I really, really love grammar. Seriously. I grew up in a family that had more copies of Strunk and White than people. When I went off to college I was accompanied by a treasured copy of the AP Stylebook. I have gotten into shouting arguments about the Oxford comma. I take grammar seriously.
Which is why some people may consider it odd that I think grammar Puritans should shut up and fuck off.
Not everyone had the benefit of a house full of books and parents that encouraged the love of language and their very own copy of Strunk and White. Some people had to try to learn grammar from (gasp) English class. A lot of those people went to schools that were underfunded, overcrowded, and full of not-very-good teachers. Furthermore, there are lots of people with disabilities that make speaking with “proper grammar”– or speaking at all– extremely difficult, as well as people who don’t speak English as a first language. Nitpicking other people’s grammar is silencing.
And can we talk about this idea of “proper grammar” for a moment? “Proper grammar” is the grammar that privileged people use. Textspeak is bad because it’s associated with teen girls! Appalachian English is bad because poor Southern people use it! African American Vernacular English is bad because poor black people use it! I cannot imagine how people who call themselves grammar nerds think that AAVE is bad, given its absolutely amazing tense/aspect system. Seriously, if you can read about tenses and aspects in AAVE and not die of joy, I question your commitment to grammar geekery.
Nevertheless, I think there are times that grammar really matters. For one thing, it is impolite to make your readers do a lot of work trying to work out what you’re saying*. (It also makes them less likely to bother to read your message.) Therefore, you should probably refrain from, randomly, putting commas in, where commas do not, belong because it slows down and confuses the reader. However, two people who both understand AAVE speaking to each other does not violate this rule, while Judith Butler does constantly, so I expect that people should be equally annoyed at Ms. Butler and at people, who put commas, everywhere.
Furthermore, I’m actually still more of a prescriptivist than a descriptivist by bent. I would prefer that people speak forms of English that have the most possible nuance, shades of meaning, expressiveness, logic, and beauty. For that reason, I’m overjoyed about the use of “he went” to mean “this is a paraphrase of what he said,” but displeased about the use of “disinterested” to mean “bored.” (It means unbiased! Bleh.) I also reserve the right to be upset about the abomination that is “irregardless” (irregardless and regardless mean the same thing! Christ, people, we just got the flammable/inflammable thing sorted out, don’t go adding more words that look like opposites and mean the same thing).
That rule is part of the reason I, as a grammar nerd, am endlessly in support of non-”proper”-grammar English: sometimes it has a beauty and emotional expressiveness than “properly” grammatical English does not. (I point skeptics to the Twitter of the incomparable quailitree.) To ignore that because of some bullshit rules that people made up in the nineteenth century is shitty as fuck.
*Unless for some reason trying to work out what you’re saying is part of the point. This is the James Joyce Exemption.
I… like this. I like it a lot. I have to say I get annoyed both by people trying to get everybody anywhere to speak the Queen’s English or whatever the American version thereof is, and by people who rail against it. I do think that there is value in having a Standardized Technical dialect, but that should probably be a formalized version of a fairly commonly used and commonly understood one.
Strunk and White? Um…seriously? You gotta go check out the comprehensive demolition job on that book by the professional linguistics blog Language Log…
Nate: I have! I am a proper grammar nerd after all.
I’m still allowed to love it though.
There’s an interesting series on this over here:
http://boingboing.net/2012/12/13/literacy-privilege-or-why-gr.html
That’ll learn them.
I think “disinterested” vs “bored / unbiased” is pretty harmless. If you say a word intending it to mean Concept X and somebody else hears it interprets it to mean Concept X, then that is “proper” English (or whatever language you are speaking at the time)
It becomes difficult when a word is a technical term which has one very specific meaning amongst the group that use it regularly, and another meaning amongst people outside that group. Two examples that drive me up the wall:
If in hospital I say a patient is “in shock” then by that I mean their blood pressure has dropped dangerously low, they aren’t getting enough blood to their tissues and we need to start fixing that and calling someone pretty senior as soon as possible. If I said they were in “shock” to their relatives or friends they might think they needed a nice sit down with some tea and biscuits and a hug. Medics who explain things to patients in in-crowd jargon make my blood pressure dangerously high. YOU AREN’T EXPLAINING ANYTHING IF THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND YOUR WORDS.
On the other hand the word “fatwa” doesn’t mean “death sentence”. It means “opinion on a matter of religion by a scholar”. It has a clear meaning, agreed on by more or less everyone who would use it commonly, but to those outside the group (ie Muslims and Arabic-speakers) it means “to call for something barbaric that We don’t agree with”. And that kind of bullshit redefinition really needs to stop.
People who use ‘zie’ instead of ‘they’ as a variable annoy me, because they is fine and I’ve been reading ‘zie’ as ‘definitely genderqueer’ and ‘they’ as ‘gender unknown (or agender)’. In fact, ‘they’ is a perfectly good word in most contexts and can definitely be used as a third person singular pronoun, and is already in the English language so doesn’t need as much effort as ‘zie’ to start being used by the general public. Of course, if someone says their pronoun is zie I’ll use it, because that’s just polite.
Equally someone might choose “zie” precisely because it is more obviously genderqueer. As they are entitled to. Slurs are already commonly in the english language, and very easy for the general public to grasp, doesn’t mean we should use them. Having said that the only nonbinary people I know in real life use “they”. “They” should be the default for anyone if you aren’t sure of their gender identity or preferred pronoun. I just want to do a Find/Replace on pretty much all UK legal documents to replace “he” with “they”.
I really want to know how nonbinary people in languages with grammatical gender manage things..
I know that in Spanish, the at sign (@) is often used because it looks like a combined a and o.
I agree with the thing about how recently constructed gendered pronouns kind of feel like a marker for genderqueer-ness, or at least gender nonconformism or something. That’s part of why I use they: it isn’t noticeable by people who don’t care.
I am really frustrated by the whole ingroup-outgroup thing (and there are some in the SJ community, esp. privilege where privilege means the privilege-theory type of privilege that combines significant benefit and lack of personal experience, and I think some people maintain these things intentionally).
Some other examples: -Theory/Hypothesis inside and outside of science.
-Violence being used to refer to things that don’t outwardly even seem coercive
-Beauty that is emphatically not in the eye of the beholder.
I’m just glad my language lacks gendered pronouns, saves me all that headache.
I absolutely love this. An an English Language and Linguistics graduate I completely understand where you’re coming from with your love for grammar but hatred for stickler Puritans.
Yes it’s important to be able to properly formulate and structure language when you’re writing something formal, and yes (in my opinion anyway) it’s nice to read something that is well written. However, just because something is “poorly” written/ spoken doesn’t mean that it’s bad, or that the person communicating is stupid.
I think it’s also important for the Puritans to realise is that language is evolving. If everyone absolutely adhered to the “proper” rules all the time then we would probably still be speaking Old English. Language evolves and economises itself, that’s the point of it: to try and communicate as effectively and succinctly as possible.
Don’t get me wrong though, I feel your pain about “irregardless”… there’s fair use of colloquial language and there’s just plain wrong!
Grammar is important, but not in the way you think « Valprehension
One thing about grammar that tends to be overlooked is that it’s often contextual. Different forms of communication have different constraints with which to contend — a face-to-face conversation is constrained in time (since it’s essentially adlibbed), an internet conversation is constrained in tone (since standard English grammar isn’t very good at conveying tonal connotations), a text message or tweet is space constrained (since it’s limited to 150 characters or so), and a formal essay is constrained by the need to demonstrate the fullest range of knowledge possible (which includes the knowledge of standard English grammar). It’s rather absurd to expect all of those different forms of conversation to strive for the same grammatical standard, when they’re all trying to do different things while dealing with different limitations.
Internet communication, for instance, would be far better served by the creation of a universally-accepted set of deviations from the standard that highlight tone (for instance, intentionally breaking rules in order to suggest that one ought not be taken too seriously, or using “/sarcasm” or “/rant” if one expects one’s words to be taken in a way other than how they’re intended) than it would by sticking to the standard at the expense of mutual comprehension. Unusual constructs (such as action tags like “*runs away*” or agrammatical memetic references like “DO NOT WANT”) can be helpful when tone and body language can’t be used, even if they’d be awkward or impossible in verbal communication.
No one thinks it’s all that strange that there are different expectations for a scholarly essay and a personal conversation with a friend at a coffee shop. I’m not sure why it’s so hard to extend that to something like AAVE or Textspeak, within their own contexts.
(With that said, of course, I’d probably get pretty irritated with someone who tried to write an essay or a debate post in Textspeak. If a form of grammar is created to meet the limitations of a particular form, and one is writing in a form without those limitations, it’s probably best to stop trying to work around those limitations if it’s going to make things more difficult for one’s audience. AAVE and Appalachian English are vernaculars that imply identification with a culture, so the dynamic between them and standardized American English is different than the dynamic between Textspeak and standardized American English)
Am I allowed to be extremely frustrated with people who are in the habit of not using nouns when speaking? Because I do. And I’ve officially decided that it’s perfectly within my right to do so. So forget that first part. I don’t care what your education or class background is, you’re a native English speaker. And I may be too, but that doesn’t mean I can tell what you’re referring to if you only give me its goddamn motherfucking location over the course of a sentence that was constructed to accommodate SUBJECTS.
ASHTLDFGHALSIRHDFKGH
Grammar can be a lovely thing indeed, but what I think gets lost among a lot of the Grammar Puritan crowd is that it is a tool, not a Moral Standard.
As the very popular “Let’s eat Grandma!”/”Let’s eat, Grandma!” illustrates, grammar plays an important role in clarifying language. Any grammar that sufficently clears up ambiguous meanings is doing its job – even if it’s different from YOUR* grammar.
*generic “you”, not Ozy.
wasn’t it just determined a few posts ago that if you’re not AA, using AAVE is hella cultural-appropriatey and offensive and wrong?
L: I drop nouns *all the time*. (Mostly in cases when I’d use a pronoun.) So I think the conclusion here is that we shouldn’t talk in situations where I’m not on my best grammatical behavior.
Practically, not using nouns in most cases violates the Don’t Make Your Sentence Difficult For People Reading It rule, so you’re not being an asshole to get upset.
SC: Well, I’d be extremely leery of someone using AAVE who didn’t spend a lot of time in an AAVE-speaking environment. That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to squee over the tense/aspect system.
While I agree that there’s something to be said for not holding the same standards of grammar in everyday communication (or even, gasp, on the internet), I DO think that there’s a certain level of obligation based on the point of the message. Likewise, the audience of the message is important. If I am speaking persuasively in an attempt to get a friend to do X Y or Z for me, my diction and grammar will be wildly different compared to when I’m communicating the same message to a professor, a prospective employer, or even a prospective lover.
I hold my friends to a certain standard of grammar and diction because generally I see my friends as colleagues and quite a few are activists. In order to be competent at what they do, they need to be able to precisely communicate. This means that I don’t usually accept jargon that’s been turned into colloquialism specifically because it’s not precise and by accepting that usage I soften what that jargon “really” means to me. A good example here is with psychological terms; if a friend calls another person a narcissist I will challenge that usage. This is primarily to see if they really mean narcissist in the psychological definition (most do and yet many don’t actually know the diagnostic criteria, so we find that their diction here was inappropriate), and to gather what data they’re using to make that assumption. Bi-polar is a bit of a hot button, for me; if someone uses bi-polar as a descriptive term (e.g. “I’m so bipolar about hugs”) I will immediately go off on them about that diction. Then again, I live with the “real” thing so it’s a bit closer to home.
I used to have a friend who had such poor grammar it was often difficult to tell what she meant by a statement (both in writing and speech). I was honestly confused. I would have to query her for five minutes just to understand what she meant. This friend decided to pursue a career as an educator and decided (and I know this because she told me this, often, and we had many debates on the topic) that people would just have to “get used to” her grammar and her “style of teaching.” Of course, pointing out the major flaw of that argument (namely that it’d get her either fired for incompetency or not hired in the first place as teachers need to adapt to the environment they’re teaching in) did not turn out well. Educating others requires precision in language; the best teachers that I’ve had (throughout all my years in education and higher education) have always been those who say precisely what they mean. As a teacher that’s what I aspire(d) to and it’s incredibly difficult.
Thinking on it more, I take greater issue with poor diction than I do grammar. I can see a statement riddled with commas and get past it relatively easily, likely due to years of reading bad fan-fiction. The comma issue, specifically, is endemic to someone who writes like they speak. Mildly annoying for someone who writes as an academic or for profession, but certainly acceptable for the average internet user or text message composer.
One of the best reasons to cut down on nonstandard grammar is to improve communication with people for whom English is not the first language. Idioms, non-standard structure and usage, etc., may not hinder your ability to be understood by your family, but the farther afield you go, the more standard English helps. If you’ve got a French boss, an Indian coworker an an Albanian landlord or if you want to get a pen pal from Singapore, all the love of your AAVE tenses you can muster won’t help you get a point across.
My grandmother was dirt-poor and uneducated, but once worked as a housecleaner of a rich woman in Pittsburgh who made her very conscious of speaking correctly and not like a poor southerner. (She did this out of love and concern that my grandmother would only be able to do menial labor if she didn’t improve her speech; the Eliza Doolittle argument, if you will.) Thus, my hillbilly grandmother became an unexpected grammar-nazi and tortured the rest of us, yet reserved the right to lapse into deep southern vernacular at odd moments. (her family was Meludgeon, and two of her siblings who “never left the farm” spoke in a totally-bizarre dialect, only half understandable to outsiders) I am now forever in her debt for teaching me to speak and write correctly (for the most part) and yet ‘keep it real’. I loved her colorful expressions, the way she used certain turns-of-phrase for emphasis, while still able to speak carefully and properly when it was necessary to obtain respect. She also forced me to learn proper handwriting and ironing and all of that shit. Even the word “grammar” makes me think of her..
Long story short, I learnt me some grammar, but it weren’t easy!
At what point does a dialect become a separate language? I like to say that I speak two languages: English and Magic Player. And if you suspect that Magic Player is really just English, well, try reading this and see for yourself.
@Ozy: HOW DO YOU DO THAT
Like, literally the sentences go thusly: “I went and got a sandwich from the Pasadena _______; it was good.” How. Hooooow. That’s pretty much every other sentence all the time, too.
So I can still hate Butler for being totally unreadable, right? I have one of her books in my bag and I haven’t gotten past the preface :/
I feel like I could potentially derive something from programming language standards to make a point here, but I dunno what.
What I believed to be an AAVE question to me at work one day- ” How do you was be doin’?”… Any thoughts on a proper response?
I think it was this that tipped me from “somethings I think me and my nerd friends’ pedantry about language gets a little boring, plus prescriptivism is like totally unsound as basic lingusitic theory” to “woah, actually harmful privileged behaviour occuring here!” And I recently came to the same appreciation of the redunculously awesome grammar in AAVE (took me a while to catch on, but in fairness, not a U.S.-ian.)
Anyway, I heard that the earliest attested meaning of “disinterested” is in fact bored, not unbiased, and that irregardless is over 200 years old.
But don’t get me started on “guesstimate”