Every time National Grammar Day comes around, I’m struck with a spot of dread. Any of my friends or acquaintances might, at any moment, spring upon me and shout “Hey! It’s totally your day! So don’t you hate when people use the passive voice, since you’re all into grammar?” And then I will be forced, as the crabby old coot I am, to meet their well-meaning inquiry with the level of vitriol normally reserved for a hairdresser who’s decided to treat your head as a testing ground for a new theory of hair design. “No,” I’ll shout, “that’s not it at all! I love the passive, I love variation! Grammar isn’t about telling people what they can’t say; it’s about finding out what people do say, and why they say it!” And through that outburst, my Facebook friend count will be reduced by one.
My problem with National Grammar Day (and most popular grammarians in general) is that it suggests that the best part of studying language is the heady rush of telling people that they shouldn’t say something. But if you really study language, you know that there’s so much more to it than that. Each time March 4th comes and goes, we’re missing an opportunity to show people how wonderful the field of linguistics is. So if you’ll permit me to steal a moment, let me show you the two papers that really made me fall in love with the field.
The first is from Murray, Frazer, and Simon: “Need + Past Participle in American English“, which is the first in a series of three papers on the Midwestern/Appalachian construction needs done (e.g., this article needs re-written, my cat needs washed). This paper made me realize how deep the rabbit-hole of colloquial and dialectal speech goes. (Sadly, you need a subscription to JSTOR to read it.)
The second paper is the one that launched me into the exciting world of alternation studies, Bresnan & Nikitina’s “On the Gradience of the Dative Alternation“. (This paper has since been superseded by revised versions, but I think this draft is still the best version for an alternations newbie.) If you ever have the chance, take a look at these papers. Maybe they won’t do anything for you, but then again, maybe they will, and maybe you’ll understand why I think so many celebrants of National Grammar Day are missing the point.
On to the meat of the post. As you might remember from last year, my favorite way to celebrate National Grammar Day is by debunking popular grammar myths. Here’re 10 facts about the English language that run counter to the rubbish that pedants prescribe. The first eight are from the last year of posts here at Motivated Grammar. The last two are from other sites. Explanations and justifications for the statements below are found by following the links, so if you disagree, please don’t grouse to me that I must be wrong until after you’ve read the reasons why you are.
Singular they is standard English. What’s wrong with the sentence Everyone celebrates today in their own way? Historical usage, contemporary usage, the usage of revered writers, acceptance by language authorities, analogous constructions, and issues of ambiguity all agree: absolutely nothing.
Slow is an adverb. It has been used as such for years, for centuries even. Shakespeare, Milton, and Thackeray all used adverbial slow, so it’s even fine with the literary set and style manuals. You may resume drinking Dr Pepper if you so choose.
People are using hopefully correctly. Hopefully has two distinct usages, one a regular adverb meaning “in a hopeful manner”, and the other a sentence-modifying adverb meaning approximately “I hope” or “With any luck”. The latter usage has been unreasonably derided, because it is a sentential adverb and it is a new meaning for an old word. But neither of those complaints is valid, especially since…
The meanings of words can and do change over time. Hopefully isn’t the only word with a new-meaning stigma; prescriptivists often vilify words that have sprouted new meanings. But this is a very standard part of the English language. In fact, not only hopefully, but also of course, snack, naturally, enthusiasm, and quarantine have all changed their meanings over time.
You can eat healthy food. This meaning was fine for 300 years, and then Alfred Ayers came along and declared it wrong. Of course, it was he who was wrong, but his edict has stuck around at the edges of prescriptivism ever since.
I’m good is good. Every once in a while, someone gives me guff about my careful avoidance of the phrase I’m well when I am asked how I am. There’s nothing wrong with I’m well, but it isn’t what I mean to say. There is also nothing wrong with I’m good, and it is what I mean to say.
Between and among differ not in number, but in vagueness. The rule that between can only be used with two items, and among with more than two, is specious. The real tendency of English favors between when the connections are conceptualized as being specifically between individuals, and among when the connections are more vague and collective.
An invite is informal, but hardly wrong. It’s a minor point, of course, but the noun has been around for 500 years. I mention this post mostly because there was a great discussion in the comments about the psychology of prescription.
And from others:
Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style isn’t a good grammar reference book. From Geoff Pullum. While Strunk & White are able dispensers of style advice, they drop the ball in their grammatical advice, and unfortunately, that’s what people use them for. Pullum explains why the 50th anniversary of the book should have been met not with celebrations, but with shaking heads.
Choosing between which and that is more interesting than you’d think. It’s nearing five years old now, but Arnold Zwicky posted about his understanding of different contexts in which which and that can be used as relativizers in a relative clause. It’s much more interesting and rewarding than just saying that which is to be limited to non-restrictive clauses. It’s also much more accurate.
Want more debunked myths? 10 more are available on last year’s post! See why 10 items or less, different than, and alright are all right. Want still more, preferably in fewer-than-140-character chunks? Follow Motivated Grammar on Twitter.
[Update 03/04/2011: For National Grammar Day 2011, I’ve listed another 10 grammar myths, addressing topics such as Ebonics, gender-neutral language, and center around.]
[Update 03/04/2012: And again for 2012. Ten more myths, looking at matters such as each other, anyways, and I’m good.]
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March 4, 2010 at 12:39 am
Vance
The meaning of words can and do change over time
I suppose this might be a trap for the unwary. What the heck — I’ll stumble in regardless.
Is one of your points here that the rules for numerical agreement get fuzzy with distance? I’ve managed to shed many of the prescriptions I learned in school and along the way, but part of me, I find, still finds this wrong (though plausible on first read, and not salient even on the tenth).
March 4, 2010 at 4:25 am
dw
The meaning of words can and do change over time
Is this sentence some kind of honeytrap for prescriptivists? I would expect The meaning of a word can and does change over time, or just possibly The meaning of words can and does change over time. Your sentence sounds ungrammatical to me. Go on — bite my head off:)
March 4, 2010 at 5:09 am
Stan
DW: Maybe he meant “meanings” but forgot the s.
Thanks for the collection of helpful links, Gabe. I’ve downloaded Bresnan and Nikitina’s paper, and will log in later to access the needs one.
March 4, 2010 at 9:05 am
Gabe
Oh, you guys give me too much credit. Stan was right; it was a typo. The worst part is that I didn’t even notice the typo when you were talking about it in your comment, Vance.
March 4, 2010 at 10:04 am
Gabe
You know, the more I look at it, the less ungrammatical “the meaning of words do change over time” seems. I’m not sure if it’s a local-coherence effect, with “words do” sounding good enough that I don’t notice the lack of agreement between “meaning” and “do”, or if I think of “meaning of word” as a pluralizable NP. But it’s definitely bad to all of you?
March 4, 2010 at 10:24 am
Daniel
Gabe,
I have no problem with “The meaning of words can and do change over time.” Were I to be discussing this point in casual conversation, I suspect I’d use a completely different structure (probably “Words’ meanings can and do change over time”). But if I did use the prepositional phrase construction, I think I’d be more likely to go with “The meaning of words can and do change over time” than with “The meanings of words can and do change over time”, and certainly I wouldn’t utter “The meaning of words can and does change over time”. That last one just sounds horribly stilted, the sort of sentence that could only be uttered by a prescriptivist who knows all the “rules” but has no feel for the flow of language.
March 4, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Vance
What I was trying to say was that it’s definitely “wrong” to me, but not “bad” — certainly the kind of thing I would say out loud (Daniel and I must have different styles of speech), but would strive to avoid in writing.
March 4, 2010 at 1:58 pm
John Cowan
The clipped adverbs have been in English since it was English, and have been indistinguishable from their adverbs since the fall of final -e in EModE times. For example, the adjective fast was fæst in OE, whereas the adverb fastwas fæste. The OED’s oldest quotation is from Bede: Þa scéat hé mid þý spere, þæt hit sticode fæste on þæm herige ‘and he thrust with the spear [so] that it stuck fast in the [pagan] temple’. Note that this is fast ‘firm(ly)’, the post-OE sense ‘quickly’ having developed something like ‘firm’ > ‘unmoving’ > ‘closely’ > ‘immediately’ > ‘quickly’. Note also the “wrong-way” conversion from sticked to stuck since Bede’s time, apparently by conflation with the obsolete strong verb steek.
March 4, 2010 at 2:13 pm
National Grammar Day: an outsider’s perspective « Sentence first
[…] What I find most interesting about NGD is how contentious it has been since its inception, at least among a few linguablogging heavyweights. The problems seem to arise chiefly because NGD’s champions strongly promote the use of Standard English. This is a very important dialect, but it is still just a dialect, and it is sometimes wrongly considered superior to non-standard dialects. Furthermore, there is no standard Standard English. So the usual fault lines emerge between descriptivist and prescriptivist attitudes. I don’t know how this year’s NGD compares with that of previous years, but I did see a concerted effort in some quarters to emphasise the wonders of grammar and the pleasure of its graceful handling, and to downplay the fussy fault-finding that has incurred the criticism of some language specialists. […]
March 4, 2010 at 6:59 pm
HRSFANS.org » National Grammar Day
[…] National Grammar Day. Yes, you read that right: dismay. As my collegue Gabe explains on his blog Motivated Grammar: My problem with National Grammar Day (and most popular grammarians in general) is that it […]
March 5, 2010 at 1:20 am
Stan
But it’s definitely bad to all of you?
As Vance put it: not bad but wrong or at least ill-advised in formal or semi-formal prose — which may be what you meant by “bad”. I would have edited it had I seen it (or a structural equivalent) in prose I was working on.
If it arose as a typo, I would guess that local coherence was mainly responsible for your subsequently overlooking it. “Meaning of words” being a pluralisable NP might have helped you justify it, but I think you’d have been on unsolid ground, and I see that you have emended it anyway. It’s an interesting one. A good point of discussion for NGD!
March 5, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Gene
I think you mean “neither of those complaints is valid.”
March 6, 2010 at 4:15 pm
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[…] National Grammar Day 2010: Ten More Common Grammar Myths, Debunked Every time National Grammar Day comes around, I’m struck with a spot of dread. Any of my friends or acquaintances […] […]
March 7, 2010 at 11:48 am
Gabe
Gene: The danger of proof-reading a post after midnight!
Vance/Daniel/Stan: Thanks for the clarifications. Honestly, I’m considering this more and more of a puzzle. By all reasonable methods, I think it ought to be “meanings of words” (hence my correction), but for some reason “meaning of words” still sounds strangely right to me (and to Daniel too, I see). It doesn’t work for similar constructions (for me): “The color of the tables” would only be reasonable to say if all the tables were the same color.
I’ve got three possibilities I’d like to run by you. One is that because we don’t expect in this context for the different words to have the same meaning, the plural is somehow superfluous. (As opposed to the tables, which definitely could have the same color.) Another is that I’m getting interference from the no-plurals-in-compound-nouns effect, as in *mice-trap. The last is that I’m thinking of “meaning” as a mass noun. All three are weird, though.
March 7, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Vance
Gabe, I like the first of your three weird sisters — that “the meaning of words” is already plural.
March 8, 2010 at 5:22 am
Stan
I turned “the meaning of words…” around in my head for a while and it has emerged sounding oddly okay. I’m no grammarian, but it seems defensible as a pluralisable NP. I still think meaning would warrant pluralisation in edited writing; “meanings of words” has a slightly pedantic feel, but it helps underline the point that words carry multiple mutable meanings.
March 12, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Neal
Dan Brassil gave an interesting talk on the “needs done” construction at LSA in January. I’ve summarized it here, and given some counterexamples to his analysis.
March 18, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Morgan
I am sympathetic to your path, my friend, and understanding of your views.
Being a similarly unabashed lover of English, I too have a requisite dislike for grammatical snobbery for the sake of itself.
I tend to think of language, in general, as a funnel for thought. I am pained to know that whatever feelings or ideas I may have will ultimately suffer grammatical confines; however, I am equally pleased to discover a new word (possibly from another language) that holds a previously unattained meaning.
Clarity is the absolute function of grammar. Anyone who puts more emphasis on it than that is doing so for selfish reasons.
It is the nature of art—and writing is just a less obvious form of art—and artists to develop particular styles. I don’t think it is fair to say that something outside a typographical error is particularly wrong.
Contrariwise (and this is where you come in), I believe it equally unfair to claim that a controversial grammar point is universally acceptable.
That is why, with all due respect, I do not read posts like this (except today, apparently).
August 28, 2010 at 11:04 pm
John Kilgore
Good and interesting discussion, folks, but am I the only one noticing a big irony here? A) The blog’s motto is “Prescriptivism must die.” B) Gabe accordingly gives a thoughtful and winning explanation of why he wishes people would, when they think of “grammar,” quit obsessing over small points of usage and the urge to pronounce this or that usage right or wrong and appreciate, instead, the vast underlying complexity and beauty of the grammatical systems that underlie all linguistic choices. C) 18 cordial and appreciative correspondents, including Gabe himself, proceed to post comments which focus all but exclusively on the questionable grammaticality of a single half-sentence in the original entry.
What to make of this? What I make of it, in brief, is that questions of rightness or wrongness simply won’t go away, no matter how one might wish it so. We are all prescriptive grammarians according to our lights, both because using the language AT ALL entails a constant stream of decisions as to the relative desirablity of words, phrases, and sentences, but because we are all stakeholders in the language, with a lively felt interest in its upkeep, and in preserving our ability to understand one another.
Perhaps I am quibbling, because Gabe himself, in the blog posts I have read, obviously takes a considered and impressively well-informed interest in normative questions. Though usually he seems to be defending some usage that has been called into question, he never seems to be saying (what to me would be nonsense) that all usage is equally correct, that the whole concept of correctness is false. His beef, really, seems to be not with prescriptivism in toto, but with inferior strains — the kind that is too hidebound, or too unthinking, or too mean-spirited and divisive. But he is himself a prescriptivist, and a thoughtful and helpful one.
PS: “meanings of words do change” seems to me clearly the best phrasing here.
August 31, 2010 at 8:14 am
Daniel
John Kilgore: I don’t think you understand what the difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism truly is. Your post implies that you think the difference is that there are rules in prescriptivism whereas anything goes in descriptivism. That’s not the distinction, although prescriptivists are fond of that straw man and have many people believing it to be the actual distinction.
Prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar both have rules, and those rules agree the vast majority of the time (neither allows an article to follow the noun in English, to give one example). The difference is simply in what is considered an acceptable authority regarding rules. Prescriptivism is fond of the appointed (usually self-appointed) expert handing down edicts from on high based on notions that language should be logical and consistent, with the result that there is often one right answer and multiple wrong answers to grammatical questions. Descriptivism prefers to look at how native speakers of the language actually use it with little concern for the occasional inconsistencies and illogicalities that inevitably crop up, with the result that there are often multiple right answers (but still often multiple wrong answers) to grammatical questions. To say that one is a prescriptivist simply because one has an internal understanding of the rules of English and how they would apply to a particular sentence, thus allowing one to say “that doesn’t look right to me” is incorrect.
Indeed, the general turn the conversation took (starting with Gabe’s second post, wherein he says that the more he looks at his original, typo-generated sentence, the less ungrammatical it appears to him) highlight the distinction between the prescriptivist approach and the descriptivist approach, and clearly indicate that the people in the thread were, for the most part, approaching it descriptively. A prescriptivist would likely say, “‘meaning’ is singular; ‘do’ is conjugated for plurals; it’s wrong; if it looks okay to you then you’re wrong; end of story!” Instead, what followed was, “Even though this appears to be a violation of subject/verb agreement, it seems grammatical. Let’s discuss why” — an inherently descriptivist approach to the issue. The point was not to show why anyone was wrong, but rather to determine why it appeared correct to multiple people. Furthermore, no one suggested that it was somehow incorrect to take the sentence Gabe originally wrote and add an ‘s’ to the end of ‘meaning’. If you could somehow find a prescriptivist who told you Gabe’s original sentence was correct, said prescriptivist would likely tell you that adding an ‘s’ to ‘meaning’ would make it wrong.
March 4, 2014 at 9:43 pm
Jelly-Side Up
Reblogged this on Jelly-Side Up and commented:
Happy National Grammar Day, dear readers! I think it’s no small coincidence that the holiday falls on the same day as Mardi Gras this year. It ramps up the celebratory factor for both! I’d love to try earning some beads by diagramming sentences.
As you’ve probably realized by now, I’m utterly fascinated by grammar. I think language is our most powerful tool, and just as important as a rich vocabulary is the way it all fits together. I love studying the grammar of other languages–namely, Spanish and Old English (which is so different from modern that I’m going to call it a separate language). However, modern English is such a lovely, frustrating, evolving hodgepodge that one can never truly be done studying it.
With all of the grammar classes I’ve taken throughout my academic career, one of my favorite lessons was the concept of, “OK, these are the traditional rules, and it’s important to know them, because THIS is the effect when you subvert them.” So as a writer, it’s awesome to discover the power that breaking the rules in such a way creates.
So while I may be a member of the “grammar police”…like, every day (sorry, world)…I also like the reminder that our language is ever-changing, and that there are different ways to use it. I really liked this post by blogger Motivated Grammar, which takes a progressive look at the English language in celebration of the holiday. I hope you enjoy it, too. :)