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

Whenever linguists point out that the rules of language can’t be what the “grammar Nazis” think they are, people claim that they’re saying anything goes. Not at all, says Pullum. “We grammarians who study the English language are not all bow-tie-wearing martinets, but we’re also not flaming liberals who think everything should be allowed. There’s […]

Whenever linguists point out that the rules of language can’t be what the “grammar Nazis” think they are, people claim that they’re saying anything goes. Not at all, says Pullum. “We grammarians who study the English language are not all bow-tie-wearing martinets, but we’re also not flaming liberals who think everything should be allowed. There’s a sensible middle ground where you decide what the rules of Standard English are, on the basis of close study of the way that native speakers use the language.”
As an example of something that’s simply wrong, I point to something I’d read in a book recently – someone writing that “much of the data that needs processing are corrupted”. Pullum agrees: “Flatly ungrammatical.” Data can be a mass noun (“much of the data is”), or a count noun (“many of the data are”), he says, but that sentence has been caught between the two. I ask him if he has any personal dislikes, which aren’t “wrong” but which annoy him. “I have bugbears. But I like to think I have a healthy attitude towards them: they’re my bugbears, so I regulate my own usage, not yours. For example, I’ve always disliked the term ‘people of colour’. I refused to use it even when I was a graduate dean working on affirmative action in the Eighties in California.” The key, he says, is to realise that your preferences – using “fewer” instead of “less” when referring to plural objects, for instance – are just preferences, and claiming that they’re “wrong” is false.
However, there are good reasons to teach the rules of Standard English to children who speak different dialects. “I’m conservative on educational matters,” says Pullum. “It’s entirely to the benefit of all of us that newspapers’ editorials are written in Standard English, and that we can all speak it in situations such as business and air traffic control, and understand each other.” Because this particular form of English, and not northern British English or African American Vernacular English, is the language of prestige and power in much of the world, children who can master it are likely to do better in life than children who can’t.
Pullum is far from a triumphalist, British-is-best type – he left the country in the Eighties and moved to the United States to teach; his then wife and their son are black, and he was alarmed by the anti-immigrant “repatriation” rhetoric of the time. (Pullum has never corrected his son’s grammar. “It never occurred to me. He spoke London English impeccably from being exposed to it, then switched to American English at eight.”) English is the most important language on the planet, he says – not because it’s better but because, by historical accident, it happens to have spread around the globe. “It’s not that English has won out because of its virtue,” he says. “In some ways, English is highly unsuited to its role; it has 200 irregular verbs, where Swahili, for example, has none. It would have been wonderful to have Swahili as a global language, but it didn’t happen.”
Plenty of people do have a triumphalist view of Standard English, however. While few would say that our language is “better” than, say, French or Hebrew, people do think that Standard English is the true form, while dialects are somehow degraded versions. Pullum can barely contain his contempt for this view. “Other, non-standard English dialects aren’t bad or inferior. Saying that African American vernacular English is Standard English with ignorant mistakes is as stupid as thinking that Dutch is just standard Berlin German with ignorant mistakes.”
Dialects are proof that language changes. But it doesn’t change as fast as people think. “The changes you get over a century are trivial,” says Pullum, because there’s a long history of literacy and a large body of users, both of which keep it stable. “Dracula was published in 1897. When you read it, you don’t have difficulty.” Pullum says we don’t realise how old some words are. “People think the new expression they’ve noticed has just popped into use in the past few months, and they’re always wrong, usually by decades, and sometimes by a century or more.”
One change people might have noticed is the reduction in the use of “whom”: “It’s marginal now,” says Pullum, “but still firmly ensconced wherever a preposition precedes a human-gender relative pronoun, as in ‘the employee to whom it was assigned’; it’s the clause-initial uses – ‘Whom do you mean?’ – that are now rare and unbearably pompous.”
When language does change, it’s not for the worse. It was recently reported that the Oxford English Dictionary had noted, under its definition of the word “literally”, that the word could be “used for emphasis rather than being actually true”, such as in the sentence, “We were literally killing ourselves laughing”. That was an example of the slow death of the English language, said some. But language isn’t “degrading”, or we’d have lost the ability to communicate in the 50,000 years or so that we’ve been using it. Sometimes new meanings leave ambiguity – but that’s nothing new. “Real languages love ambiguity. They actively seek out words with multiple meanings, which is called ‘polysemy’. And they’re happy with sentences that have more than one interpretation, such as ‘Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.’ It’s not falling apart. And, of course, you can just say ‘I mean literally literally’, and then they’d get what you mean.”
Pullum lives in Edinburgh now – the “most intellectually lively place on the planet” – where he goes for walks with his girlfriend and her two Dalmatians and spends “a lot of time vacuuming the couch”. (“Those two things are connected,” he explains. “Never keep a dark-coloured sofa in the same house as Dalmatians, because they’ll negotiate their own rules about whether they’re allowed to use it, and they won’t necessarily be your rules. See how similar to grammar that is?”)
The battle between the English-is-decaying brigade and the scientific linguists who want to record the real rules of the language has been going on for decades. The two sides even have names: “prescriptivists” and “descriptivists”. And it is unlikely to end in our lifetimes. But Pullum has a message for the other side. “American bigots, whenever you have any criticism of America, like to say: if you don’t like it, you can leave. So I want to say, if you don’t like Standard English the way it is, talk sump’in else. Don’t mess with our language. If you don’t like it, sod off. Talk French.”