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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
I also wish schools would teach English more like they teach a foreign language. I’m less keen on Latin specifically, though. (It’s possible, for example, to get the same case-gender confusion out of German, a living language. And I’ve heard Russian is even more heavily inflected.)
Not that Latin is bad. It’s great if you want to read stuff in Latin, for example. And anyone can learn the Latin suffixes, prefixes, and roots, without actually learning to speak the thing.
What narks me, though, about some believers in “you can’t learn good English without learning Latin” is that English isn’t Latin. The two languages are different. It’s awesome to know that people can form coherent thoughts under different linguistic rules, and it’s even awesomer to know how to do it. Mistaking one language’s rules for the rules of the other language: considerably less awesome.
MFR, I suffer from jealousy of people who studied Latin. I studied only French. I have not learned Latin. :) And I really wish I knew German and Russian–when my daughter was in high school, I was really impressed that Phillips Andover Academy had made Russian mandatory. Now we need to make Chinese mandatory. :)
That said, when I went to junior high school in the cave man era, in our seventh-grade English class we actually memorized Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes and root words, and then we spent half a year on Greek and Roman mythology. I can dissect most words just from that background. Then we memorized long lists of prepositions and irregular verbs. I understood objects and indirect objects from studying French, however, not English.
Knowing grammar and understanding how words are formed, I can work in a lot of subject areas because I can dissect the sentences and the words.
I think kids are frustrated readers today because they’ve never looked under the hood.
I agree that learning Latin is not necessarily helpful to learning English. It is very helpful, however, in learning the Romance languages.
I agree learning any Romance language will help you learn another. Latin is more heavily-inflected that the living Romance languages, so understanding Latin grammar is mercifully not necessary for understanding the considerably less-inflected grammar of its living descendants :-)
Why I love Ricochet. As of today, I shall throw off my wish-I-had-learned-Latin dismay. :) It wouldn’t have helped anyway!
My daughter studied Latin for a year in high school because she had had some trouble with Spanish. I thought it would cure it. She brought home her textbook–written by a guy at Harvard, no less, masters of the classics universe–and the first paragraph she had to translate had the word “television” in it. :)
When editors are fixing copy, they look at two things: sequence and logic. Usually we can clear away the fog with one of those two lenses.
Heavily
inflictedinflected languages “open the mind” in one way, but Chinese is a head-trip in the other direction:“You mean you don’t mark tense or plurals?” I remember asking a Mandarin-speaking friend, “Then how do you ever know what the [bleep] you’re talking about?!”
But they do.
I’ve heard people claim that the heavily-inflected languages are more “logical” than our own, but it’s not like the Chinese, who inflect even less than we do, are any less logical than we are – in fact, given how well Chinese students do in the STEM fields, one might be tempted to claim the opposite!
The many differing, successful ways in which humans can express their “mentalese” is truly astounding.
I’ve sent the last two months on a book translated from Chinese. I think the translator and I are finally working on the same team! :)
It was touch and go there for a while. :)
For a long time I was absolutely convinced within myself that spelling giftedness and a facility for grammar and punctuation were directly correlated to intelligence. Because…hey–I’ve got those. Ergo, smart. Woohoo!
Then I met my husband. The man cannot spell, cannot punctuate–but he is astonishingly well read. He is brimming over with common sense and street smarts. He’s just plain wise. (He’s also the guy you want standing next to you if you go into cardiac arrest or have been shot, stabbed, electrocuted, hacked by a machete, defenestrated…. So that’s helpful, too.)
If I could get him to embrace the Oxford comma on anything like a consistent basis, ours would be a marriage made in heaven.
MFR and MarciN:
I’ve gone rounds on the “Latin question” as well. On the one hand, a strong case can be made (and has been made, especially by Tracy Lee Simmons, whose book Climbing Parnassus is spectacular) that a classical education is defined as schooling in the classical languages. On the other hand…I never took Latin and am still a contributing member of society (most of the time). Greek is just probably not going to happen here at all.
I’ve gone two routes: My son is taking Latin; my daughter is studying Greek and Latin prefixes and roots. Time will tell…. In any case, they are BOTH studying English grammar. :) ~L
They are blessed with a smart mom! :)
I regret not taking Latin in high school. I thought one of the reasons it was taught was so you could suss out on your own the meanings of many English words.
True. A course in Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes can be quite useful, either integrated into the ordinary English curriculum or on its own. It is specifically when elements of Latin’s grammar (like “don’t split infinitives” because in Latin you can’t split infinitives) get misapplied in order to “better” English grammar that I get narked.
Even Douglas Adams, not generally a super-reverent guy, seems to have absorbed “don’t split infinitives” to the point that he’d rather write the occasional ugly and even confusing sentence than risk the split. I wish I could remember the examples. As it is, all I remember is this jarring feeling, like a lone eyeball on a stalk suddenly popping up from your soup.
So, I guess he can think. Can he convey a thought clearly, spoken or written?
(Probably because I’m not sloppy and untrained, and think before I speak and write) I have a hard time reading emails and papers written by people who can’t break their sentences into clauses for pauses, who use an unhyphenated string of four or five nouns as an adjective (it takes three readings to determine what the subject of the frakkin’ phrase is), or who use complex, canned expressions they use without thinking instead of a few, direct words that would very efficiently say exactly what they mean (e.g., “in terms of”: “the park is dangerous in terms of animals” instead of “the park has dangerous animals”).
Not from Douglas Adams, but it makes the point:
McWhorter transformed me…well, moderated me, really… into somewhat less of a judgmental grammar snob. Which is a good thing, since judgmental snobbery is unattractive in a woman of the cloth.
I guess I’d better read it.
Well, sometimes you’ve just got to have some faith!
Boy howdy.
True, but I do think at least learning some basic Latin vocabulary is immensely useful not only for understanding the roots of many English words, but also because so much technical vocabulary in some many fields is in or derived from Latin: philosophy, science, psychology, medicine, law, and so forth. Concepts like “ex post facto” laws or Freud’s “id, ego, and superego” are easier to understand and remember when you know what those words mean in Latin.
Definitely!
I hear you, Sister.
I give you now Professor Twist
The conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside
One day he missed his lovely bride.
His travel guide was scant grammatical:
“The park was dangerous in terms of animals.”
Offended by that grotesque prose style,
Twist threw his guide to the hungry crocodiles.
I agree McWhorter is outstanding. I’ve never read his books but I do have one of his Teaching Company courses. And I think he’s put out a few since that first one. Claire, you might want to look them up.
An oldie but goodie:
Last words of Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian: