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Grammar Snobbery: The Last Permissible Prejudice?
When the Blue Yeti sent me this item and said, “This one’s for you, Claire,” I was a bit perplexed. Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, what’s really hot on dating sites is proper grammar:
With crimes against grammar rising in the age of social media, some people are beginning to take action. The online dating world is a prime battleground.
Mr. Cohen joins a number of singles picky about the grammar gaffes they’re seeing on dating sites. For love, these folks say written communications matter, from the correct use of semicolons, to understanding the difference between its and it’s, and sentences built on proper parallel construction.
“Grammar snobbery is one of the last permissible prejudices,” says John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University. “The energy that used to go into open classism and racism now goes into disparaging people’s grammar.”
Why is this one is for me? What does he think I do all day — sit here, swipe at Tinder, and correct my ardent suitors’ semi-colon usage? After a long day of imposing grammar discipline on Ricochet, you think that’s how I’d want to relax?
I concede, to be fair, that in my youth I did once dump a guy for using the word “critique” incorrectly. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was definitely the final straw:
Him: Who do you think you are to critique me?
Me: You mean criticize. I was criticizing you. Nothing about what you just said was worthy of a critique. And frankly, if I were you, I’d stay away from any verbal usage of the word “critique.” Never use a weapon you don’t know how to handle.
That was obviously the end of our relationship. But beyond that one time, I have no idea why the Yeti thought of me as our resident expert in dating and grammar snobbery.
However, the link prompted me to look up John McWhorter, who sounds much more interesting than that quote from him would suggest. Based on the blurb, in fact, I think I’ll order his book:
A rousing polemic in defense of the written word by the New York Times bestselling author of Losing the Race and the widely acclaimed history of language The Power of Babel.
Critically acclaimed linguist John McWhorter has devoted his career to exploring the evolution of language. He has often argued that language change is inevitable and in general culturally neutral-languages change rapidly even in indigenous cultures where traditions perpetuate; and among modernized peoples, culture endures despite linguistic shifts. But in his provocative new book, Doing Our Own Thing, McWhorter draws the line when it comes to how cultural change is turning the English language upside down in America today, and how public English is being overwhelmed by street English, with serious consequences for our writing, our music, and our society.
McWhorter explores the triumph of casual over formal speech — particularly since the dawn of 1960s counterculture — and its effect on Americans’ ability to write, read, critique, argue, and imagine. In the face of this growing rift between written English and spoken English, the intricate vocabularies and syntactic roadmaps of our language appear to be slipping away, eroding our intellectual and artistic capacities. He argues that “our increasing alienation from ‘written language’ signals a gutting of our intellectual powers, our self-regard as a nation, and thus our very substance as a people.”
Timely, thought-provoking, and compellingly written, Doing Our Own Thing is sure to stoke many debates about the fate of our threatened intellectual culture, and the destiny of our democracy.
Has anyone here read it? Any good? (And does anyone want to bet that the person who wrote that blurb isn’t properly qualified to handle the word “critique?”)
Published in Culture, General
Good. I think the French waste way too many brain cells on the reproductive role of silverware.
I wish I could find it, but in one of my old dictionaries, either a Merriam-Webster’s College edition or American Heritage–I’m betting it was in my old American Heritage–there was a long front matter piece about the history of the English language. It told of a period when the Brits got really ticked off at the French–after the Hundred Years War, perhaps?–and literally banished all French words from the English language.
Dating sites have essays now? What happened to short answers like: smokes, 5’6″, puts out? Most guys never get past the pictures anyway.
Here he (John McWhorter) is discussing language back in 2011:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?301077-1/book-discussion-language
Brave fellow:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?280399-1/book-discussion-beat
That’s a conservative, by my lights. Big tent.
Persian has no gendered pronouns, either, and Iranians also commonly have trouble with “he” and “she.” Another thing they don’t have is the definite article; oddly, they tend to overcompensate in English by using “the” all the time.
We drive non-natives up a tree with that one. It’s so hard to learn.
And the difference in usage between American English (“in the hospital”) and British English (“in hospital”) doesn’t help.
I defy anyone to watch Dr. McWhorter’s appearance in Indoctrinate U, watch 50-75% of his bloggingheads.tv conversations with Glen Loury (who much better fits the “Democrat willing to engage with conservatives” description, IMO), or listen to his comments about the politics of linguistics in his Story of Human Language, and come away thinking “Dr. McWhorter is a liberal, as that term is understood in post-Vietnam America.” If anything, John Hamilton McWhorter V is open to the usual leftist brickbats of “Uncle Tom,” “acting white,” and “privileged.”
If all it takes to not be conservative is to vote for a Democrat, my Evan-Bayh-electing parents in Indiana are not conservatives, Ronald Reagan was not a conservative, etc. I’d remind my friends here that conservatism is about principles, not what letter comes after a candidate’s name.
This happens to me surprisingly often as a native speaker of English. Not in writing, but in unguarded speech. Also utterances like “She is her husband” or “He is her wife” – and not because the couples are same-sex.
Armenian’s excuse is that it’s believed to be one generation removed from Indo-European—it predates the adoption of gendered nouns in other Indo-European languages. I wonder what Persian’s excuse is?
Russian also lacks the definite article. Some Russian English-speakers, similarly to the Persians, overcompensate, but in my experience (Los Angeles has very large Persian and Russian immigrant populations) most don’t bother, or rather, it doesn’t even occur to them.
The gendered noun thing is a pain. In German, the only way to master the genders is rote memorization, which meant my command of them when I visited Salzburg was mostly wrong. The locals were very forgiving, and mostly hid their amusement as politely as decorum called for. :-)
Begun, this grammar war has.
It’s my experience that even Germans get royally fed with their case-and-gender system. The trick? Whenever possible, mumble the articles and turn the final syllable of nouns and adjectives into a barely-audible grunt that could stand for -e, -er, or nothing.
Even native-speaking Germans do this :-)
Those are what truly matter.
Part of this may be explained by the fact that Standard German and the various German dialects apparently don’t always agree on what the genders of nouns are. And no wonder – if it hasn’t got genitals, how can you really tell?
True story: a friend of my Aunt Hilda’s was, like Aunt Hilda, a native German speaker. When she would write the family, I noticed that she wrote English as a kind of literal translation from the German. German is, indeed, SOV (Subject, Object, Verb), whereas English is SVO (Subject, Verb, Object).
Then The Empire Strikes Back came out, with a little green Jedi master. I burst out laughing when he talked just like my Aunt’s friend wrote. My guess is Frank Richard Oznowicz, English-born son of a Dutch/Polish father and Flemish mother, had heard exactly the same SOV-in-English as a child as I did, and decided Yoda’s native language was SOV. Considering Yoda’s face was partly modeled after Albert Einstein’s, it makes even more sense (although Einstein himself had no trouble adopting English’s SVO structure correctly).
1) You could ask the fork how ze identifies at that moment.
or
2)Ask the “genitalless” within earshot so as not to offend Them… er, zir.
The serious context of the language wars is the inability or the refusal of too many blacks to use standard English.
It’s unnecessarily difficult for blacks to whom studying is “acting white” and speaking standard English is “talking white” to escape the underclass. It’s not so many years ago that some liberal linguists tried to foist “Ebonics” on us.
I haven’t read McWhorter’s book, but I’ve seen enough of him over the years to know that he is a fearless and intelligent advocate for most of what is right and good.
I suppose “supposably” is correct if you posit that there are some ideas which are supposable and others which are not, and you wish to refer only to that which can be supposed. “Supposably” is then the opposite of “unthinkably”. Supposably ;-)
And even though I’m a right-winger, I’m always in favor of speaking pacifically as opposed to belligerently. Teddy Roosevelt, sticks, and all that.
“You’ve got all the right verbs in all the right places.”
That’s a tricky one to parse, but I’d say it’s an adverb, used in what the dictionary calls a “completive use”–along the lines of “cross out”, “type out”, and “fight it out.”
Definitely not a preposition, since it has no object. It’s unlike, for instance, “he ran out the door.”
That’s a mute point.
Agreed. I really liked that one. BTW, in it he argues that English should drop the distinction between who and whom, as the language isn’t really case-based the way Latin and German are.
That’s because for native-speaking Germans, the social repercussions for screwing up the grammar are a lot bigger than they are in the US.
In almost every party I went to in Berlin, someone eventually hauled out a German grammar or a dictionary to settle a question of usage. Yes. Almost every party (guests ranged in age from early 20’s to mid-60’s).
That’s “he done run out’n the door”.
Some people just can’t get it right.
I am a big fan of Mc Whorter; even when I disagree with him I find him really interesting. This is a good piece : http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion.html. His BHTV spots with Glenn Loury are always worth watching.
I have posted about this on Ricochet countless times before. A preposition is a perfectly fine thing to end a sentence with. It is not something anyone should feel bad about. I wish people would stop telling others not to. Seems like an issue we should all be able to rise above. Or to put it another way, a taboo we can all move beyond. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.