In case I haven’t said it lately, grammar snobs are great big meanies. In case you doubt it, I cede the floor to the accused.
Bill Walsh:
Am I being elitist? Sure I am.
I may be a curmudgeon.
I may be strident on other points, but this is one where I truly believe that people who disagree with me are deranged.
Self-described grammatical stickler Lynne Truss:
Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people.
We are unattractive, know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.
Robert Hartwell Fiske (on Robert Hartwell Fiske): A “grumbling grammarian.”
William Safire (on William Safire): An “excruciating curmudgeon.”
James Kilpatrick, proudly self-proclaimed sovereign of his imaginary “Court of Peeves, Crotchets & Irks,” on anyone who disagrees with him: “Pooh!”
William Strunk: Well, I don’t have any dirt straight from the horse’s mouth, but Stephen King sums up the late Strunk quite nicely as “that Mussolini of rhetoric.” (And Stephen King likes the guy.)
As we continue to see, the problem with language today is that the people writing the rules are such blowhards that not even they themselves can deny it. There are no checks on their power. They declare themselves to be in a position to write rules, and then they do, without regard for the fact that other “authorities” before them have already written different rules. Language is left in a state of anarchy and you and I are left not knowing what to believe.
The contradictory rules that result are everywhere.
For example, on December 18, 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that a director of national intelligence would be the “principal intelligence advisor to the president.” On the same day, the Associated Press reported that the new director would be the principal “adviser.”
The Associated Press Stylebook, a bible in some circles, is very clear on the use of the word “entitled”: “Use it to mean a right to do or have something. Do not use it to mean ‘titled.’ Right: ‘She was entitled to the promotion.’ Right: ‘The book was titled Gone With the Wind.”
The equally venerable Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t tackle “entitled,” but on page 124 the editors’ position is made clear in a sample letter that reads, “The University of Chicago Press is pleased to undertake the publication of your contribution, entitled . . .”
The best-selling punctuation book Eats, Shoots & Leaves tells you that a total of three apostrophes are needed in the expression “do’s and don’t’s.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary recommends the inconsistent but cleaner “do’s and don’ts.” The Chicago Manual of Style will tell you, however, to lose yet another apostrophe: “dos and don’ts.” Strunk and White didn’t bother to include the topic in their little book, but the book’s afterword by Charles Osgood makes specific mention of “Strunk’s do’s and don’ts.”
If you follow Strunk and White’s rules on possessives, you must write “Charles’s friend.” If you listen to AP, you must write “Charles’ friend.”
As we’ll examine in later chapters, these experts can’t even agree on how many commas go into “red, white, and blue,” whether someone’s age is “16” or “sixteen,” or even whether to write, “the ’80s” or “the 80’s.”
A lot of these disputes have to do with style. For example, the Associated Press sets the standard style for many newspapers, while the Chicago Manual writes the rules for books, the Modern Language Association for academic papers, and so on. Newspaper style tends to favor the efficient use of space, which is why newspapers use numerals for ages: 16. But books don’t have to worry about that as much, which is why they spell out ages: sixteen.
In a perfect world, it would stop there. But in the real world you have newspapers like the Los Angeles Times utterly affronted at the AP’s suggestion that they spell “adviser” with an “e.” Worse, you have newspapers like the New York Times utterly affronted by the suggestion that they should have to follow anyone else’s rules whatsoever, which is why they’re pretty much the only paper staffed by high school graduates in which you’ll find an apostrophe in “the 1920’s.” This makes them look all the sillier when William Safire’s “On Language” columns are compiled into book form, where his own published use of “1920’s” is changed by the book editors to “1920s”—the exact same language column printed two different ways.
Of course, all this would be just a fascinating study of the behavior of wankers in their natural habitat were it not for the fact that they’re screwing with the rest of us in the process. This grammar anarchy has created an environment in which anyone who wants to prove you or me “wrong” can cite multiple sources to put us in our place. But until now the best we could aspire to was a lame retort of, “Uh. That’s debatable.” So many ways to be wrong, so few ways to be right.
With friends like AP, Chicago, Kilpatrick, Safire, and the rest, English grammar needs no enemies. These are people who push the rest of us toward the edge, making us want to trash grammar entirely and begin allowing e-mail-speak such as “ICURrite” into corporate earnings reports and doctoral theses.
For damage control, grammar authorities try to justify their own existence by lecturing the rest of us about how important it is to speak and write good English. We’ve heard their spiel over and over again. “If you want to get ahead in almost any business or profession, you must speak and write reasonably correct English,” writes Laurie Rozakis, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grammar and Style.
It’s a claim most of us can lay to rest with just two words: Dan Quayle. Arguments such as Rozakis’s also “misunderestimate” the forty-third president of the United States (“Is our children learning?”), they overlook the legendary Yogi Berra, and they fail to explain political newcomer Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose recent feats of communication include, “All of the politicians are not any more making the moves for the people, but for special interests.” (Is it just me, or did anyone else wonder while watching Terminator 2 why future generations would program a cyborg with a thick accent, then have the nerve to make the cyborg say that he continually learns from his environment?)
Ignorance of the language in no way hinders someone’s ability to become wildly successful in politics or pro sports—we all knew that already. A lesser-known fact is that people who butcher the language can even rise to become professional wordsmiths. For example, a press release for a new Mattel toy some time ago said the new product would “strike a cord” between fathers and sons. People who write press releases sometimes make quite a bit of money and often they’re pretty well educated, or at least enough to know that there’s no cord that connects fathers and sons. It should have been “strike a chord.”
A photo by the Associated Press that appeared in the L.A. Times had a caption that said police told crowds of demonstrators to “disburse.” Here you have one of the most respected names in the news business reporting that cops demanded that a group of protestors write them checks. They meant “disperse.” Not to be outdone, the author and/or editor of one of the biggest-selling fiction books of all time, The Da Vinci Code, made the same mistake backwards. “His Holiness can disperse monies however he sees fit,” author Dan Brown writes on page 175, suggesting an image of his fictional pope hurling fistfuls of euros from a hole in his Plexiglas popemobile.
One newspaper where I worked was somewhat famous for embarrassing flubs, especially ones that had to do with figures of speech. In this paper, there have been reports of people “ringing” others’ necks (should have been “wringing”), living in a “doggy-dog” world (instead of the correct “dog-eat-dog” world), facing “a long road to hoe” (should have been “row to hoe”), driving “beamers” (the writer meant “Beemers”), yet not being “phased” by any of the goings on (should have been “fazed”).
I’ve also seen professionals write “tow the line” and “set your sites.” The first one is embarrassing because it should be “toe the line.” The second one, however, is quite forgivable because, while it should have been “set your sights,” as in the sights of a rifle, the not-so-well-paid professional who made that mistake was yours truly.
When the experts can’t even get their stories straight and when professional writers make such egregious flubs, it’s actually good news for the rest of us. It means that the seemingly huge gulf between ourselves and those in the know isn’t so huge after all. It means that nine out of ten times when we’re worried we don’t know the right way to speak or write the experts don’t know either. It means that our instincts are good and that common sense applies. It means that the super-arcane, super-difficult aspects of the language aren’t things we’re expected to know anyway. It means, in short, that this is our language too.