2013-05-24T14:36:05-04:00 Robert Lane Greene http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=robert-lane-greene Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Robert Lane Greene Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.864987 2011-05-22T10:18:07-04:00 2011-07-22T05:12:01-04:00

Robert Lane Greene http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lane-greene/ the book, but herewith, I offer a taxonomy of language mistakes and non-mistakes, as a way of helping people think about what's right and wrong:

Rules everyone knows: These are the language rules that even a three-year-old knows: "Steve is here," not "Steve am here." These are the bedrock of the language, and there are so many thousands of them that most people don't think of them as rules in their own language because they're not what most people think of as "rules": the difficult ones that are drilled into you in school.

Standard but tricky: Many people are tripped up, for example, by "whom." "Whom" is still part of standard English, though it is so misused, even by people who are trying, that it may not survive forever. Rules in this category are also routinely ignored in speech.

Obsolescent rules: Sticklers insist on many usages that are now too late to save. I like the old philosophical-logical phrase "to beg the question," which means to try to sneak the conclusion of your argument into one of your assumptions. But the usage "to raise the question" is so much more common that I've nearly given this one up.

Disputed rules: Many sticklers insist, for example, on "None of us is leaving," but common speech often has this as "None of us are leaving." But the great English rulebook writer H.W. Fowler, among others, weighed in in favor of "none are" in his 1926 "Dictionary of Modern English Usage." Some questions are simply not settled, and you should check your pockets after talking with anyone who insists that they are.

Non-rules: A long list of peeves on the part of single individuals that somehow made it into grammar books and teaching materials. Most famously, great writers have split infinitives and ended sentences with prepositions for centuries, yet somehow bans on both usages became "rules" that have been taught to millions of speakers in English, in contravention of their own good sense for their native language. The linguist Arnold Zwicky has called the most persistent of these "zombie rules": like the two above, they've been shown as bogus in many good usage books, yet still survive thanks to many a provincial schoolmarm.

Formality differences: Speech and writing can have two different sets of rules, though many people are uncomfortable with this idea. If you knock on a door and your wife asks "Who is it?," if you're in the small category of people who say "It is I" you could use a refresher on the concept of "register": formality has its place, but so does informality, and usages like "It's me" has been part of living English forever.

Regional differences: Brits not only have different words from Americans (lift, motorway) but some subtle bits of grammar: "You should see that movie." "I will do," says the British-English speaker, using one more word than Americans do. To label regional differences "wrong" is one of the worst kinds of provincialism.

Dialect differences: This is tricker, but linguists have known forever that Black, Southern, Scots, Irish and many other kinds of English differ from the standard not randomly (because their speakers are lazy) but systematically. They are rule-bound varieties of language just like the standard is, with the main difference that they're not written down as often and have historically lacked prestige. That doesn't make them wrong; it does make them inappropriate for settings that call for standard English. But book-standard English is wrong for many other circumstances, a fact too often forgotten.

House style: "August ninth" or "August 9th?" "E-mail" or "email?" I have read the rant of a copy-editor who is convinced that there is a simple black-and-white answer to the question of "douche bag" versus "douchebag." But this is ridiculous: all these questions and many others are matters of house style, not correctness per se. It's good to keep one house style for a single publication, but for God's sake don't lose sleep over these as a matter of correctness.

Personal taste: I've heard that the New York Times bans "should" from editorials, since saying it relieves the writer of explaining why something should happen; the verb does it all. Bloomberg's business-wire service bans "but" from all copy (except direct quotations). This isn't grammar but style.

It's not easy keeping track of so many kinds of right or wrong. It'd be so much easier simply to memorize one set of rules and let that be that. But it's much more rewarding to develop a feel for the different things we mean when we say "correct," and much more interesting too.
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Robert Lane Greene http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lane-greene/ said that "the United States is literally taking nuclear swords and turning them into plowshares." My first thought was that it was pretty sweet that DARPA had finally invented nuclear swords. My second was, "But who wants a nuclear plowshare? Would you eat vegetables out of a field plowed with one?"

So I'd like to keep "literally" meaning "not figuratively," and every time I see it used to mean "figuratively" I sigh a little sigh. You certainly have your peeves too. Maybe it's "Between you and I." Maybe it's "Jenny and myself are going to have to think that over." There are enough to fill many books, and indeed they have filled many books--some of them bestsellers. All of us who love language hate to see it used incompetently.

But I got the idea for my recent book by noticing that there seemed to be more than defending the language going on when people talked about this or that usage. Take Black English: linguists have long known that it's a regular dialect of English with its own consistent internal rules, like Scots or Southern White English. But while most people know that it's unacceptable to make fun of someone's skin color, they feel free to make fun of their language. Zach Galifinakis has a joke about using lots of Axe body spray, though since he lives in a black neighborhood, he calls it "Ask". It's a pretty good joke, and he defuses it by saying "If you didn't get that, you're not a racist." But many people really think that "aks" in Black English is mouth-breathing stupidity, rather than merely dialectal. It has a long history in English, even appearing in Chaucer: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housbond to the Samaritan?"

In other words, there's nothing wrong with treasuring good English. But people confuse "grammatical" and "good." "Correct" English is often plodding or incompetent. Meanwhile, many people who aren't one hundred-percent fluent in standard English are nonetheless brilliant, charismatic and persuasive--I should know, as my father, who could charm a fish out of water, was an earthy, profane southerner, and not exactly Henry Higgins when it came to "proper" English.

Too many people take the step beyond caring for their language to enjoying laying scorn on others who use it differently. This is several different problems at the same time. One is, as mentioned, the bigotry against dialectal English, apparently the last form of prejudice acceptable even in polite, liberal company. It's important for African-Americans (as for all Americans) to master standard English, but part of that bargain should be accepting that their language, like my dad's Southern White English, deserves a place too, and one without scorn.

The second way in which people go wrong with language peeving is simply picking the wrong peeves. There are many "rules" that are "known" to copy editors and sticklers everywhere that simply aren't so. Famously, the ban on splitting infinitives and another on ending sentences in prepositions have both been known to be bogus by quality grammar-book writers for at least a century. But these "rules" seem unkillable. So do many other more rarified ones, which seem to live on so that copy-editors can one-up each other: Use "each other" for two people but "one another" for three or more. Use "that" for restrictive clauses like "the house that Jack built", but "which" for non-restrictive ones like "the house, which Jack built,..." But these and so many others are not "rules": they began life as one grammar-book writer's fetish and made their way into print to plague us with an endless game of grammar-gotcha.

So by all means, treasure language. But don't let your love for good English mean disdain for people who don't use it exactly as you do. Part of a healthy love for language is an understanding of the many different forms it takes. Dialects are healthy parts of real communities. Changes to a language are natural, not simply degrading. Even if my friend "literally" doesn't survive, quality English will.
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