Are ‘grammar Nazis’ ruining the English language? (I)

This article by the (UK) The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers captures this tension. It was originally published on March 19, 2014. Enjoy. Imagine a world in which biology was taught using no textbooks written later than 1795; a world in which the advances of the science since the publication of On the Origin of Species – […]

This article by the (UK) The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers captures this tension. It was originally published on March 19, 2014. Enjoy.

Imagine a world in which biology was taught using no textbooks written later than 1795; a world in which the advances of the science since the publication of On the Origin of Species – or even since Charles Darwin was born – were ignored. The theory of evolution would remain untaught; the existence of bacteria would never be mentioned. Biologists would be furious. So imagine how Prof Geoffrey Pullum feels when he sees the same thing happening in his own field every day.
His field is linguistics: the study of the rules of language. “Linguistics is a scientific subject,” he says. “It’s of a rather peculiar kind, but it is a science.” Pullum has been taking language apart to see how it works since the early Seventies, after a career as a rock’n’roll pianist failed to live up to the glamour it promised. He toured France and Germany in the Sixties with Sonny Stewart and the Dynamos, and shared a stage with the Kinks and the Rolling Stones with his later outfit Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band. But life on tour was “tedious” and so, seeking glamour and excitement, he became an academic linguist.
He has, paradoxically, found a kind of celebrity in academia that he couldn’t in music. His rock’n’roll career took him to two foreign countries; as a linguist, he has been to 22, and 24 US states. The Ram Jam Band enjoyed moderate success in the Sixties, but now millions read about the complex facts of linguistics on Pullum’s blog, Language Log, probably the most-viewed linguistics website in the world. He is the author, with Rodney Huddleston, of the award-winning Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, one of the most respected descriptions of the rules of English in the world.
Despite what many people think, the rules of a language – any language – are only defined by how people use that language. When you think about it, that has to be the case: the rules of English are different now from how they were in Milton’s time, let alone Chaucer’s, and no one has ever sat down and deliberately changed them; they’ve changed because the language has evolved, through changing use. Pullum’s job is determining what those rules are.
Many rules are obvious, so obvious that we don’t even think about them, such as: “most verbs take an -ed on the end to form the past tense” or “plural nouns usually take an S on the end”. Others are more subtle. For instance, there is a rule to how you order adjectives before a noun. In English, adjectives describing size and shape generally come before those describing age, which come before those describing colour, and then place of origin, and so on. It would be very unusual to say “the old little pot”, instead of “the little old pot”, unless there are two little pots and you wanted to distinguish between the old one and the new one.
Rules such as this have been discovered through careful study of how English speakers actually use the language. “An enormous amount more is understood today than it was in, say, 1900,” says Pullum. “There have been discoveries that make the pattern of things easier to grasp.”
But instead of this sort of discovery making it into popular consciousness, he says, the national discussion of grammar and language is stuck in half-remembered dictates and daft shibboleths. “What is taught in schools, and in popular books for laypeople, is the same as it was in 1900, and much the same as it was in 1800. The public is denied all of it.”
The first popular grammar book was Lindley Murray’s English Grammar. It sold more than a million copies after publication in 1795. Many of its proscriptions would be approved nowadays: never leave a preposition at the end of a sentence, don’t use “who” as the subject of a sentence. Towards the end of the 19th century, grammarians added more, such as the injunction against “splitting infinitives” – that is, putting a modifier between “to” and the verb, such as “to boldly go”. These rules are still taught: last year, a little book called Gwynne’s Grammar, by a self-taught grammarian named Nevile Gwynne, became a surprise bestseller.
The trouble is, most of these rules are wrong. “I’ve never seen a book so bad on my subject,” says Pullum of Gwynne’s Grammar. “It’s the familiar old nonsense, modified through 200 years of rubbish, from teachers who didn’t quite understand it to students who understood it less.” Split infinitives, for instance, have been commonly used for hundreds of years. Another myth is that the word “none” is always singular (so you can’t say “none of them are coming to the party”, you have to say “none of them is coming to the party”), even though it’s been used since the 1640s and the plural version was the more common form for 300 years. There’s a similar ruling against using “they” to refer to a single thing. “That would mean that you’re not allowed to say ‘nobody seems to think the rules apply to them’,” Pullum says. None of these are uneducated mistakes or modern slang: as Pullum points out, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen use singular “they”. But still, a certain kind of person insists that it’s bad English.
In the early years of this millennium, Pullum and his fellow linguist Mark Liberman began Language Log to provide a forum where this sort of nonsense could be debunked by professionals, and where the real findings of scientific linguistics could be discussed. “It’s a shoestring operation,” he says. But now tens of thousands of people read it every day. It made a particular splash in 2004, when Pullum stumbled across Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in an airport and gleefully tore it to shreds in a series of blog posts: “one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature,” he wrote. “I had such fun writing about his novels, and I almost feel it’s unfair,” he says. “But then I think, he’s got so much money that he doesn’t ever need worry about what I think. He could run me down in his Lamborghini. His style is dreadful, his metaphors are awful and sometimes he picks words out of a thesaurus, but he made a good living out of it, and I think he deserves credit for that.”