Your Modifier Is Dangling by Bob Morris, The New York Times, October 21 2007.
Not long ago, an elderly friend and grammar stickler stopped me midsentence. I
had just said, “They gave it to him and I,” when it should have been “him and
me.”“You have to keep in mind the object of the preposition,” she gently told
me. I felt ashamed, but also grateful to be corrected.“And now you won’t
embarrass yourself in front of someone else,” she said.She isn’t the only one wagging a finger or a pencil these days. Bring up the topic of grammar at any party and you’re likely to be hit with a tirade.But then, this is a time when e-mail messages, hip-hop slang, and a “decider” president who said that
“childrens do learn” are chipping away at good grammar. Poor usage, of course,
goes back at least to Shakespeare, who invented plenty of his own rules.In “Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw wrote that the English have no respect for their language, and spell it abominably. And Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop, with her silly misuses, could hold her own on today’s White House cabinet, or anyplace where being folksy sells better than being impeccable.
“Unfortunately, using poor grammar comes off as less pretentious,” said Sharon Nichols, a 22-year-old law student. “Everything is just so calculated in politics.”Ms.
Nichols is one of many young people throwing off her generation’s reputation for
slovenly language, and taking up the gauntlet for good grammar. Last year, after
seeing a sign on a restaurant window that said “Applications Excepted,” she
started a grammar vigilante group on Facebook, the social networking site, and called it “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar.” Its 200,000 members have gleefully and righteously sent in 5,000 photographs documenting grammatical errors. Facebook offers several grammar-crusading groups in high finger-wagging mode, including Citizens Against Poor Grammar and Grammar Freaks United.Meanwhile, Martha Brockenbrough, a Seattle writer, has started the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, for waging her own battles. She wrote a scolding letter to a shampoo company that used the word “structurizes.” She has also written to President Bush. “But I haven’t heard back from him,” she said.
Engaged as she is in flagging misuses, however, she doesn’t correct people face to face. Lynne Agress, founder of Business Writing at Its Best, a 25-year-old Maryland-based company, is another stickler who won’t correct people in social situations.
“You never want to make anyone uncomfortable,” she said.Of course not. And you probably don’t want to correct your boss, either. On the other hand, what kind of world would we have if everyone let grammar continue its drunken, downhill slide? Communication would become even more difficult than it already is. Civilization might even be hastened to its ultimate collapse.So, when is it O.K. to correct grammar? When you’re a teacher, of course, or when you’re coaching a nonnative speaker who has asked for help.
But if you can’t control the impulse to help a friend by correcting a mistake, what’s the best way to do so? It seems there are two options.You can ask, “Oh, is that the way you pronounce that word?” Then go on to say that you always pronounced it differently, and demonstrate how you do so.
A more subtle approach: Don’t point out the mistake. Instead, repeat what was
just said, but with correct usage this time, and in your own sentence. Then keep
talking.Ms. Agress, the business-writing expert, uses this technique.“So if
someone tells me that everyone has their issues,” she said, “I reply, ‘Yes,
everyone has his issues, but that doesn’t mean we have to worry about them.’”And
unless we really care, we don’t have to correct them, either.
It is true that many, MANY people perceive perfect (or good) grammar to be a sign of snobbery. But I don't think that is the case at ALL. I just don't get why you'd want to encourage--nay, CONSCIOUSLY BRING ABOUT--the degeneration of any language system (syntactic, phonemic, whatever). It hurts! It's the slow, deliberate death of an INSTITUTION, a beautiful SYSTEM.
In the case of English, I fight hard not to correct people I talk to (or overhear) because it's not very nice. And in case you're wondering, I have these impulses not because I'm pretentious, or because I'm a teacher--I've been like this as long as I could remember. Bad grammar (and spelling and punctuation and pronunciation) grates on my nerves, drives me completely nuts. Especially when they come from supposedly native speakers. People who by dint of their nationality and mother tongue are blessed with unconditional passports to unquestioning respect and financial ease, people who wield an invisible power, a perceived superiority over their non-native English-speaking counterparts.
When I do correct someone, I'm pleasantly surprised that I use the exact two techniques discussed in the article above. So it's nice to know that I'm strong enough to curb impulses that may otherwise brand me a social pariah (for example, I don't screech at people "It's YOU'RE taller THAN me, not YOUR taller THEN me! GAHHH!" or "It's MY FEET HURT not MY FEET HURTS, GOD don't you KNOW feet is PLURAL?!"). It's hard, but I try. ;)
