Tuesday 13 October 2015

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.

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