen as a pompous idiot and likely tossed out. But when Grammar Nazi Lynne Truss wrote a book insulting British grocers for using an apostrophe instead of an "e" to make the word "tomato" plural, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" became an international bestseller.
How many bosses have given in to the demands of the Grammar Nazis and refused to hire the more qualified job applicant simply because there was a typo in his résumé? If Facebook groups are any indication, there are thousands of people who will never find true love because they refuse to date anyone with "bad grammar."
It may seem like I'm being too harsh, but Grammar Nazism is serious business. As George Orwell pointed out, linguistic prescription is a favorite tool of tyrants.
The Soviets replaced the local languages and dialects used in the areas under their control with a static, official version of Russian. The British designed a system to literally beat the Welsh out of young children. Turkey still has laws against speaking Kurdish in public. And a teacher in the American South who bans the words "ain't" and "y'all" from her classroom is only a few generations removed from the teachers who banned Cherokee and Navajo from theirs. It's called linguistic genocide.
The English language is a beautiful and diverse creature. Don't let the Grammar Nazis kill it.
Adam Roberts is a columnist for The Arkansas Traveler. His column appears every Monday.
Our friend is a Grammar Nazi.
Grammar Nazis (or "radical linguistic prescriptivists," for those of you who prefer the academic term) believe it is their mission in life to force everyone to conform to their vision of "proper grammar." Like Henry Higgins on steroids, Grammar Nazis spend so much time studying their rulebooks and straining out gnats that they forget what English is actually like.
Double negatives should be perfectly acceptable in most situations. No one really thinks that Mick Jagger gets satisfaction, so why not let him say it how he likes? We all understand what the word "dont" means whether I put the apostrophe in or not, so why make it an issue? No one has ever been confused because I replaced "it's" with "its." Why not just treat pairs like "fewer" and "less," "who" and "whom" or "good" and "well" as synonyms?
The word "like" has acquired a large number of widely accepted meanings, like it or not. Like, many of us like enjoy being able to like use like like five or six times in like every sentence.
Every English speaker who read that last sentence out loud understood exactly what I meant. Every time I used the word "like," it seemed natural and made sense. My words were given a different emphasis and a slightly different meaning because of where I chose to place "like."
For example, the phrase "like every sentence" used "like" as a hedge to alert the reader that my next word was an approximate count and not an exact rendering. The reader then knew that I didn't literally mean "every" sentence, but that I was exaggerating for comical effect.
This sort of versatility, however, is lost on the Grammar Nazi. The Grammar Nazi wants to keep the English language in its original plastic package, high on a shelf and out of the reach of us common folks. Grammar is a thing to be looked at and studied, but never to be played with. Interaction and innovation are the enemies.
I'm not calling for grammar anarchy. It is important to maintain good grammar. What I'm saying is that we need to replace the subjective, artificial regulations that the Grammar Nazis promote with the more rational standards of intelligibility and coherence.
Most of the debate over what constitutes "good grammar" is really just a debate about style. Sane, normal people recognize that different styles are appropriate for different situations. If you write for a newspaper, you use Associated Press style. If you write a paper for class, you might consult Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style." If you text message your friend, you use a much more informal style, with lots of abbreviations and acronyms.
Grammar Nazis are unable to negotiate these sorts of social nuances. They treat arbitrary constructs about prepositions and double modals as if they were mathematical universals.
If a Clothing Nazi went to Ozark Natural Foods and started loudly chastising everyone there for not wearing double-breasted suits with Windsor-knotted ties, he'd be seen as a pompous idiot and likely tossed out. But when Grammar Nazi Lynne Truss wrote a book insulting British grocers for using an apostrophe instead of an "e" to make the word "tomato" plural, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" became an international bestseller.
How many bosses have given in to the demands of the Grammar Nazis and refused to hire the more qualified job applicant simply because there was a typo in his résumé? If Facebook groups are any indication, there are thousands of people who will never find true love because they refuse to date anyone with "bad grammar."
It may seem like I'm being too harsh, but Grammar Nazism is serious business. As George Orwell pointed out, linguistic prescription is a favorite tool of tyrants.
The Soviets replaced the local languages and dialects used in the areas under their control with a static, official version of Russian. The British designed a system to literally beat the Welsh out of young children. Turkey still has laws against speaking Kurdish in public. And a teacher in the American South who bans the words "ain't" and "y'all" from her classroom is only a few generations removed from the teachers who banned Cherokee and Navajo from theirs. It's called linguistic genocide.
The English language is a beautiful and diverse creature. Don't let the Grammar Nazis kill it.
Adam Roberts is a columnist for The Arkansas Traveler. His column appears every Monday.
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