CHAPTER ONE

Who Cares

. . . or should that be “Who Cares?”

Or should that be “‘Who Cares?’?”

Do you care? But I bring up these questions merely as rough and ready examples of the sort of thing that my mail has taught me many people care deeply about, not as a topic into which I hope to plunge immediately, if you don’t mind. (If you do mind, then please turn to Chapter Five and read the item on question marks in the section “Unquestioned Answers.”) Nearly every day for years people who care about our language have been in touch with me, in my capacity as the World Wide Web’s MsGrammar@theatlantic.com and the judge in The Atlantic Monthly’s Word Court column. From all over the country—really, all over the world—they send me letters, they send me e-mail, they send me voice mail, asking and telling and bragging and inveighing about how English is used and how it should be.

My correspondents are chemistry professors and fifth-graders, bureaucrats and amateur genealogists, secretaries and lawyers, copywriters and ministers and radio-show producers, recent immigrants and concerned parents and university presidents and builders of birdhouses. Some of them are wise and charming and witty; some of them are choleric; some are erudite, some clueless, and some completely nuts. They write from big corner offices and kitchen tables, dorm rooms and Army posts, from Canada and Mexico and Finland and Japan and Australia, from Alaska and Texas and Washington State and Washington, D.C.—all limning their fascination or frustration with American English.

I am not an academic linguist or an etymologist. Linguistics and what I do stand in something like the relation between anthropology and cooking ethnic food, or between the history of art and art restoration. As for etymology, I second the psycholinguist Steven Pinker, who, in his book The Language Instinct, concludes a laugh-out-loud-funny section about people who make a hobby of word origins, or “wordwatchers,” with the confession “For me, wordwatching for its own sake has all the intellectual excitement of stamp collecting, with the added twist that an undetermined number of your stamps are counterfeit.”

What I know about language derives chiefly from my having edited, line by line and word by word, other people’s writing over the past two decades. For the last sixteen of those years, as an editor on the staff of The Atlantic Monthly, I have read and approved every editorial word scheduled to appear in that magazine. It’s been my duty to check over the work of great prose stylists like Roy Blount Jr., Anthony Burgess, Ian Frazier, Cynthia Ozick, E. Annie Proulx, and John Updike—to pluck half a dozen examples out of sixteen years filled with great prose stylists of widely divergent kinds—and make sure that everything in their stories and articles is just as it should be. If it isn’t, I suggest improvements. I have learned a great deal simply from observing how writers like these achieve the effects they do.

The Atlantic also publishes lots of articles by specialists, who may be used to writing for others in their fields. Members of this group craft sentences like “Confronted with the lack of sure knowledge, many assume that they are being manipulated for devious political reasons” and “The release of interim numbers to the scientific community and the press has given rise to a variety of inconsistent but often-cited figures.” They haven’t minded being prompted to say instead “Uncertainty makes many people mistrustful” and “The figures cited by scientists and the press are provisional and inconsistent”—and I’m sure the magazine’s readers also didn’t mind that they were.

Then, too, The Atlantic is proud to publish young, up-and-coming writers. I try to be especially solicitous toward this group. They are in their formative years with respect to editing, and if editing is as much like mothering as it sometimes seems to be, I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s lifelong neurosis.

Regardless of who the writer is, in most articles and stories I find things that are definitely, indisputably wrong. I also suggest many changes that are matters of taste, and often my suggestions are possible solutions to problems that have a range of other possible solutions. I can’t hope to present—to The Atlantic’s writers or to you—every option for writing, or speaking, well. All I can do is offer at least one solution to every problem that writers or my correspondents raise. I can’t tell you everything that is good English, but in virtually any situation I can tell you something that is. Your dictionary or your spouse or the wise old fellow who taught you grammar in high school may well disagree with my advice—and why not? In this book I am expressing my opinions, not promulgating laws. I would only add that The Atlantic Monthly regularly gets called things like “one of the two or three best-edited magazines in the world” (The Washingtonian) and wins praise for its “respect for language, reasonableness and careful thought, . . . and a capacity to surprise and entertain” (National Magazine Award citation); you could do worse than follow my advice.

Thank heaven, I do not stand alone as I fight my heroic battles against incorrect language! The Atlantic has a corps of crack word troops on duty at all times. There’s even a fellow I refer to as my secret weapon—an elderly polymath in Sharpsburg, Maryland, whose subscription I quietly underwrite, because he reads every issue from cover to cover and reports to me (and only me!) any mistakes he’s found.

Sure enough, despite everyone’s best efforts, the wrong word or bad grammar sometimes sneaks through the lines into the magazine. When it happens, I hear about it. Believe me. When something even just suspect appears, I hear about that, too. What with seeing letters that come in about the contents of The Atlantic and soliciting word disputes for Word Court, I think I must have heard at least once about every cranky little punctilio that bothers anybody. Silly me: I consider it a proud accomplishment that when an irate reader wrote in to object to the grammar of the article title “How Many Is Too Many?” (he thought it should be “How Many Are Too Many?” and if you also think so, please see Chapter Three, No. 4, “Agreement in number”), I was able to explain so persuasively why he was wrong that he signed up by return mail for a three-year renewal of his subscription.

Most of my Word Court correspondents, as well, write to me about specific words or phrases, and a large portion of this book will be given over to their questions and the answers to them—including a few exchanges that have appeared in the column in somewhat different form and many that have never been published at all. Before we start on all that, though, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the usual tone of my correspondents’ remarks.

 

I have a pet peeve.

 

It annoys me very much when I see ———

 

I wince every time I hear ———

 

——— seems cloyingly sweet with a hidden agenda of arrogance.

 

Such usage when I was in grade school would have merited a rap on the knuckles by the presiding nun.

 

Have we gotten so timid in our speech that we are willing to torture our grammar, or is this usage proper?

 

It is an ugly word that, to me, has no meaning and, worse, clangs in my ears.

 

It is sort of like a squeaky hinge or having a kitten sharpen its claws on your head; at first it is only mildly annoying, but with repetition it becomes almost unbearable.

 

. . . this egregious solecism . . .

 

This somewhat gross solecism . . .

 

Imagine my consternation.

 

I can’t stand it anymore.

 

These are some of the little signs, omens and portents that signal our approaching demise.

 

Such reactions occur, and word disputes erupt, in all kinds of settings.

 

My co-worker and I have had a grammatical disagreement for at least ten years.

 

Can you straighten out the argument my boss and I are having?

 

In a recent meeting with our company president, a colleague of mine used the phrase ———. The president scoffed at his poor use of English. . . . My chastised colleague felt suitably humbled until . . .

 

My wife and I have a dispute about the meaning of ———

 

My friends and I have pondered and debated ———

 

A friendship of more than fifty years hinges on your expertise.

 

My partner and I play cribbage together. When we count our respective hands . . .

 

My father and my aunt, both wise, well-informed, and mature adults, are engaged in an intense discussion about ———

 

How can I inculcate proper sentence structure in my children if . . .

 

Since children place a great deal of confidence in what they hear and see on television, I am bothered by the grammatical inconsistencies they pick up on the evening news.

 

Help! People in my choir are arguing over this one, and it’s driving me crazy!

 

Well may you wonder whether the usages these people dislike so much are part of your vocabulary—and if so, whether their complaints are justified. But, again, for the time being the point is simply that many people care about how we express ourselves, and that they judge us by our language. One letter I received reads:

 

I love language/linguistics too much, perhaps—so much so that I’d be proud to be called a philologist wanna-be (as opposed to a dilettante, I hope!).

My significant other (same age: 44) could care less. This baffles and worries me. Should she care? She maintains that because she is not in a position that requires it, good grammar is a personal preference only—that she can take it or leave it without consequence!

Is grammatical accuracy necessarily a sign of intelligence? What does it say, if anything, about a person who doesn’t worry in the least about whether she says was or were, went or gone, ran or run? She is otherwise responsible (has raised three law-abiding children, is not a barfly or a motorcycle mama, is a very conscientious worker, a loyal employee, and a good housekeeper).

She works for a county welfare office, but I recently had a boss in manufacturing who was the same. In addition, he couldn’t spell the word spell if his life depended on it! But he could communicate ideas for projects quite well, gave presentations in a calm and thorough manner, was fairly well organized in directing the daily operations of a small department, and was very good at implementing decisions made by upper management and employee groups. I eventually found it impossible to take orders from a man who could not even spell basic words and, for other reasons as well, agreed on a separation package from the company.

Both of these people are high-energy “doers,” joining school boards, etc., so I find it hard to believe that it’s just intellectual laziness. In contrast, I have perhaps three or four times the vocabulary of both of them put together, have excellent grammar, and can spell words that they don’t even know exist—but I’m so organizationally challenged that I have to write out the route to the bathroom to make sure that I get there and back!

As you can tell, I’m having a good deal of cognitive dissonance over the dilemma of trusting someone with my life who doesn’t see any significance in the difference between was and were.

 

Hmm. Some of the issues raised here just might be outside the scope of this book. All the same, the man has brought up important points. Are people who care about grammar superior in some way to people who don’t? I wouldn’t go that far. But certainly our language is a valuable possession that we hold in common. And I believe that people who treat it cavalierly are doing it harm.

If a group of us were setting out to develop a brand-new, perfect language—a system of symbols by which we could communicate with one another completely and exactly, in a way that admitted of no misunderstandings—we would want to come up with just one word for each meaning that we might need, and assign just one meaning to each word. Alas, it’s too late for English to be quite so precise. Standard American English—the English of our dictionaries and grammar books—is a great, messy deluge of words, some of which overlap in meaning, many of which have multiple meanings, and many of which can be used as various parts of speech. So even if we follow the rules of standard English, there’s no guarantee that our meaning will be clear. The same goes double if we fail to follow the rules.

Along with this drawback comes an advantage: standard English gives us a range of choices about how to communicate almost any thought, allowing us to express our individuality as we make our points. Note, for example, the varying ways above in which my correspondents have communicated displeasure.

Some people will object that their individuality is best expressed by breaking the rules. This idea has a certain appeal as it applies to, say, music or clothes or cooking—all aesthetic matters in which conformity doesn’t necessarily win compliments. But, as you may have inferred even from the content-free form of what my caviling correspondents have to say, deviations from standard English, or what people take to be deviations, are more likely to arouse fury, pity, or scorn than admiration for the deviator’s individuality.

And English is not just an aesthetic form or a cultural signifier, like music or cooking, but, again, a system of communication. Our ability to communicate will break down if we don’t work together at maintaining our language. You can prove this to yourself by visiting a part of the world where for some time English has developed in ways independent of the American variety’s development, and trying to figure out what the local people are talking about. To give just two marvelous examples, drawn from The New Englishes, by John Piatt, Heidi Weber, and Ho Mian Lian: in Nigeria a person who declares surplus is planning to host a party, and throughout Anglophone West Africa the word wonderful expresses pure amazement and would not be out of place as a response to the news that someone had just died.

Another problem we encounter if we wander off from standard English is that we will progressively lose touch with our past. Here is a snippet of Chaucer:

 

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thing, or finde wordes new.

 

It’s not so easy anymore to tell what was on his mind, is it? In order to continue to understand Chaucer and Shakespeare and the King James Bible at all, and Gibbon and Jefferson and Austen and Dickens in rich detail, we should embrace standard English, and do what we can to ensure that it changes as slowly as possible.

We may hope that future generations, too, will want to understand us. Not that our casual conversations around the breakfast table are likely to interest them particularly, or even our favorite sit-coms, except as evidence of what our era was like. For such contexts, as will be discussed in Chapter Two, the relatively free, transient, and idiosyncratic stylings of informal English will do fine.

Sometimes, though, we may want to make a serious point to people outside our own immediate circles—people living in the present or the future. We may wish to communicate with members of one of America’s elites: the people in control of, for example, business or finance or education or scientific research or politics or the law or the media. Whether we belong to such an elite and just want to talk to our peers, or we aspire to belong, or we seek to influence these elites because, after all, they influence our lives, standard English is the tool for the job.

The—well, the elitism of an argument like this will appeal to some people and offend others, as these quotations from my correspondents may suggest.

 

Those who criticize minor blunders of speech are often accused of unearned haughtiness or limp-wrist snobbery. Let them tell that to the Ephraimite who could not pronounce the h in Shibboleth. And when “he said ‘sibboleth’ for he could not frame to pronounce it right” he was slain by the Gileadites along with 42,000 others.

 

I tend to be very liberal about grammar, idioms, and other spoken idiosyncrasies, but get very upset when someone bungles it while trying to sound posh.

 

I am an Ivy League–educated physician who is not afraid to use bad grammar. I do it all the time and it feels good. My patients understand me, and, I would argue, prefer it. My brother, a Midwestern-educated music professor, uses good grammar, and is really snooty about it. What gives?

 

But standard English is not something handed down from on high. It may seem disingenuous for someone who calls herself the judge of Word Court to say that, and yet I do not just make up my answers, any more than a real judge rules according to whim. Whenever I can, I rely on precedent and consensus. What’s more, although the column may give the impression that I have the last word, I don’t: I receive plenty of letters disagreeing with my rulings. Rarely do these change my mind on the matter in question, but they often teach me how emphatically some people hold a different view. For example, should it be “a historical event” or “an historical event”? This surprisingly controversial issue is discussed in Chapter Four. Here suffice it to say that if you find yourself wanting to make a point about such an event without arousing someone’s ire or contempt, your best bet will be to call it “an event in history.” In this book you will hear from my critics as well as from me on a number of contentious points and so will have the chance to make up your own mind.

Everyone who chooses to use standard English must make an endless series of decisions about the language, and thereby has a say in how it develops. If people habitually use contact as a transitive verb—as in “I hope you will contact me”—the usage becomes a part of standard English (and, in fact, it has done so). If people insist on calling the establishment where they go to wash their clothes a laundromat, then whether the creators of the Laundromat® launderette franchise like it or not, the generic meaning eventually becomes standard English (it, too, has done so). If everyone stops saying forsooth, the word is sure to be marked “archaic” in dictionaries (this day has not yet come).

For this reason, and also because the world that words describe keeps changing—hauberks and greaves are, forsooth, rather rarer than they were in Chaucer’s day, whereas CD-ROMs and tacos and snowmobiles are infinitely more common—the components and rules of standard English keep changing, too. The challenge to remain simultaneously current and correct is eternal. Oh, well. Many people seem inclined to rise to the challenge, because they care deeply about language. Isn’t that why you’re here?

I mean it about not insisting on always having the last word, so I’m going to let someone else end this chapter—a correspondent of mine who disagrees with nearly everything I’ve said. At least, I think he does. And if, having read the foregoing, you find yourself in sympathy with his view, now’s the time for you to say “Who cares,” close the book, and give it away.

 

What I’m trying to think is whatever it is that you intended to make my writing comprehensive is not necessarily ameliorated for easily digestible audiences. Despite you and your implications for your active nay-saying readership, those readers who want to find no difficulty in getting what I mean closely as if it were their own intention to formulate language as my words’ embody. Sometimes when your rough in your meaning it is far better to wield an imprecision blade which must be handled with ever more carefully in the hands of him who wishes no error occured in the accurate diffusing of one’s wisdom. Let me bring these flailings of my own accord to an end: let us alone making those poorly conceived “mistakes” of yours, and we likely will look in an opposing manner as you dispense with those ill-begotten grammatical habits.

 

 

AN ASIDE
Warning

 

“Warning” may be hyperbole, but if this were called “Procedural Notes,” who would read it?

With a few exceptions (they will be apparent), throughout this book I have lightly edited my correspondents’ letters, cleaning up typos, errors, and inconsistencies that distract from the points the writers want to make, or sometimes homing in on one point when they have written me about two or three. When I refer to a correspondent as “he” or “she,” it’s because I have seen the signature on the letter the person sent and know his or her sex. (For current thinking on what to do when you don’t know someone’s sex, please see the section titled “Sex and the Single Pronoun,” in Chapter Two.)

Flattered though I am when mail seeking my advice arrives from distant countries, I’ve tried not to let it go to my head. I’m not the world’s expert on anything. My expertise is specifically American—by which I mean that it has to do with English as English is spoken and written in the United States. (If this meaning of the word American troubles you, please see “Something for Everyone,” also in Chapter Two.)

I cite many books in this one. Because language is always changing, language-reference books change, too. Some that continue to be popular for years may go through a number of editions; other highly respected ones may nevertheless fail to sell well and will go out of print or be heavily revised—for good or for ill. Because my focus is on enduring usage, I have not felt it important to cite the latest edition of each book I refer to, nor have I even wanted to do so. And because this is not a work of historical scholarship, I haven’t made it a point of honor to track down the first edition of a book in which a given citation appears. When I’ve cited another book, I’ve simply referred to the edition I have, the date and publisher of which can be found in “Shelf Life,” the aside at the end of Chapter Four. If I have more than one edition and the differences between the editions are significant, this is pointed out.

Thinking is not linear, but words are: organizing a book like this one inevitably involves a number of decisions that others may find arbitrary, misguided, or even woeful. Sorry! Questions that seem to me to point up various changes now roiling our language appear in Chapter Two. Questions that clarify consequential aspects of grammar appear in Chapter Three, in a completely subjective ascending order of importance. Chapter Four treats questions about specific words and phrases: where two or more words are discussed together, the discussion will be found under the alphabetically first word that my correspondent asked about. (Thus a letter about procrastinate versus prevaricate, into the discussion of which I drag equivocate, appears under “Prevaricate,” as it also would if a later reader of the first letter had been the one to bring up equivocate.) Chapter Five is a miscellany. It begins with matters that are like those in Chapter Four except that no one has asked me about them, and it continues with ideas for words that someone wishes existed, with pronunciation questions, and with complaints and observations about redundancies, pleonasms, and wastes of words. Chapter Six, finally, is meant to put all of the foregoing in perspective and to encourage you, the reader, to step back and admire what a piece of work is the language that we share.