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A Grammarian’s Lament
In their appeal to the common reader, grammar books probably fall somewhere between the little pamphlets with a list of warnings that come with power tools (“Don’t put your hand into the path of the bandsaw”) and the stapled pages of how-to instructions for crocheting penises (“Knit one and purl two, perv!” See postscript.)
About fifty years ago when I still had ideals and ambition, I put my heart and soul into writing a grammar book. My sole surviving copy is a bit worn and shabby, but here’s what it now looks like.
Yes, I can conjugate the hell out of verbs and you can’t. (Ok, what’s the past participle of lay? How about the future perfect continuous of sidle? OK, I don’t know that one, but I think I knew it once.)
You may spend your days emulating the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi, but that will not save you from grammarians. We lay waste to all ambitions, moral and otherwise, and only find our true selves in pettiness.
You may have written a brilliant essay in which you prove, once and for all, the existence of God, but a grammarian can ruin your feeling of accomplishment by pointing out that you used I when you should have used me. How can a writer prove that there is a God, the grammarian asks rhetorically, when Mr. Would-Be Theologian doesn’t even know that I is a nominative pronoun and that me is an object pronoun and therefore follows a transitive verb or is the object of a preposition? (The misuse of I for me is sometimes termed, by grammarians, a case of pompous over-correction. The word I always sounds more refined than the humble me — and therefore seems correct, even when ungrammatical, to the linguistically challenged.)
Enough of that. I sense your eyes have already begun to glaze over. Here follows a few solicisms that harsh this grammarian’s mellow. (Thanks again, Doc Jay, wherever you are, for that mellifluous phrase.)
Mrs. She always writes rings around me — and most everyone else — but I caught her using disinterested for uninterested on her last post. Yes, yes, I know, that particular usage has been violated so often in these modern days of loose morals and lax standards that it now shows up — mon Dieu! — as standard usage in dictionaries and grammar books.
But not mine. In the good old days when real men still drove big, American, eight-cylinder Detroit iron, disinterested meant unbiased, not uninterested. Alas, we now drive little Japanese cars and write, “I was totally disinterested in playing marbles when I was a kid.” So we’ve lost a useful distinction between two words that were once disparate but which have now, unfortunately, merged. Shape up, She.
Here are a few other solecisms that frost my cookies:
• The confusion of lie and lay. Your purse lies on the table. It doesn’t lay there. When you place it there, you are laying it there. I corrected my wife Marie a few times on this, but I could see that she was becoming annoyed. So before I think about correcting her these days, I first tell myself that discretion is the better part of valor. And that keeping one’s mouth shut is the better part of a marriage.
• It’s used for its. It’s is a contraction, not a possessive pronoun. This error shows up with some regularity on Ricochet.
• A semi-colon used as a colon. A semi-colon is related to a period, not a colon. It’s also not a small intestine.
I’m also annoyed by sportscasters who say, “There was a huge differential between the two scores.” In their pomposity, sportscasters have a fondness for differential over the simple and direct difference. Howard Cosell used to set my teeth on edge.
Grammar is a noble undertaking. At its most basic and useful, it describes standard language usage. I think W.B. Yeats was thinking about the decline of a knowledge of grammar when he wrote these famous lines:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . .
Whenever you write a post for Ricochet, I silently (except for my comments on Mrs. She) take note of your grammatical, rhetorical, and lexicographical failings. For the time being, you’re safe — I would not be so crass as to point publicly to your errors — but you will be punished for them in the afterlife.
Postscript: Crocheted penises are apparently a thing. Etsy, the website full of handmade goods, contains page after page of crocheted penises — from penis toothpaste holders to penis hats, from penis masks to penis cat toys, from penis pillows to penis potholders. It’s easy to imagine a circle of women sitting around giggling as they crochet these various iterations of penises. I came across a pair of penis slippers that are so handsome that I thought I’d share the above photo with you.
I found a few crocheted penises that were to be used as a faux phalli, one of which was designed for transsexuals as young as five. With a little crocheted penis strapped on, your little trans toddler can walk around confidently with a stylish bulge in his/her little trousers.
No one worries about split infinitives except the fearful and the overly punctilious.
Interesting way of teaching grammar. I’ve never heard of that technique before.
I assumed that the subject was “a few solicisms.” As in, “A few solicisms follow here.”
Or, “A few solicisms follow:”
I heard Steve Inman use the verb “commentate” today.
Or vice-versa?
When I first read this I thought it was a full sentence.
I wince when I do it, but it reads so much better. And then I think of “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put” and split them.
For your next book:
Jerry Lewis was the worst offender at this: “This means so much to she and I”.
But that’s OK when Alabama does it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FgZNo5j7I
Its not.
It totally grates on me, but I have found numerous professional writers who either have editors who do not care, or they AND their editors do not care. A sentence like this: John was uncomfortable, because his teammates were all taller than him. Shouldn’t that be “taller than he”? I learned way back in school in the 1960s to add the missing “is/was” to that sentence internally, to show what was correct. Just recently, Daniel Silva made that mistake, as did John Steele Gordon in books I have been reading. Every time I find an author making that error, I wince. Has the rule changed, or are current writers neglectful?
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Papa John’s that had the subject, “You’re party, our pizza” . . .
It always surprises me that no one catches something like that before it leaves the ad agency. Or perhaps the company allows the local stores to make small announcements.
Like Rob once commented on franchise owners on the ad:
Why not just show them the burger?
Why? No one proofreads anymore. My guess is that both copywriters and editors are products of the public schools where accurate spelling is considered discriminatory. Boy, does that date us!
I usually do a cursory review whenever I make a post or comment. But I really wish the bar at the top of the comment box had a spell checker . . .
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
I think autocorrect is a bigger problem than the lack of a spell checker. It regularly baffles me that I can type something like gumtwazzle and autocorrect correctly renders what I meant to type, perhaps finagle, but if I miss one letter in a commonly used word, such as puzxle it will cheerfully ask me, “did you mean roadkill?”
The problem with it’s/its, you’re/your, their/they’re/there, etc. is that they’re not caught by the spell checker, unless it’s really good good at context checking as well, and the problem with proofreading isn’t so much that it’s not done, as I think it is that the people doing it are only marginally literate themselves.
Um, I’m pretty sure I recall our local newspaper editor explaining, back in the 90s, that the level of proofreading that used to be done just isn’t going to happen again in the business. There just isn’t enough time and money for it. He was a very good editor, himself, even though he was a liberal. I used to study the edits he made to my letters to the editor to learn how to improve my own writing. When he got out of the business, his replacement would just print my letters, un-edited. I quit writing them. And the paper is now a left-wing hate sheet. At least it was the last time I looked at it, which was years ago.
Spell check saves me form a lot of embarrassment.
Don’t do a rewrite – that will be its selling point!
Have you looked at The Transitive Vampire?
It is a matter of decriminalization of bad grammar. Without effective proactive policing, this is the sort of civilizational decline we get.
Your rubber; I, myself, am glue.
Or perhaps they’ve discovered that grammarians don’t eat much pizza.
A trans vampire? Count Dragula?