I’ve just nicely started reading a new language book and
want to share some thoughts from it. Robert Lane Greene is a writer who lives
in New York.
Greene is a regular correspondent for The
Economist and has published in The
New York Times and many other well established periodicals so is well
acquainted with modern English usage yet is no fan of prescriptionism. In his
2011 book You Are What You Speak: Grammar
Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, Greene “pokes gentle
fun” at linguistic sticklers.
As Greene learned new languages (he speaks nine last count)
he began to question English grammar rules. If Danes can end sentences with a
preposition, why can’t the English?
Here are some quotes from the Preface:
I think flexibility,
humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance,
and nationalism when we think about language.
Language isn’t just
rules and words, but communication.
Greene warns about journalists or other writers who, because
they know how to use language well, think they can write about language without
doing their research. He compares this to a top athlete thinking he is a
physiologist. Greene devotes several pages to humorist author Bill Bryson’s
“facts” about English and other languages that, in fact, just aren’t so.
Greene then takes umbrage with language sticklers, focusing
on Lynne Truss in particular. The rally cry of her best-selling book “Eats,
Shoots and Leaves” (2003) is “Stickler’s unite!”. Greene argues that her “fury
on the decline of English punctuation and those who hasten it” is greatly “out
of proportion to the crime”. As an example he quotes her pronouncement that
those who misplace apostrophes “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on
the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” Greene doesn’t seem to get her use
of the British hyperbole. Later Truss demonstrates her appreciation of the
Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1450-1515) for standardizing Western
punctuation by “absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his
babies”. Perhaps Greene missed reading the Publisher’s Note to the American
edition which ends “Please enjoy this narrative history of punctuation as it
was meant to be enjoyed, bone-dry humour and cultural references intact…”
Getting back to my post title, there are two types of “grammar
mistakes that aren’t”. One type occurs when the critic misunderstands or
misapplies grammar rules himself. An example might be saying that the sentence “Send
a copy to Joe and me” should be “Send a copy to Joe and I”. The first sentence
is correct; the “and I” rule applies to the subject not the object of a
sentence. Such incorrect corrections can be either ignored or dealt with
satisfactorily by reference to the actual rule.
The second type, a few of which Greene tackles in his book,
are grammar rules that shouldn’t be. Greene lists three bases for grammar
rules:
·
clarity – does it make the meaning clearer?
·
literary tradition – is it used (or not) by
great English writers, past and present?
·
purity – is it native to English or adopted from
another language?
I would argue that only the first is essential. Just because
Milton or Shakespeare broke a grammar rule doesn’t make it obsolete. And a rule
borrowed from another language, if it makes English easier and clearer, should
be welcomed. Some grammar rules, however, fail all three. Here are some
examples:
Ending a sentence
with a preposition
This is a natural sentence structure. We all do it. But
according to a grammar rule, we shouldn’t. (We aren’t supposed to start a
sentence with “but” either; I’ll get to that in a minute). So where did the
rule prohibiting this particular sentence structure come from? (Now doesn’t
that sound better than “from where did the rule… come?) Blame a 17th century poet, John
Dryden, who liked to compose in Latin and then translate into English. Because
one can’t end a Latin sentence with a preposition, Dryden stipulated that one
shouldn’t in English either. His arbitrary rule was adopted by the writers of
the first English grammar books in the 18th century and continues to
influence writers to this day.
Double Negatives
Robert Lowth, who I discussed in my post of
April 2, proclaimed that two negatives cancel each other. Thus “He don’t know nothing”
must mean that he does know something rather than emphasizing his ignorance.
While this rule has some basis in mathematical logic (-2 x -3 = +6) there is no
reason that it has to apply to English. The use of double negatives for
emphasis is common in certain dialects and everyday speech both historically (Chaucer
and Shakespeare used it) and currently. Some languages like Spanish and Russian
require the negative pronoun with a negative verb.
Split infinitives
The rule banning the insertion of words between the “to” and
the rest of the verb in the infinitive tense is more modern, appearing in an
anonymous article in 1834. The rule was adopted by grammarians and quickly
became official. It likely originated from Latin and Greek where it is
impossible because the infinitive form is one word. It completely fails the
clarity test and has a long list of respected authors who ignore it – both
historically (before the rule was invented) and afterwards (witness Star Trek’s
“to boldly go...”). George Bernard Shaw verbally attacked an editor of a
newspaper who had corrected his split infinitives calling him, among many other
names, “a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot…” and suggested he be replaced by an
intelligent Newfoundland
dog. Ironically, Shaw’s character Henry Higgins in Pygmalion shows a complete intolerance of nonstandard speech when
he tells Eliza Doolittle “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting
sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live.”
The attitude towards these (and other) rules is changing.
Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) in his 1926 book A Dictionary of Modern English Usage encouraged readers to ignore
rules that didn’t make sense or which caused ambiguity. He freely gave license
to split infinitives, to end sentences with prepositions, to begin sentences
with “and” or “but”, and to use “none” with a plural verb (e.g. “none of us are
going”).
I agree that the first and third rule described above can be
safely ignored. On the use of double negatives I’m not so sure. While the rule
could have gone either way (that two negatives cancel or reinforce each other),
one or the other should be standard. The use of double negatives was already in
decline when Lowth’s rule was written, he just finished it off. For clarity
sake, I would reserve a reinforcing double negative for dialogue in a dialect
where it would not be unexpected (did you catch my double negative where the
intent is to cancel?). One tip is the word “ain’t”; if someone says “she ain’t
never comin' back” there’s no use waiting up for her.
Fowler’s rather liberal English usage book was published in England which
one would expect to be the bastion of prescriptionism. Meanwhile in freedom-loving
America William Strunck Jr. and E.B. White published, in 1959 The Elements of Style, commonly referred to as “Strunk and White”. This book is full of picky little rules, many of which are quite
arbitrary like Strunk’s ban on beginning a sentence with “however”. White added
“hopefully” to the sentence-beginning ban list as in “Hopefully, I’ll do better
tomorrow”. Greene argues that in this usage “hopefully” is a “sentence adverb”,
and gives another example “Honestly, he’s a liar”. In Greene’s example,
“honestly” obviously does not describe the person being talked about but
modifies the rest of the sentence. If “honestly” is acceptable in this
structure, why shouldn’t “hopefully” be?
White’s inflexibility on the many rules in their book seems
at odds with his beautiful quote on language change that I use in my blog
heading. I suppose it illustrates the idea that language is very personal: “all
changes to language are fine and acceptable – except for the ones I don’t like”.
I haven't delved very far into the books yet. "Languages of the World - An Introduction" by Asya Pereltsvaig, 2012, is a textbook-like discussion of each of the world's main language families. I expect it will contribute much to a blog I have in mind showing the great variations, in many ways, of the languages of the world.
"Through the Language Glass - Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages" by Guy Deutscher, 2010, argues the controversial idea that the structure and lexicon (vocabulary) of our language affects how we think and view the world. I'm looking forward to reading this one.
