Not a few people seem to take fiendish pleasure in drawing attention to, and purporting to correct, the supposed language faults of others.
I say fiendish pleasure because most of the efforts I have encountered are characterised by more than a hint of disdain and ridicule and an intent to shame. Perhaps they tell themselves that they are teaching.
Yet, some wise soul did say (for those of you who would give The Bible a look-in), “Not many of you should become teachers (self-constituted censors and reprovers of others), my brethren, for you know that we teachers will be judged by a higher standard and with greater severity [than other people; thus we assume the greater accountability and the more condemnation].” (The Amplified Bible, James 3:1, bracketed portions and all.)
In the relatively recent past, some scholars and other interested persons have given us tremendous insights into the realm of error, unshackling us from the facile and inaccurate assumption that error has only two origins: lack of knowledge or carelessness.
James Reason, Sydney Dekker, Joseph T. Hallinan, Richard Chase, David Marx and a host of others have dealt with error in broader spheres, while Mina P. Shaughnessy’s Errors And Expectations is perhaps the standard-bearer in relation to language use.
So we are more aware of contributors to error – work context, time element, overwork, inadvertency, eye strain, brain tricks, at-risk action, poorly deployed resources, technological traps, absence of redundancy set-ups and so on.
It is unfortunate that despite this whole field of studious people examining human error, the most vocal day to day bombardments come from people who are not on the field or learning from those on the field. They are in the stands shouting things like “No ball”, “He cahn bat”, “Dah umpire cahn see”.
The most sad thing, though, is that these language pundits are very often downright wrong or they have not kept up with newer understandings of the very thing they are oh so sure about. Remember the storm of contempt visited on THE NATION by those who thought that in the headline Jalon Gets Just Deserts, the word deserts should have been spelt desserts!
Now they are talking about using a plural verb in reference to a sports team. A simple perusal of the BBC News Styleguide, the AP Style Guide, the UPI Stylebook And Guide To Newswriting would have been enlightening.
Then people humbug you about the use of “following” as in “He returned home the following day”. Or they want to assault you about “over” in a sentence such as “As a batsman, he has scored over 50 seven times”.
Language is a dynamic thing, man. But not only does its use change; so does our understanding of it. So if you study it, you discover that the prescriptions of earlier grammarians were in not a few cases based on weak or even wrong understandings.
For instance, almost everybody was told that none always “takes” a singular verb for agreement. It turns out that this was based on failure to deal broad-mindedly with its etymology – and its actual use down through the years.
Again we were told that collective nouns always “took” singular verbs. So, according to that “rule”, we could safely write: “A bunch of us is going to a fete at the Concorde Experience”! What?!!
We now know of something called notional agreement, technically called synesis, which helps us to understand that it makes sense for the verb to agree with its real subject rather than its strictly grammatical subject.
Sometimes English teachers chose the easier path of laying down rules rather than introducing their charges to the untidy world of nuance – fair enough sometimes for primary school and secondary school (that’s why Bryan Garner calls these trailing misguided notions “high school grammar”). But you are an adult now.
You might be interested to know that psychologists are studying “language bullies”, like they study criminals, the mentally unstable and such.
Check out Are You A Language Bully? online, especially what Robert Kurzban and Benoit Monin have to say about such people. It en pretty.
If you really mean well, don’t behave like a know-it-all humbug or a snarling, censorious judge – who will soon, as life often has it, be hoist with his own petard.
I would recommend, at a minimum, investing in Frank Palmer’s Grammar, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, the full edition of the Merriam Webster Dictionary Of English Usage, Garner’s Modern American English Usage, the Cambridge Guide English Usage, Theodore Bernstein’s Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins, and Patricia T. O’Conner’s Origins Of The Specious.
And prepare to have your long-standing house of certainty blown to bits in many cases.
It might be an expensive undertaking, but as Derek Bok said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
“Rightness” and “wrongness” of language use, those who study these things have come to understand, are often not matters for the simple-minded. Or bad-minded.
Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.