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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
Now let’s try it the other way.
I have posted about this on Ricochet countless times before present. A preposition is a perfectly fine thing with which to end a sentence. It is not something about which anyone should feel bad. I wish people would stop telling other not to end sentences with prepositions. Seems like an issue above which we should all be able to rise. Or to put it another way, a taboo beyond which we can all move. It’s nothing of which to be ashamed.
Puke.
Well, at least you didn’t try to stupidly split an infinitive.
We prefer to boldly spit them.
I would put him in the same category of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
My Dear Dr. Berlinski,
https://youtu.be/zZ3fjQa5Hls
Regards,
Jim
And in German, sometimes even the genitals don’t help you! “The girl,” is “das Madchen,” neuter article. (Sorry I don’t have the umlaut on my iPad.).
Perhaps I’m not qualified to critique your post, but is this really a case of poor grammar? The sentence “Who do you think you are to critique me?” is grammatically correct, if the word “critique” is misused that’s a confusion of vocabulary, not grammar.
Or is it a question of syntax? I say this because critique is a noun that became a verb much like all the annoying corporate speak these days such as leverage.
Really? That’s a very unusual mistake for a native speaker to make. I don’t think I can recall ever hearing a native speaker make it. Do you make other atypical mistakes?
I’m curious about how your brain might be wired up.
I’ve made that mistake before. The error is in choosing the wrong relational noun, not the pronoun. As I’m thinking that the relationship between John and Sally is that John is Sally’s boyfriend, I introduce Sally by saying, “This is Sally, John’s boyfriend”.
Alright, the jig is up. Let’s work this out.
The confusion here is between true prepositions and phrasal verbs containing particles that are used adverbially — which are, confusingly, known as prepositional verbs, but they’re not true prepositions. Examples: carry on, looking after, picked on, take over, fall over, ran into, passes for, dress down, hang out, put up, etc. The verb and the particle are a single semantic unit that can’t be understood independently.
Such constructions are the bane of the lives of ESL teachers and students alike. English is miserably full of them and they are all irregular and must all be memorized; they make no sense; they follow no rules; and anyone who thinks the French are just out to annoy them with their gendered forks has never tried to find an easy way to teach this system of random linguistic madness to some poor, bewildered ESL student. Try it. Explain why “You can bank on Susan. Think it over,” sounds right to you, but, “You can bank in Susan. Think it on” does not.
My grandfather, who lived in the US for almost sixty years, went to his death saying that he was “pissed up.” Obviously, what he meant was that he was “pissed off.” None of us would have dared to correct his grammar when he was pissed off — you didn’t mess with my grandfather when he was angry — so he never learned.
Anyway, neither is a sentence that ends with a true preposition (those are, generally, awkward and best avoided). Clearly, only one of them would sound correct to a native speaker.
Carry on,
Claire
Flexible is our language, permissive in the placement and order of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but especially prepositions (or is it prepositions especially?) which we are told we should not end a sentence with. One man’s opinion does not a rule make or break.
Most supposed corrections to the “improper” terminal preposition (whether phrasal or true preposition) are merely poor rearrangements of a sentence obviously cast naturally the first time. Re-writing does not mean shuffling the magnets around the fridge. Many times, if a sentence is misbehaving, the paragraph needs work.
Example: I don’t think that’s the drawer I left my keys in.
Poor correction: I don’t think that’s the drawer in which I left my keys.
Better correction: Pretty sure my keys are not in that drawer.
Best: Honey! Where the *** are my keys?!
In the U.K. and Canada, “pissed” means drunk. Maybe rather than being angry, he was just feeling tipsy.
I have a fondness for “whom,” but, alas, it seems to be used primarily in error (to my ear the worst cases involve using “whom” as the subject) so I suppose it should just tuck its tail and depart. I don’t think, though, that I’ll ever be able to write “To Who It May Concern.”
With regard to the question of snobbery and prejudice, I notice that both qualities are in abundance concerning a myriad of objects. The question is only which side one is permitted to adopt. One is barely permitted to defend good usage, but a prejudice in favor of “whatever works” is fine.
Bah. They only “became verbs” in the addled minds of those misusing them. I don’t even care if the dictionary says they’re verbs.
It’s my prerogative as a nascent geezer obstinately to maintain they’re not.
I’m surprised you trust the photos, Mike. Any girl can buy a cheerleader outfit, y’know.
Did your grandfather live long enough to hear the president of the United States say, ‘There’s something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.”
Claire,
I Professor Harold (Ramis) Hill can easily teach them by the “think” system.
Regards,
Jim
Sure. But it’s hard to hide much in a cheerleader outfit.
It’s the internet. Your picture doesn’t actually have to be a picture of you.
You mean that you don’t have llllooooonnnnnggggg skinny neck?
My grandma, a grammatical stickler who, though not a native English speaker, nonetheless spoke English almost perfectly, also had a few of these.
I think our favorite was potato-couches. She despised potato-couches. What was great about this particular reversal is how little sense it made – and she was always on everyone’s case for not making enough sense. Describing a lazy TV-watcher as a vegetable who never gets off the couch (couch-potato) makes sense. Describing such a person as a couch for potatoes makes none.
And she hated having this reversal pointed out to her – perhaps because such an involuntary reversal on her part flew in the face of her insistence that there is no such thing as a mental slipup that cannot be consciously controlled.
Oh yes! My whole family does to some extent, and I managed to marry a guy who makes even more than I do, though his errors are of a somewhat different type.
Alleged dyslexia runs on both sides of the family. It’s not so much a reading thing, but confusing any “opposites”, including spatially, though otherwise our spatial skills are quite good. Left/right, before/after, male/female, direct-object/indirect-object, yes/no… If you ask me to put away a pint of ice cream and a can of soup, usually the ice cream ends up in the freezer and the soup in the cupboard, but it’s rather hit-or-miss.
I suppose you could call it mild anomia. Well-formed syntactic structure must be also populated with the right words in order to make sense. Not recalling the right word in time results in circumlocution or Mad-Libs.
Curious as in concerned? You would not be the first person ;-)
When I’m estimating my grocery total in the check-out line, I’ll often subtract instead of add some amount — or vice versa if I’m using arithmetic shortcuts — and come up with the wrong total — and then question the cashier. I’m sort of adding from the hip, in a hurry.
Don’t I know it. The long chains of trig identities in physics might have been the worst. When you’ve spent hours literally not seeing a mistaken transcription of +/- or sin/cos…
Though finding yourself in the middle of a field, looking for a building that cannot exist because you transposed the digits in an address even though you knew you’re prone to that mistake, so you checked the digits one-by-one like a million times… Yeah, that happened to me last week.
Thank you!
There is an underlying logic to language–as unbelievable as that may sound. :) It is not arbitrary. It reads like a mathematical equation. In fact, I can edit math equations because I understand how the English language works.
I have always found it interesting that when I correct the grammar, the logic is suddenly correct also. Or not! When I can’t, the problem is deeply embedded in the thoughts the writer is expressing.
The bane of my editing life are verb tenses. Writers handle the simple tenses very easily–past, present, and future. But when writers move into the past and try to describe past, present, and future within the past, wow, it can get very messy. It is clear they do not know how many verbs they have to work with back there. They bring only their scant knowledge of the the simple tenses, so they get lost trying to describe the past.
I wish schools would teach (a) Latin and (b) English–that is, teach English as if they were teaching a foreign language, complete with long lists of verb declensions and irregular verbs.
We could clear up a lot of confusion.
:)