So as English majors and literary enthusiasts we deal with grammar a lot. We see a lot of horrible grammar, we all have our pet peeves and we get really frustrated when we see what we interpret as “basic” grammar misuse.
Why?
I honestly don’t understand this attitude that all grammar must be perfect all the time. I mean, sure, if you’re presenting to a class it’s best to sound like you have a decent understanding of linguistic mechanics. And, yeah, if you’re writing for a class it’s probably an okay idea to use the best grammar you have at your disposal. But what about outside of class?
I have a lot of friends who are grammar tools. I won’t say grammar Nazis, largely because I hate that phrase, but also because they’re not in good enough command of grammar themselves to be considered real, high level grammar assholes. They tend to amuse me more than they frustrate me (at least when they’re correcting someone else’s grammar) but they do manage to frustrate me most of the time, usually when they’re criticizing a grammar mistake that doesn’t impede comprehension on the part of a listener.
One particular grammatical criticism I’ve been hearing harped on frequently in the last week is the phrase “I’m doing good” – to which grammar tools quip, “Oh, have you been helping out with a charity? Volunteering? Assisting old ladies? No? Then you’re doing well, not good.” Ahem, sorry, but fuck you. Mister Grammar Tool, you know perfectly well what that speaker meant – you just wanted to take the opportunity to point out that “good” in that context has historically meant something other than what it means in colloquial speech. Good for you, you’re an asshole.
I have a secret that most of my friends don’t know about me, largely because I made most of my friends in school where this secret could be potentially embarrassing. When I’m at home or when I’m with my other friends, I primarily speak LOL, not English. I pronounce BRB as “burb” around my husband and sister, I phrase requests for objects as derivatives of “I can has?” (i.e. when I want a sandwich I say to my husband “can has fud naow plz?”) and I rarely say “I don’t like X” when a nice “do not want” will do the trick.
Now, why do I, an English Literature major with a BA and a high level of respect for the written word, allow my spoken grammar to be so infected with such hideous perversions of the English Language? Because I actually know how the rules of the language work, which can be simply summed up in two words: they don’t.
Look folks, I’ve studied Chaucer. I’ve got Shakespeare down. I’m full up on James. I know the 411 on Spencer and I’m hip to Pope. Do you know what one of the most important thing all of these authors have in common is? They sound nothing like us. It doesn’t matter if it’s Middle English, Early Modern or full on Modern English; if something was written in English more than a hundred years ago, the language has changed drastically enough that it can never go back, and so it sounds like it comes from a different language because it essentially did.
So why are we trying to correct ourselves to sound like we’re a hundred years older than we are? I’m not saying that the change from Twain’s English to Salinger’s English is as drastic as the change from Chaucer to Shakespeare, or even the change from Shakespeare to Twain, but the change exists nonetheless and even now we’re not speaking or writing in the language of Salinger. It’s still English, sure, but it’s a slightly different English – a more modern English for more modern times.
Grammar doesn’t really matter. I’ll let you flinch for a second before I add a caveat to that. Okay, prescriptive grammar doesn’t really matter. The grammar that grammar texts teach, the grammar of Strunk and White, the grammar you hated having to learn in high school – that doesn’t matter. Descriptive grammar matters because it is what the speakers of a language understand. When you’re speaking, you can’t hear the differences between there, their, and they’re or its and it’s. When you’re reading you can usually see the differences between those words, and know which is wrong in context, but generally we know what the writer meant even though they committed the horrendous faux pas of using the wrong homonym. So get over it. Prescriptive grammar is largely useless and even in the context of a classroom it’s nearly impossible to properly pin down the exact rules by which grammar should be judged, and even then it doesn’t particularly matter – you can still sound professional and competent in English when you’re ignoring prescriptive rules. Don’t believe me? Check out the first eight paragraphs of this post; I dare you to find the seventeen purposefully inserted violations of prescriptive English grammar and point them out in the comments.
Didn’t notice them? Couldn’t find them all? Good. You’re not a grammar tool. You use grammar as it should be used: to enhance understanding in written and oral communication rather than to blindly adhere to archaic systems in a misguided bid to appear proper.
Death is the absence of change. This axiom holds true for languages as well as for organisms. If you want the a language that won’t keep changing for the “worse,” then I kindly suggest that you drop English and take up Latin.
- Cheers,
Alli
*Just a side note as a real mindbender - the last few paragraphs of this, the ones that are more confusing and harder to understand, are as prescriptively correct as I could make them. What does that say about the place that prescriptive language has in the modern world. Just food for thought.
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