Grammar snobs come in two forms: amateur and pro. Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists—they’re everywhere, they’re all too eager to offer their services, and they’re anything but gentle. They include the guy at the party who says, “From where did you get the recipe for this torte?” and the girl who likes to point out your dangler and laugh, and the old biddy who was beside herself with malicious glee the time I accidentally wrote “old bitty.”
These people are scary enough, but what’s worse is that there also exists a whole crop of cranks who actually make a living at being meanies.
Meet James Kilpatrick, syndicated columnist and grammar grouch extraordinaire. Kilpatrick is a guy who actually writes stuff like, “It is time, once again, for propounding a paean to the period. Heavenly dot! Divine orb! Precious pea of punctuation! Let us pray for their unceasing employment!”
I shtick you not. This was the opening paragraph of Kilpatrick’s November 1, 2004, “The Writer’s Art” column.
In Kilpatrick’s defense I should say: He’s half kidding. In my defense I should say: He’s half serious. Sure, he’s using over-the-top, punctuation-drunk terms to exaggerate his love for the period, but I can assure you that he didn’t just pull this stuff out of his Underwood. No, this linguo-erotic rant bubbled up from some dark place deep within, carrying with it a large red flag alerting normal people to the state of this guy’s inky soul.
In his flowery spiel, Kilpatrick displays one of the most classic signs of grammar snobbery and an important thing for the rest of us to note. You see, as much as we tend to think of language snobs as frothy-mouthed meanies who spew bitterness day and night, in reality the meanies aren’t cranky all the time. Sometimes they can be downright chipper.
That’s when they’re really scary.
Unlike normal people who get giddy about things like love, sex, money, free beer, and classic REO Speedwagon, these guys have the hots for things like punctuation marks and syntax rules and the excavation of lost words that were lost for a reason.
Like a lot of “happy” drunks, these people can turn on you in an instant, transforming from Jekyll-like, playful nerds into bloodthirsty grammar Hydes. Think I’m exaggerating? Then compare the above Kilpatrick excerpt to what immediately followed.
“Why this unseemly ruckus?” Kilpatrick continued. “I shall explain—regretfully explain. On October 4, The New Yorker magazine carried 1,500 words of truly abominable editing. The piece was a think-piece of little thought. It started nowhere, went nowhere and arrived at no interesting destination.”
As the Seinfeld characters put it when they tried to imitate a vicious catfight: “Reer!”
His venom was just to make the point that very long sentences are bad and that periods can make them shorter. I suppose that, in the interest of filling up blank paper, Kilpatrick had to milk the idea for all the words he could get, but in the process, you can’t deny that he brings a whole new meaning to the term “to be on one’s period.”
William Safire, author of the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, does a better job of keeping bipolarity in check. But upon closer inspection, it’s clear that he has quite bit in common with his colleagues.
In his December 12, 2004, column Safire describes himself as an “excruciating curmudgeon” and then goes on to demonstrate. In the same column, he high-fives author and fellow language meanie Robert Hartwell Fiske by proudly describing Fiske’s and his own readers like this: “Our audience is composed of (not comprised of ) people who get a delicious kick out of getting incensed at loosey-goosey language.”
Yuck.
In a 1980 piece, Safire demonstrates a surprising capacity for understanding the dangers of language superiority. “Some of the interest in the world of words comes from people who like to put less-educated people down—Language Snobs, who give good usage a bad name.” But after authoring that piece, Safire went on to spend the next twenty-five years writing columns that snootily drop more names than you can count. In a single “On Language” column reprinted in his book Coming to Terms, Safire makes reference to Hermes, Mercury, Library of Congress manuscript division chief James H. Hutson, Warren Harding, Roger Sherman, Max Farrand, Attorney General Edwin L. Meese III, seventeenth-century theological author Richard Burthogge, editor Hugh J. Silverman, Zeus, Martin Heidegger, Irving Kristol, Jacques Derrida, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Stuart Berg Flexner, and Heritage Foundation constitutional specialist Bruce Fein.
So much for our great defender of the less-educated little guy.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both Kilpatrick and Safire have had long careers as political columnists—conservative political columnists. And perhaps the fact that one William F. Buckley Jr. authored one of the language books at my local library is further evidence of something funny going on here. It’s certainly not my place to speculate whether there exists any correlation between conservative political punditry and uptight, anal, quasi-erotic obsession with impossibly strict language rules and/or mean-spirited superiority. My job here is only to examine the shared affliction of these men to consider the question: What crawled up their behinds and died?
For argument’s sake, let’s say it was a bug.
So, transitioning not so gracefully into the lesson phase of this chapter, would you say, “A bug crawled up Kilpatrick’s and Safire’s behinds and died”? Or would you omit the first apostrophe and “s” and instead say, “It crawled up Kilpatrick and Safire’s behinds”?
Though both sentences have a certain on-the-money ring to them, the first one sounds better, doesn’t it? That’s because the question of whether to use the extra apostrophe and “s” has to do with whether the possession is shared or separate.
If Kilpatrick and Safire shared two behinds, you would say, “Safire and Kilpatrick’s butts.” If they shared a single behind, it would be “Safire and Kilpatrick’s butt. (And no doubt it would also have to work double overtime to expel both men’s special brand of genius.)
But because it’s safe to assume that each man has his own distinct and vise-tight posterior, you would say, “Safire’s and Kilpatrick’s butts.”
No doubt right now you’re probably thinking, “This whole question is ridiculous. A single bug could not have crawled up both their butts and died, unless of course it was some kind of super zombie bug that can rise from the dead to irritate again.”
So, looking forward to the day when science can transcend such limitations and genetically engineer a fanny-loving phoenix bug, I concede that, for now, you’re right.