I confess I lead a double life. I am one thing to my colleagues, superiors, and students. I am another when off-campus, blogging, e-mailing, chatting with friends and family.
In my professional life, I am a prescriptivist about grammar. In my writing, there is never a split infinitive, never a sentence ended with a preposition, never a sentence fragment. My pronouns agree in number with their referents. Which and that are not confused. I mark students down for grammatical infelicities. I do not start sentences with a conjunction. I only beg the question if I make a circular argument. I never call anything very unique.
When I wear my blogging hat, all grammar bets are off (irking at least one reader). Not just because of the pseudonym! But (and I am sadly at variance with my co-blogger on this issue) I am a full-throated descriptivist in my heart, soul, and mind. Grammar is as grammar is used. Words mean what the community believes they mean. End of story.
I simply don’t understand what it even means for someone to insist that although everyone understands a word to mean X, it really means Y. Language simply is communally agreed-upon conventions. Whenever I think of this debate, I am reminded of a passage in Northanger Abbey (are not all truths in life to be found in Jane Austen?):
“Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”
“The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”
“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”
“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”
So when I say someone is a nice person, I know you’ll now realize I should mean that she is proper and fastidious.
There was a recent opinionator in the New York Times on this that tried to stake a middle ground between prescriptivism and descriptivism. [The first sentence is actually very funny. “Today I’m going to hopefully beg a question which will incentivize the reader to share their views.” Even funnier are some of the commenters who complained that the first sentence of the article is ungrammatical. But I digress.]
Debates about linguistic norms typically set traditionalists against revisionists. The two sides are particularly entrenched because each is rooted in a fundamental truth: the traditionalists are right that the rules are the rules (for instance, pronouns do need to agree in number with their referents), and the revisionists are right that language does change over time (nouns can come to be used as verbs).
The two fundamental truths are reconcilable because language is both our creation and our master. We humans invented and continue to reinvent our language to meet various needs, but language can serve these needs only if, at any given time, we conform to most of what has been already devised. Therefore, although we as an evolving species make language, it is also imposed on each of us individually. There’s a sense in which we speak language and a sense in which, in Mallarmé’s famous phrase, “language itself speaks.”
I am in favor of the most refinement of meaning possible. So I try to fight when word meanings are lost for which there is no fluid equivalent. It would be a shame to lose literally. It expresses an idea for which there is no other word. However, I also love that English has the flexibility to have split infinitives. I think it’s fantabulous that words can combine and verbs can morph into nouns and nouns can become adjectives. And I don’t want to tie myself in knots to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill is said to have said, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
So why do I hold my students to another standard? There is nothing inconsistent with descriptivism to say that certain ways of speaking are more appropriate in some situations than others. I expect my students not to pick their noses in class, but I don’t really care what they do when they go home. I expect them to learn and use the grammatical standard demanded by academia. It’s a way of showing respect for the institution. It’s also a useful skill to learn to placate any judgmental prescriptivists they may encounter in their professional lives. I write with standard grammar in my professional work so that I won’t be held back by a prescriptivist reader. But my heart wants (want’s?) to willy-nilly split infinitives!
38 Comments
Comments are closed.
I understand “nice” to mean “incapable of causing offense”.
I tend to consider it an insult.
Your writing is colder and deader for the use of grammatical structures from other languages.
I hope to hell you never fail a student for splitting infinitives. I consider that an immoral act.
I am sadly at variance with my co-blogger on this issue
Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!
*rends garments*
My position is that language is for communication. If you (the general “you” in this case) do not lose the clarity of my meaning given the words I’ve chosen, or the order in which I’ve placed them (UGH!), then there is nothing wrong here. Ending a sentence with a preposition, or beginning it with a conjunction, doesn’t make the sentence unclear. Messing up the pronouns and their referents might.
Diction prescriptivists have different problems. Theirs is often an aesthetic complaint, as you indicate, and I’m with Sam on the amount of deep significance I’m willing to assign to an individual’s aesthetic preferences (that is, none).
Now that I have composed myself, let me respond a bit more seriously.
I’m not actually much of a prescriptivist. I think you and Ryan and I are on, if not the exact same page, then at least pages in the same chapter. So long as the ability of language to express a person’s underlying thoughts with clarity is preserved, then I welcome change. Splitting infinitives (which I do with adverbs all the time) bothers me not at all.
I am more of a prescriptivist when it comes to usage rather than grammar. Using “unique” to mean unusual drives me crazy, because we have many words to convey the meaning behind the latter but only “unique” (and the clunky “one-of-a-kind”) for the former. How do we efficiently convey if something is truly the only one of its kind if there is no longer a word that means just that? It degrades language rather than enhances it.
I probably err a bit too much on the prescriptivist side. I think there is sufficient difference between “less” and “fewer,” or “anticipate” vs “expect” that it’s worth preserving the distinction. YMMV.
This is english. we over use something? import another word. verboten, taboo.
it feels odd to hear “sick” being used as a compliment, but I’ll get used to it,
Your answer seems a wee bit facile to me, Kimmi. What word would you like to import to assume the meaning “unique” once held? How will you introduce its usage and make its meaning understood to those who wish to convey it?
For my part, I don’t think there’s a need to import another word. We have a perfectly good one already. (“Taboo,” on the other hand, conveys a meaning that otherwise has nowhere to land in English, and so fills a gap.) We just need to use it right, and remember that “unusual,” “rare,” “extraordinary” and “peculiar” cover the other territory already.
I don’t speak other languages, but might I suggest singular?
It does have connotations along those lines, though its more common usage is closer to “unusual.”
In fairness, I forgot about “sole.”
UNIQUE, GET BACK IN THE HOUSE
racist!
Outside of pure mathematics, everything is unique. Imagine a shipping container holding 500,000 seemingly identical plastic blue balls, and yellow ball. Unless you can prove at least two have the exact same composition and number of molecules (and the exact same relative position and velocity of each–good luck with that), I would say every one of them is just as one-of-a-kind as any other.
In real life, though, there’s a scale of things. We perceive most of the balls as identical, and one, though perhaps the same size and weight and bouncibility and otherwise, as different, in the subjective way of just looking at a large pile of plastic balls. That one is more unique than the others. It is not more unique in a mathematical way, but in a useful way of communicating with other people. Everyone understands what “more unique” means in that context, unless they’re purposeful peevers.
I’m in the know-the-rules-before-you-break-them camp. Grammar is a structure by which we understand reality; ignorance or misuse of that structure may hinder individual and communal understanding. However, it is a structure we use to make sense of reality, to communicate meaning to others, to speak beautifully, etc., and therefore not something set in stone or delivered from the heavens with a divine seal that says “Do not temper with.”
ya be speakin’ truth for sure. bear in mind, that the frames can also hinder understanding.
There’s nothing wrong with either splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, unless you’re writing in Latin. If you don’t believe me, ask Mr. Fowler.
Churchill got that wrong. “Up” is an adverb, not a preposition, so he should have ended that sentence with “…with which I will not put up.” Except that doesn’t sound ridiculous at all, which would have undermined the point.
I don’t take “up” to be modifying “put” in that sentence, but it’s not really functioning as a preposition, either. I see your point. Still seems awkward to me as you have it.
Right. I was actually going to mention that in that sentence, “put up” is an idiomatic compound verb, and “up” isn’t really functioning as either an adverb or a preposition, but decided not to. I suspect that the original logic behind the idiom involved “up” functioning as an adverb, but that’s beside the point.
And “up” is a preposition sometimes, just not in that sentence. I don’t know why I thought it wasn’t.
Split infinitives? Haven’t you read that the reason we were told that in English you don’t split infinitives is WRONG? In Latin, the language of the powers that were arrogant enough to declare their own superiority, you cannot split infinitives since they are single words.
But in English, split them! “To boldly go where no man has gone before” is correct. “To go boldly” just sounds funny.
First of all, plenty of people disagree with you on the split infinitives front. But either way, it really doesn’t matter whether someone has decreed that split infinitives are right or wrong. No one person or small group has the authority to do that. Split infinitives are simply an example.
Yes, ma’am, it does matter. It has serious fucking consequences in the real fucking world.
A friend of mine failed a college course (despite earning the highest score on the midterm) because he split infinitives.
My friend, the professional copy editor, failed a course — because of too many grammatical mistakes.
Jesus, Kimmi, I just wrote a post defending descriptivism. I am saying it doesn’t matter whether anyone says split infinitives are okay or not because they don’t have the authority to do that. So someone telling me that split infinitives are “really” okay is failing to move me. I’m not saying the issue is irrelevant.
And per your earlier question, I do not fail students for grammar errors. If grammatical errors are serious and sustained enough to inhibit my fluid reading, they get a third of a grade off and an opportunity to rewrite for the higher grade. I never call out students for grammatical matters that are up for debate, such as split infinitives.
By “a third of a grade off,” do you mean a B becomes a B- and a B- becomes a C+, or that you knock of 33 points out of 100?
I am confounded by the notion that a person whose grasp of standard grammar is sufficiently poor as to fail a class on those grounds alone would become a professional copy editor. Was the class about copy editing? Because, if so then yes, it would make sense that the expectation would be to use standard grammar correctly (that’s why we have copy editors — to make sure what we’ve written complies with current standards), and yes, failing to do so should result in a failing grade.
no, the class was about European Jewry.
He was failed for splitting infinitives five times within his final paper. As it said clearly on the syllabus, five or more grammatical mistakes on your final paper will result in a failing grade. He was given no chance to correct said mistakes.
He was a professional copy editor for years before college (and a damn fine writer, himself).
[Actually, copy editors spend more time finding large scale problems — “this creates a continuity error” or “tighten this entire segment, it’s dragging”]
He was failed for splitting infinitives five times within his final paper
Well, that’s just crazy.
Unless he went out of his way to grossly, egregiously, and for no compelling reason split them.
“the class was about European Jewry.”
Well, that explains it! Rabbi Levitz writes that the split infinitive shall not be kosher.
Every claim Kimmi makes ultimately fails to be proven true. Is there any reason to believe this one is correct? I’ve been in academia for far more than a decade now, and I’ve never heard of anyone making a rule that “5 grammatical mistakes” will result in a failing grade for the class. Perhaps for the paper, but then that suggests the person wasn’t doing so well in the rest of the class, either.
I’d file this one under “academic legend,” because it simply sounds farfetched, and the particular tale-bearer has borne so many false tales in the past.
James,
when your class consists of a midterm exam and a final paper, it’s not so farfetched that you might fail a person for failing on the final.
*shrugs* I didn’t come up with the class, and I didn’t write the paper.
I have no authority, I am not saying I do. But it is very interesting to know where the idea comes from, especially when it’s not from listening to native speakers.
Or reading well-regaaded writers (a point Fowler makes over and over in Modern English Usage, quoting writers we all agree are great violating the so-called rules.)
grammar’s an art, not a science. the trick lies in breaking the rules artfully.
(and, naturally, in knowing which rules are necessary. english deals reasonably well with AdjN or NAdj, but flip PrepN, and you got bad juju).
On the one hand, it’s a bit silly to get all huffy about the difference between “which” and “that” when there are people who don’t know that “breath” is not a verb.
On the other hand, pretending like the rules don’t matter (and don’t even really exist) isn’t going to solve that problem.
OK, can someone educate me on the difference between these three:
different from
different than
different to
Is that last one ever correct?
“When everybody important agrees that decent people should write with their right hand, it’s different to write with your left.”
The last one is chiefly British, according to this, from the OED web site. They basically all mean the same thing, but “different from” is standard.
“Different from” is standard when followed by a a simple noun of pronoun: “Today is different from yesterday”. “Different than” should be used when followed by a phrase: “The moon is fuller than it was yesterday.”