This article says nothing that I don’t know and everything that I already have been saying. But hear me out on it. It’s very convincing. And once again, though it is about English, it was not written in America, England, Canada, or Australia, and it was not written by an American, and Englishman, a Canadian, or an Australian. “Why I will continue to split hairs over split infinitives” by Michael Skapinker is about the pet peeves of English, and the book The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Infer/imply, uninterested/disinterested, I/me and split infinitives are among the nitpicky things mentioned in the article. They sound like just the kind of things that I like to be nitpicky on, kind of like good/well. Some of those things are not grammar, though, they are vocabulary. I certainly think vocabulary should be taught, although I hated vocab tests in high school with a fiery burning passion.
GRAMMAR is really what is on trial here. And, according to more and more people, it just doesn’t matter.
Pinker, in spite of his queasiness about “disinterested” for “uninterested”, is even more robust. Yes, there are ungrammatical sentences, he says. “Apples the eat boy” is ungrammatical. But beginning a sentence with “because” is not ungrammatical. Neither are split infinitives. (The rule that says they cannot be split is another holdover from Latin, whose infinitives cannot be split because they are one word.) Grammatical speech is the way people speak.
Any (native) English speaker speaks grammatically, because that is the only way TO speak. Ungrammatical sentences such as the above example are silly, and no one makes those mistakes unless they are learning the language. To further prove the point, there is this interesting little analogy
Imagine, says Pinker, watching a wildlife documentary. The narrator does not like what he sees. “Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls . . . the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors and monkeys’ cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years.” We would be incredulous, Pinker says. “What on earth would it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an ‘error’? Isn’t the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing?”
However, I have never met a teacher who allows her students to sing whatever they want in the classroom. This dilemma is the cause of debate (like the one that happened a few years ago over the Oakland Ebonics decision). Differing dialects have different grammatical correctness, but just because saying “we was” is wrong in one dialect doesn’t mean it is wrong inherently. This brings us to the most interesting (I think) part of the article.
Prescriptive grammatical rules are a shibboleth, he says, “differentiating the elite from the rabble”. “Shibboleth”, you will recall, comes from the Book of Judges and from the battle between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. The Gileadites crossed the Jordan and when any Ephraimite tried to follow, they set him a little test: “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth.” This was sneaky because “shibboleth” was an Ephraimite tongue-twister. They said “sibboleth” instead, marking themselves out as different.
But this surely is the point. Language is the way we signal what group we belong to. A 16-year-old can enthuse about a band being “bare safe”. A 66-year-old using the same language at the Royal Opera House would be regarded as either pretentious or peculiar, assuming anyone knew what he was talking about.
Prescriptive grammar really is a Shibboleth. And though no one is in danger of being killed by the Gileadites, grammar is a tool that can get the user into secret clubs and societies like jobs or social circles… or an English teacher’s good graces. The problem is that we are dealing with a grey issue with language. Knowing formulas could be the key to getting in good with the math or science crowd, but when an equation is wrong, there is no question that it is wrong. Linguists know that wrong and right can change dozens of times a day for just one speaker. Must an English teacher teach all kinds of “rights”? Just teaching the ones that students are not as familiar with implies that these are the “right” ones. But no one needs to be taught how to speak to their friends!
