Pedants’ revolt? Just be glad we’re still using words at all
COLUMNIST
SO should there be a Pedants’ Revolt in response to the shocking revelation this week that split infinitives are becoming the norm?
Depends on the strength of your inner Grammar Nazi, I suppose. As the daughter of a headmaster who corrected almost every sentence our young mouths chirped, mine is pretty hefty. (“Wassamarrar Dad?” Cue frosty riposte with rolled eyes: “A ‘marrar’ is a vegetable.”)
That kind of upbringing leaves its mark. When I endured a digital dumping, for example, I was yanked momentarily from my heartbroken torment to ponder the grammatical howler in the departing significant other’s opening line: “Dear Carolyn, this is my last and final email...”
“Last and final”? No wonder we were doomed. How could I even have contemplated a relationship with someone who doesn’t know the meaning of tautology?
Yet let she who is without syntax errors cast the first correction. I am wary of devoting an entire column to the use of the English language when I’ve made some monumental cock-ups myself on the printed page, not least spelling fluoride wrong in 72pt on the front page splash of the Neath Guardian in 1991.
An irate Western Mail reader also took the time some years ago to admonish me via a lengthy missive to the Letters Page on my habit of starting a new sentence with a conjunction. He had no truck with my defence that this was pacy journalese rather than a grammar by-pass. As far as he was concerned there were no ifs or buts. And definitely no ands.
People love a good gripe about grammar. Or a punctuation punchup. Or, as I discovered recently, an interminable row about the use of the definite article. All I did was paste on Facebook that I had enjoyed a nice day recording on The Gower. If I did.
There followed a social media spat that lasted the best part of a week as friends divided furiously into two camps – those who believed it’s “The Gower” and those who say it’s simply “Gower.”
Who cares? I certainly didn’t after reading 19 posts complete with corroborating links to Wikipedia. Having said that, I would still lie down in the middle of Treorchy High Street if someone dared to remove the “The” from The Rhondda.
Yet as this week’s debate on the split infinitive has demonstrated, the rules of language can be flexible rather than fixed. Even Shakespeare – who had a better grasp of what to do with words than most – was laid back about language laws. He couldn’t even decide how to spell his name. To be fair to the Bard, however, Johnson didn’t write his dictionary until 1755. And by the 19th and early 20th centuries the grammarians had exerted their grip on our expression of the written and spoken word. Yet language loopholes could still be found.
Grammar guru Otto Jespersen, writing as far back as 1909, declared that English grammar was “not a set of stiff dogmatic precepts, according to which some things are correct and others absolutely wrong; but was living and developing, founded on the past but preparing the way for the future, something that is not always consistent or perfect, but progressing and perfectible – in one word, ‘human’”.
So is it all about how we actually use language (descriptive) rather than how we should use language (prescriptive)? That certainly seems to be the case for the split infinitive. Researchers have suggested teachers no longer have to advise pupils against splitting infinitives because they are now in common parlance.
Experts at Lancaster and Cambridge University Press drew on the largest ever public collection of transcribed British conversations – some 11.5 million words - to analyse the invasion of the split infinitive since the 1990s.
They discovered its usage has grown from 44 words per million to 117 per million. “The rise of the split infinitive is just one example of language phenomena which some commentators might not like, but which are becoming a normal part of everyday speech,” said Dr Claire Dembry, principal research manager at Cambridge University Press.
We could have saved them all this meticulous study. It’s obvious the split infinitive has been on the march since Star Trek. Once Captain Kirk implored his crew “to boldly go where no-one has gone before” there was no going back for our grammar rules, as well as the Starship Enterprise.
The iconic William Shatner narration is the perfect illustration of the need to be flexible, because this “wrong” version sounds right. The correct version “to go boldly where no-one has gone before” just doesn’t have the same impact.
According to Kingsley Amis – who, incidentally, taught my grammarobsessed dad at Swansea University – “the split infinitive is the best known of the imaginary rules that petty linguistic tyrants seek to lay upon the English language.”
There are certainly far more heinous crimes that would merit a Pedants’ Revolt. The misplaced apostrophe, for example – scourge of countless white van signwriters and ranting Twitter trolls.
The same study that unearthed the invasion of the split infinitive has also tracked the ubiquity of the word “like” in modern speech. Try asking anyone under 30 to construct a sentence without the quite redundant use of “like”. They would feel grammatically grounded. The chances of any millennial getting by without “like” are extremely ... unlikely.
Dubious jargon and cringeworthy clichés can be even worse than dodgy grammar. On Planet Journalese, police always make “grim discoveries” yet when is the unearthing of a body ever a vaguely pleasant experience? Councils, meanwhile, always give the “green light” to “controversial plans” even though “local residents are up in arms”.
On the back pages, where men of matches declare themselves to be “literally over the moon” injured team-mates are “crocked”, a word no-one would ever apply to a groin strain beyond a sports section.
Going forward, as they say, political and corporate double-speak remains the worst abuse of language. “A funding stream” is what we used to call money, and “outcomes” were once results that could be measured, rather than “benchmarked.”
And perhaps my blue-sky thinking is a little clouded, but I’m still not sure what “mainstreaming”; “contestability” and “pathfinder” actually mean and why we can’t just say “working together” rather than “stakeholder engagement”?
Yet let’s not forget - as the researchers told us this week - that “language is constantly changing”. With technology in the mix that’s quite a disturbing prospect. The spoken and written word is at the mercy of the smartphone generation. Yikes. Linguistically speaking, we could be boldly going where no-one has gone before...to face a future where communication is confined to indecipherable text-speak and a limited selection of emojis.
So however poor the punctuation, grammar and spelling let’s just be grateful we’re still using words at all.