Grammar? It’s just snobbery in disguise

MARCUS BERKMANN

YET another book about the English language? It seems to me that as the general literacy of the population declines, so more and more books about language are appearing for the fewer and fewer people who can actually read them. Notice I said ‘fewer and fewer’ there. If I’d said ‘less and less’, I would now be running in fear of my life.

Grammar has become a hot potato, though, for this very reason. Whole generations have grown up not really knowing what an adjective is. It’s the generations above who seem to be buying old-fashioned grammar books. And if these books give them something else to beat up younger generations with, so much the better.

Harry Ritchie, though, doesn’t care for old-fashioned grammar books. He finds them too concerned with what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’. As a result, everyone thinks of grammar as ‘a weird combination of finicky word usage and obscure social etiquette, like knowing how to address a viscount or where to place the sorbet spoons’. But grammar shouldn’t be defined by the rules of its self-appointed guardians. It’s determined by us, native English speakers, the people who use it every day.

So what’s wrong with saying ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘it is to be hoped that’, which is how almost everyone uses it now?

The new use of the word is popular, says Ritchie, ‘because it works so neatly and effectively’. What it comes down to, says Ritchie, is snobbery. Supposedly heinous sins against English grammar — saying ‘Him and me are going to the seaside’ — are sins of class before anything. Ritchie distinguishes between standard grammar — posh middleclass English of a type what I do speak — and non-standard, which covers the multitude of dialects on these i slands and elsewhere. Each, he says, is completely valid. Much of what we think of as ‘correct’ grammar is the written equivalent of elocution lessons.

Along Ritchie’s way, he explodes all the l i ttle ‘ rules’ that aren’t rules at all. Yes, you can start a sentence with a conjunction (as I have done several times in this piece). Yes, you can end sentences with a preposition. And there ain’t nothing wrong with double negatives.

In fact, only on the vexed question of the split infinitive is Ritchie anything less than robust. People who know nothing about grammar know that split infinitives are wrong, and froth from the mouth whenever Star Trek comes on. (‘To boldly go …’) But this was the judgment of a single ‘completely barking’ Victorian grammarian. There was no linguistic justification for it, and grammarians old school and new agree that split infinitives do no one any harm at all. Ritchie still suggests not using them, mainly to avoid argument. Avoid argument? Where’s the fun in that?

For despite the apparent dryness of the subject, this is a hugely entertaining read, full of attitude and verve and sharp running jokes. And underneath all this lies rigorous linguistic heft, which gives the book real authority. At last I know that when I ask ‘How are you?’ and someone says ‘I’m good’ instead of ‘I’m well’, it’s my own snobbery that makes me want to stab them, rather than their grammatical inexactitude. It’s an advance of sorts, I suppose.