Apodion.net

More than just a clever rearrangement of a previous Apodion post title, you might have seen Language Log or Language Hat comment on Nathan Bierma’s column about National Grammar Day, one of these tiresome celebrations of pedantry by the sort of people who get their kicks by bitching about how ‘decimate’ really means ‘reduce by one tenth’, or how (pace jbo) ‘I could care less’ means the opposite of its speaker’s supposed intentions.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with a comment myself, given the repetitive nature of this kind of grousing. But an excerpt from Mr. Bierma’s column caught my eye:

Brockenbrough reprimands pop stars for grammar gaffes in song lyrics, including Bryan Adams for singing “if she ever found out about you and I” (it should be “you and me,” she says) — even though that’s the best way to rhyme with the line before it: “She says her love for me could never die.” And she takes Elvis to task — is no one sacred? — for singing “I’m all shook up” instead of the proper “all shaken up.”

I think the bolded part (my bolding of course) is actually quite interesting. Because I think it brings up a point in this whole debate that is often overlooked. Often when people piss and moan about these supposed solecisms, their complaint is that through inaccuracy, inconsistency, change and inattention we diminish communication; that if we let our standards droop pretty soon we will all be talking different monkey languages at each other¹. Their opponents disagree; people are always speaking different regional and class dialects at each other and communicating pretty well; no one who has heard ‘I could care less’ has actually taken that at its literal face without trying; and communication is actually a pretty tricky act of interpretation and pas de deux anyway, and avoiding sentence-final prepositions is a laughably minor gesture in one direction or the other. These are all true assertions.

But what that quote brings to mind is, in my mind, a better counter-argument: people have better things to do with their language than simply convey facts. In the imaginations of the dryest of grammarians, perhaps, language—not speech, though; written language—is simply or reductively the tool that we use to transmit and record factual information. Everybody else, though, and I mean everybody, is answering to a series of more pressing concerns. Even when speaking prose, we are participating in aesthetic creation. Every utterance obeys rules of meter and rhythm as fundamental to language as its grammatical structure. Every utterance also, as DFW notes, bespeaks of its speaker, and so in reality the only people who are going to be careful to only use ‘decimate’ in its Latin sense are people to whom it is important that they are seen as people who care about the true meaning of ‘decimate’.

Sometimes it makes a body really want to rap these critics on the head; don’t you see that people are speaking here? Do you really imagine that people who say ‘between you and I’ don’t have anything better to do with their words than see that they conform to some superficial notion of grammar? Can you allow in your worldview the possibility that the greengrocer or urban youth has his own sense of language, and is actively wielding it, rather than simply trying and failing to follow all the rules?

Oy.

1. sometimes they also try to bring up—David Foster Wallace, I’m looking at you—that people judge you by the words you use, and pretend that 1: this is a fact descriptivists do not thoroughly accept and assume, and that further 2: descriptivists actually believe some vein of hippie-dippy anarchism, where either i: there are no rules, man or ii: everyone should just go around talking like how they want all the time, and nobody would/should ever draw any conclusions from their choices↩