Grammar Nazism is misguided snobbery
In which I very obviously bait pedants.
Spelling and grammar are in decline, right? Textspeak and emoji are ruining English, no-one can write properly any more and everything’s going to the dogs.
That’s a pretty common argument you hear, accompanied by either righteous indignation about the standard of teaching, or hand-wringing about the future of our great literary culture.
There’s just one small problem with the idea that the standard of English is in decline: it’s total nonsense.
Literacy rates in the English speaking world have been rocketing for the last hundred years and show no signs of slowing down. More people write than ever before, and more of us are reading than ever before. (Generally global literacy is on the up too, it’s not just an English thing.)
This myth isn’t new.
In a manual on teaching English from 1961, the author complained that: “Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.”
In the early 18th century, Jonathan Swift wrote extensively about the “disgrace of our language” (brought about by new words like bubble and shuffling).
And 4,000 year old clay tablets from ancient Sumeria record: “the agonised complaints of a Sumerian teacher about the sudden drop-off in students’ writing ability.”
Every generation (wrongly) believes that the one that comes after is desecrating language. I’m looking forward to pedants of the future decrying that kids these days don’t know their see-no-evil monkey from their speak-no-evil monkey.
Language evolves. It always has, and it always will. The foaming anger at new words coming into the dictionary, or words changing their meaning (the supposed misuse of ‘literally’ being a prime example), just shows that people don’t understand what a dictionary is. It’s not a list of how people should use words, it’s a list of how people do use words. That’s why it gets updated — to reflect our actual language.
The word awful used to mean ‘worthy of awe’, and then did a complete about face. And the word hussy comes from housewife, and referred to the respectable lady of the household. It’s changed a bit since then, eh.
There’s no fixed and eternal English grammar either, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you their grammar guide. (The fact that there’s more than one grammar guide kinda kills the idea that there’s one correct English grammar, innit…)
Lots of the rules we take as gospel today are personal prejudice masquerading as linguistic fact. Most of what we consider proper English grammar was first set down in the 18th and 19th centuries by men who daftly believed it was possible to fix the rules of English for all time, and that they alone had the intellect for the task:
Every self-appointed purifier of English had an idiosyncratic list of objectionable words and expressions.
Many grammarians … based their pronouncements wholly upon personal preferences, based on some form of logic or analogy or even some feature of their own dialect.
(Source: The Rise of Prescriptivism in English)
That’s how a lot of grammar pedants approach the rules these days; cherry-picking the ‘offences’ they personally dislike and ignoring the obvious truth: if millions of people use a word a certain way, then that’s clearly an acceptable way to use it.
Take the idea that it’s somehow wrong to say ‘I have less apples than you’ (instead of ‘I have fewer apples than you’). In both cases anyone who speaks English knows exactly what I mean: the number of apples I have is smaller than the number of apples you have. Since my meaning is perfectly clear, I haven’t made a mistake. I’ve just deviated from what some people consider proper usage.
Or the entirely ridiculous notion that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition (a word like ‘in’, ‘to’, ‘on’ or ‘with’). People have been ending sentences with prepositions in English for hundreds of years, and the idea that it’s incorrect didn’t even exist until the mid-18th century, when a bunch of pompous self-appointed grammarians decided it wasn’t allowed and went around fixing their own writing where they’d been happily doing it themselves until they decided it was wrong.
That isn’t to say that anyone can say anything in a big linguistic free-for-all. There are plenty of conventions we all follow that help us understand each other, and it’s useful to know what they are so you don’t accidentally say something you didn’t mean to. But none of those conventions are immutable. Over time they’ve almost all changed, and will keep changing.
Raging against things that almost everyone does is futile, because that pace of change is picking up too. The internet means we’re all writers now, and we’re all exposed to more new words, dialects and linguistic structures than ever before. That’s a beautiful thing — it means we all have more ways to express ourselves and engage each other. So the next time you’re tempted to ‘correct’ someone’s grammar, ask yourself what you’re really reacting against, and whether you’re actually helping anyone.
I’ll leave the final word to Stephen Fry:
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.
