An Open Letter to Grammar Pedants

Last time, I had quite a bit to say about the things that don't appear on my Facebook feed. This time, in the best tradition of crowd-sourcing ideas from the internet, I'm going to talk about something that does appear on my Facebook, and, as opposed to all that Britain First nonsense that I'm not really that invested in, this time it's something that's very close to my heart: grammar pedantry.

What I'm not talking about is grammar Nazism. I really don't like that phrase, and in any case it refers more to people who weaponise pedantry as a type of non sequitur counterargument. Nothing to say in response to someone? Criticise the shape they presented it in, not the point itself. No, grammar Nazis are, by and large, dipshits, and they're not my indented audience. But they come from the same source as the more casual pedants that I am in mind of, the people who keep popping up on my feeds and smugly reposting infographics about the correct uses of their/there/they're like it's a mark of betterment.

Case in point. You don't gotta be a dick about it.

At the heart of all this is prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is a particular school of grammar that we all, unavoidably, come across in our lives, because it's the one that is taught to us. In school, we learn that there are correct ways of doing things, and that certain things are just straight up wrong. Their, there and they're all serve specific purposes and are not interchangeable. That's how it is, and for most people, that's how it ends. This sort of thinking tends to dovetail with ideas about the correctness of 'standard English' and thus the comparative 'wrongness' of colloquialisms and dialects, further imprinting ideas about what is essentially 'right' in our heads as we grow up. And from there, we regurgitate what we've learned back onto others, sometimes just to prove them wrong.

But that's not the full story, guys! Prescriptivism isn't the only way of looking at grammar. Elsewhere, there is the descriptive approach, which doesn't set out to enforce rules, but simply comments on how grammar actually works and what people do with it, regardless of whether the 'rules' are obeyed or not. There's a particular example that I've seen come up quite a few times, and which serves to demonstrate this quite well. It's the curious case of 'should of'.

Prescriptively speaking, the correct form of the auxiliary here is 'should have', as in 'I should have used should have correctly'. Yet lots of people are saying 'should of', instead. Why are they doing that? Why won't they stop being so belligerently wrong? Well, maybe they're not wrong? 'Should of' comes from how it and 'should've', the generally accepted contraction of 'should have', are basically interchangeable in spoken English. Spoken English is the most flagrant abuser of the 'rules' - and the sorest point of contention for me when people try to apply them - but it's also the kind of English we encounter the most. Of course particular elements of that would leak back into the written word. And this is where descriptivism comes in; this particular development is fascinating, and a marker of our language's most potent ability, its ability to change. 'Should of' angers people because they think it's wrong, but actually, it's just our language, doing its thing. We should embrace it, not shun it.

This is from Grammarly,
the 21st century equivalent of  'Fragment: Consider Revising'.
Don't take it as law.

Who do self-righteous images like this save the English Language from, then? No-one owns English but us, i.e. everyone who ever spoke it. There is no supreme arbiter of right and wrong; when you pass judgement on people who you believe to be speaking incorrectly, you're stepping into the shoes of a judge who doesn't even exist. The 'rules' as we understand them came about from collective usage, from the constant of change; eventually, enough people started doing a thing a certain way that it just became the way it is. 'Infographic' didn't used to be a word (Chrome's spellcheck still refuses to recognise it as such). Once, the idea of a verb called 'Google' was unthinkable. Stick to the rules too hard, and these things don't happen. A language that doesn't change is a language that stagnates, and a language that stagnates is a language that dies. Ultimately, if you're championing prescriptivist approaches on things as petty as 'should of', then you're strangling your own language.


Okay, so that's a little bit drastic. I'm not saying that we should all embrace the anarchic science of descriptivism, and let all the rules go in favour of just watching what happens. Most of the 'rules' are still very important; the reason that we learn English through a prescriptive lens as we grow up, and particularly as a foreign language, is because it's the best bloody way to. If we lived in a world where English was completely DIY.. well then no-one would have any idea what the fuck anyone else was talking about. So no, my point here isn't that we should throw out prescriptivism; it has its place, just as descriptivism does. I just want to point out that there is another way. English works on a constant cycle of cause and effect between these two approaches, with the rules informing our observations, and our observations leading to new rules. In this mish-mash, your prescriptivism is important, but it's only half of the story. So please, don't feel obliged to bring the force of your scorn down on every error you encounter, because half the time, when you think something is wrong, it might just be that it's different.

And if you're hating on something because it's different, well, then you are a Nazi.

Newspeak vs. my Facebook feed

Last night I went to see a theatrical production of George Orwell's 1984, and it was pitch-perfect in the exact way that it should have been: a black-as-all-hell rendition of a state that commands absolute power, a surreal, cerebral lens of study for totalitarianism and all the awful things that come with it. It was my first time truly engaging with 1984 as an adult: I read it once when I was a teenager, when angst and rebellion were right up my alley, but in the time since then everything but the most cursory details of the plot had fallen away from my mind, thus enabling it to be thoroughly blown anew.

In a telling tale of how my priorities have shifted, the main thing I took away from 1984 this time around was not a rousing round of 'woo fuck the system', but a serious gnawing horror about the very idea of Newspeak. For those who aren't aware, in 1984 'Newspeak' is what the ruling party call the new language they are building, a severely reduced version of English that serves to reduce the population's ability to form contrary opinions by taking away their ability to vocalise them. In Newspeak, the word 'free' does not include the definition 'able to consider opinions other than those that the ruling class beams into your head'; the only meaning that the party allows it in the sense in which we might say 'this cat is free of fleas'. Semantically, we can argue for a similarity, but the characters of 1984 can't, because the alternative meaning has already been crushed out of existence.

Y'all probably know already that I'm a massive fanboy for the sheer capability of language, for the infinite amount of expression that it allows, so you can probably imagine my reaction to the idea of taking a purposefully reductionist approach to it, of chopping off bits you don't like, shaping it into  form that benefits you and you alone. It makes me goddamn mad, all the more so because it isn't just a fictional conceit; this shit happens all the time. I've been especially aware of it of late because of the recent UK Labour party's leadership election, because of poor Jeremy Corbyn, who suffered through a deluge of shit from pretty much the entirety of the UK media in order to get elected nonetheless; for the past month or two it has been pretty much impossible to swing a cat round in journalistspace without whacking it against someone who was lining up a shot at Corbyn. The spin is everywhere.

Check this out:

Notice how 'I've no interest in being part of a cabinet and have held this position for decades' becomes, with but a deft revision, 'this man would not take a job from Jeremy Corbyn'. I mean both things are ostensibly true, but one is a neutral fact that only speaks of Skinner's character, and the other is positioned to be an attack of Corbyn's legitimacy as a leader. And even that is build on the false dichotomy that there's a difference between 'working' for Corbyn, and being an MP in the Labour party. The two are one and the same, unless they can be used to make an anti-Corbyn point: then, words can only mean one thing. Newspeak, bitches.

I mean good grief. Now I'm not an out-and-out Corbyn fanboy, but the more of this sort of crap I see, the more I want him to carry on upending this system - as Skinner quite cathartically does above. It's not just the right-wing media that's on with this either; even institutions like the BBC, which I previously considered to be fairly even handed, and which you wouldn't expect to have much love for a Tory government, are getting in on this action. Even the Guardian, one of the few left-leaning media institutions I thought I could trust, was full of pieces from 'big' names like David Miliband doomsaying the prospect of a Corbyn government, for reasons that I can only assume are borne from fear of him being too liberal to win anything. And yet, as these articles were appearing, it was becoming increasingly apparent that he was going to win the shit out of that election.

And that's what gives me hope. For all the endless spin and bullshit that the media tries to pour into our ears, there are increasingly things happening that give me hope that we're not going to go the Newspeak route, that the people of the world are getting increasingly pissed off by this nonsense. There are smart people out there who won't stand for it any longer, like Dennis Skinner above, and like this dude:

Both this video and the proceeding one came from, you may be surprised to hear, my Facebook feed. Judging from some folks who I've spoken to, there's been a marked increase in recent months of reposted bullshit - namely niche, Britain First-esque nonsense like repurposed nationalist images accompanied by completely fabricated anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-whatever messages designed to provoke defensive, xenophobic responses. I don't know if that's true of your Facebook, but, actually, it isn't of mine! Instead, my Facebook trades in the exact opposite of this: mostly informative, progressive stuff that either satirises the aforementioned content or condemns it, pleading with the kind of people who post it to please, please, think for yourselves. Add that to stuff like the tidal wave of amusing memes that have arisen from David Cameron's pig-gate scandal, refreshingly transferring the shoe to the other foot for a change, and, well, it's good for the soul.

Of course, this isn't Facebook's own doing. But it provided the platform for all of the excellent people I know to object to all the crap that self-serving idiots would have us believe. The poor doomed characters of 1984 didn't have that. They'd lost all means by which they could object to the bullshit they were being spoon-fed; their only rebellions were petty, individualistic acts that meant nothing, and in the end they lost that too, lost the ability to do anything other than just accept it. But we don't have to do that: we have the power to look at these endless reams of bullshit and say no. We've got our language, we've got our heart, and it warms mine to see people using theirs. That, in the end, is the point of this whole post: a shout out to those who won't be having with this gentle-into-that-good-night fatalism, a big internet hug to everyone who dares to give a shit. Keep being awesome.

The Men in Hats: Several Sides of SEO (sample copy)

Once you’ve finished with the nitty-gritty of setting up your business and are ready to hit the web, you come to the next problem, a rather major one: no-one on the internet knows who you are. In order for people to start finding you, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get yourself indexed on the various search engines that people use to sift through the internet. Thankfully there’s already a field of industry that covers this niche, and that is the process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO uses a variety of different techniques that work towards the same endgame: your website, highly ranked on Google. But! Not all of these techniques are what you might call good – they’re effective, sure, but morally, they might leave something to be desired. These techniques are known as black hat techniques, the modern wild west of the internet having appropriately absorbed the nomenclature of villainy that a man in a black hat represented in Hollywood’s classic westerns. Similarly, the better SEO techniques are known as white hat; we’ll get to them later. First, let’s meet the villains.

The Black Hat Gang

Probably the very worst thing about the gang of vagabond techniques that represent black hat SEO is how obvious they are. The most sinister offender, the ringleader of the gang, is probably keyword stuffing, the technique of shoving whatever particular word or term it is that you’re looking to pop up in search results for into a text as many times as possible. This is the text-based equivalent of when you get sent to a dodgy website to download something and are greeted by fifteen different ‘download’ buttons in various fonts and styles, each of which is poised and ready to ruin your day with popups and malware. If my keyword was keyword, then using the keyword keyword as many times as possible ends up with sentences like this one, which feature the keyword keyword so many times that the keyword keyword starts to seem like it’s haunting you, keyword. This is no use to anybody, because it makes your content look amateur and doesn’t actually help anyone who finds it. What’s the point of being the top result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ if someone who is looking for information clicks on it and finds garbage? Well, you got a click; if that’s all you’re after, congratulations. But we can do better!

Other black hat techniques include the application of tiny, hidden text, links that don’t look like links and will, upon accidental click, send the browser off on another adventure, sneaky redirects, and the incredibly cheeky act of directly changing the content of a page once it’s been indexed!

The White Hat Sheriff

The real heroes of SEO are the ones who wear the white hats, and who outdo the black hat outlaws simply by being better than them. The true sheriff, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO, is a focus on user experience. Implement keywords, sure, but where they’re relevant. Focus on putting together a quality piece of content that helps the person who’s searching for those keywords; if the second best result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ is a complex treatment of the theme, then that disgruntled user who clicked off the previous result is more likely to stick around – and time spent on a page is just as important as the initial click that gets us there. So write like a human, not like a robot that got stuck repeating keyword keyword keyword.

The search engines themselves are designed to reward this kind of content; thanks to the continued evolution of machine learning, their algorithms are getting smarter at detecting context all the time. Google can tell the difference between keyword spam and a well-written sentence, and will sort accordingly; good content goes up, bad content goes down, and the worst content might even get removed if it’s judged to be suitably unethical in its SEO applications. The Black Hat Gang will, inevitably, end up in internet jail.

The idea of user experience goes beyond the text, as well. It’s also about presentation; if your content is pleasing to the eye, it’s pleasing to the owner of that eye as well. So optimise! Design a website that looks good, reads well, and presents itself nicely on computer screens, phones, tablets; any conceivable means by which people might visit it. Then apply some of the other white hat SEO techniques: pop keywords into URLs, use keyword tails that search engines themselves suggest, curate strong, legitimate backlinks; even something as simple as having a website that loads quickly is a boon. All of these techniques, when used well, will drown out the black hats, and send your content to the top.

The Taming of the West

The web is different now to the dark days of the early 2000’s, when the black hats had an easy time of it. SEO isn’t just about language anymore; search engine results aren’t driven by how many times one can stuff variations of a keyword into a text. Nowadays, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO techniques is that one type has a future. Here in the dying days of the new west, the black hats are the last few cowboys, clinging to a land of lawlessness that is slowly being tamed and remade into a civilised land of quality content, with reputable locales that are linked by serviceable infrastructure and curated by good people. It might not make for as exciting movies, but at least we can find what we need!

Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?-
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And with fresh numbers number your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed by their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

—————

I've really rather fallen for this sonnet. As opposed to its immediate successor, Sonnet 18, it feels incredibly human and fallible. The poet is far less confident of the infinite nature of his art, or more accurately, less confident of his poetic ability to represent the beauty of his subject without invoking such dramatic hyperbole that the scholars of the future think he’s lost the plot. I know the feeling, when words don’t work. It manifests here through the rather shaky start; 'come’ and 'tomb’ is a half-rhyme at best, and there’s no damn way I can make a rhyme of 'desert’ and 'part’ without severely mangling at least one of those words. But then the poet gets it; play to the impossibility, and do the impossible:

If I could write the fortune of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne'er graced earthly faces’.

Even if I could tell the tale of your beauty, says the poet, it wouldn't matter, because I’d get called a hack for it anyway. This subtle jab against the very nature of the romantic sonnet, which is reiterated in the hilariously self aware 'stretchèd metre of an antique song’ at line 12, is Shakespeare at his most deconstructive, and a wonderful precursor to Sonnet 18, when he takes umbrage against the very nature of a summer’s day as a rubbish thing to compare such beauty against. But it’s also heartbreakingly romantic in how it pierces through to the very core of affection, and both laments and celebrates how the curious nature of love individualises our opinions of its targets in ways only we can see. The author tried to leave this note for the world, to mark his love, to save a portion of his subject’s beauty, and ultimately he doesn't seem to care very much whether anyone believes him or not.

Of course the point of this sonnet is a procreation sonnet, which is why the closing couplet turns towards 'have a baby, nudge nudge’ like its precursors. I'm not a big fan of this part of the sequence, as I honestly just think it’s kinda weird, but it doesn't faze me in this sonnet because, whatever the poet might have intended when he started Sonnet 17, the nature of procreation ends up as an afterthought, displaced by rising senses of affection and a preoccupation with survival through verse that leads us very nicely into Sonnet 18, and a'swinging off from there. 17 is ultimately a turn-point, a pivot, but that doesn't make it any less than what came before, and what will yet follow after.

So we've got romance, transitioning themes and deconstruction. No wonder I was so inclined to write about this rhyme.