LANGUAGE: CHECK YOUR USAGE AT THE DOOR
Incorrect grammar grates on the nerves like nothing else. But isn’t it great that English evolves in part by incorporating persistent errors? Anybody?
Incorrect grammar grates on the nerves like nothing else. But isn’t it great that English evolves in part by incorporating persistent errors? Anybody?
Stannis Baratheon is a hard man. The luckless Game of Thrones warrior wants to take the Iron Throne, and in his quest is guilty of all manner of horrors, even burning his own child. He punishes his best and only friend Ser Davos by cutting off four of his fingers. But there are some laws even cruel Stannis refuses to break. When Ser Davos shrugs off the loss of his fingers by joking that it gives him “less fingernails to clean,” Stannis frowns. “Fewer,” Stannis says. “Fewer fingernails to clean.”
Cut off your best friend’s fingers, sure. But please use proper grammar when referring to the stumps.
There are a lot of Stannis Baratheons around these days—so-called Grammar Nazis, ready to burn you at the stake for a misplaced apostrophe. And even if we’re not all card-carrying party members, most professional writers are at the very least Grammar Nazi sympathizers. English is our business. We have to care.
But what should we care about? Which battles are worth fighting and which are examples of misguided linguistic fundamentalism?
Like almost anyone else who uses words for a living, I cringe daily over the misuse of language. Egregious mistakes—confusing “their” and “there” or “your” and “you’re”—can be a death sentence for anyone’s credibility. To mount a proper argument you have to demonstrate basic grammatical competence.
But other obsessions are more arbitrary. “Decimate” is a word some linguistic purists have chosen to gripe about. They object to its common modern meaning: to destroy or seriously damage. Instead they claim for it a more specific meaning: to kill or destroy precisely one out of every 10. This, the purists claim, dates back to punishments administered by Roman legions, and is implied by the spelling—decimate, as in decimal, as in 10 per cent. There are two problems with this argument. One is that according to the Oxford
Dictionary, the earliest recorded English use of the word “decimate” means not to destroy but to tithe, or give a portion of one’s income. There is no record of the word being derived from punishments Roman or otherwise.
Secondly, that sort of fanaticism ignores the history of the English language. A quick perusal of the King James Bible will reveal the fluidity of English meanings over time. Many have puzzled over why Jesus would say “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” not knowing that when the King James Bible was published, “suffer” typically meant “allow.” The phrase “making love” looks shocking when encountered in a Jane Austen novel until one realizes that it once meant simply courting, flirting, pitching woo. Words evolve. Deal with it.
Still, most of us tend to have particular malapropisms that grate. I grimace whenever anyone says “harkens back” instead of “harks back.” To “hark back” means to return; to “harken” means to listen.
But why should I care? “Hark” and “harken” come from the same root—after all, “Hark!” also means “Listen!” It’s a distinction without much of a difference and after years of confusion the use of “harken back” is generally accepted.
I howl when sports announcers say “deceivingly,” as in “He’s a deceivingly fast skater.” “Deceptively!” I scream at the TV. “Deceptively fast!” But whether I like it or not, “deceivingly” is a word. And isn’t the more important issue whether the defenceman got back to his own end in time to break up the two-on-one? I know what the guy means.
When a Grammar Nazi selects a hill to die on, the chosen hill is generally Mount Slippery Slope. That’s the preferred metaphor for proper usage—if we let small mistakes and common errors go, we’ll slide into general illiteracy. For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost, etc.
This feeds into a larger narrative that is particularly pressing now. When Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway coined the unfortunate phrase “alternative
When a Grammar Nazi chooses a hill to die on, the chosen hill is Mount Slippery Slope.
facts,” she unwittingly crystallized a burgeoning fear over meaning and truth itself. Even the popular phrase “fake news” has become a point of contention. Widely used to describe bogus news stories disseminated on social media, it was quickly co-opted by others, including President Trump, to refer to any news story or opinion that one disagrees with. (I read one editorial describing Jane Fonda’s trip to the oil sands and her subsequent criticism of the project as “fake news,” as though Fonda had not actually boarded a plane and flown to Fort McMurray.)
Can reality be distorted by the insidious and insistent dissemination of falsehoods? If we buy into the argument that everyone has their own facts, their own version of the truth, do we risk a slide into totalitarianism? And if so, isn’t the misuse of language another path to the same terrible end? Shouldn’t we insist that words have specific meanings in order to prevent the distortion and co-option of language by would-be tyrants?
It’s an argument most famously made by George Orwell. The language of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984 is Newspeak. Big Brother declares that war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc. In his essay “Politics and the English Language” Orwell wrote: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
The ancient historian Tacitus said of the Romans: “To robbery, butchery and rapine they give the lying name of ‘government’: they create a desolation and call it peace.”
As we are rediscovering in 2017, it is in the interests of rulers to reshape the truth. Words must have meaning. Otherwise we lose the ability to dissent.
But grammatical purists can distort, too. As frustrating as bad grammar can be to a writer, just as frustrating are the readers determined to seize on minor typos and overlook larger points. Public arguments on important subjects often go off the rails when a desperate debater triumphantly jumps on some misuse or misspelling as evidence that the opponent’s entire argument is worthless. “Why should I pay attention to any argument you make,” they crow, “when you can’t even spell ‘fascist?’”
There are always crusaders who seek a convenient linguistic stick with which to wage holy war. The Grammar Nazi is a party member and there’s no sense joining a party if there are no outsiders to battle. Grammar fanatics sometimes remind me of photo buffs who care more about camera equipment than the actual photos.
Perspective is key. Does it matter whether Joe Sports uses “deceptive” or “deceiving”? Nope. Does it matter whether I use “no” or “nope”? Nein. Does it matter whether Donald Trump is saying “bigly” or “big league”? No biggie. Does it matter that he appears to have the vocabulary of a fourth grader, an inability to comprehend the U.S. Constitution, and recently referred to a respected member of the judiciary as a “so-called judge”? Damn right. We need to pick our battles. As the group Vampire Weekend sang: “Who gives a (bleep) about an Oxford comma?” A lot of people. But at the moment we have bigger problems.