
Originally Posted by
All Good Things
Grammar Nazi threads make me a sad panda.
I’ve spent huge swaths of my career in this endless battle to disabuse writers, linguists, translators, and other language folk – often young, inexperienced ones – of the notion that grammar is a Holy Grail that must be protected, like some 18th-century virgin’s honor. This is often the result of unfortunate intellectual violence done to young students by badly trained teachers with some deeply seated conflicts of their own.
Language is a deeply human instinct. We all weave language like spiders weave webs – instinctually, flawlessly, brilliantly. We all do this from a young age, in all languages and cultures, and without formal training of any kind.
Grammar is an arbitrary set of rules developed by people like me to standardize how we communicate through the written word. The crucial idea here is “communicate.” If you understand the meaning of what a writer intends – irrespective of the grammar – then they have succeeded in communicating.
If a person insists on bitching, pissing and moaning about certain people ignoring the arbitrary rules, then that tells us something about that person. It screams “can’t see the forest for the trees.” I’m sorry to be so blunt, and I mean nothing personal with respect to AJ or tuesdaymarie, but this phenomenon has been studied by linguists and that research suggests that writers who get distracted by the arbitrary rules are not yet sophisticated writers. It’s like musicians getting distracted and bogged down by the individual notes and not seeing the whole musical piece. The research actually points out that it’s young and inexperienced writers who do this. They are behaving just like beginning musicians, all trying to get the notes right, not yet able to master the music.
Such writers typically have a lot to learn about how language serves ideas and not the other way around.
And yes, I know all about how punctuation changes meaning, how inadvertent errors can derail ideas and how standards serve a greater good. After all, I consult on dictionaries myself, have published dozens of books, speak five languages can read three more and am considered one of the greatest living linguists of Russian. So there, I said it!
But grammar rules are in every important way totally arbitrary. They change constantly and it’s the truly creative writers who push those envelopes and redefine the boundaries. Rap and R&B are among the most beautiful examples of this creative destruction.
And of course real linguists just love grammatical variation. Language use is a profoundly personal marker. Value what it tells you about people and how they choose to express themselves. You will learn new things, I promise.
But above all please understand that there is no virtue in getting bogged down slapping the wrists of people who do not follow arbitrary written conventions. It’s unseemly, wrongheaded and discouraging.
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