No Grammar For You!

I always find it funny when people who claim to be snobs are completely ignorant of the thing they're trying to be snobbish about. A few fortnights ago, I posted a rant in my deviantArt about this very subject. To sum it up, for those of you who don't want to read it and/or couldn't care less about my opinions about the anime community, I was lamenting the fact that the majority of the Internet's many gaggles of Howl's Moving Castle (the movie) fans don't even seem to know that Howl's Moving Castle (the book) even exists. I got a little vituperate about it, I will admit. I then conjectured that this ignorance was due to anime snobbery--"true" fans never watched dubbed anime, thus they had never seen the note in the title logo of the English version of this movie, which says, quite prominently, "Based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones."

Now I turn my ignorance-seeking eyes on a different Internet target: The vast battalions of Grammar Nazis, stationed in platoons across the many message boards of the World Wide Web, eager to ambush those unwary souls who dare to forget the captalize proper nouns. You know them, I guarantee you do. You have seen them ravage the digital flesh of many an unwary newbie before; their savage fangs, dripping with crimson correctional ink, severing the bulging jugular modem sticking out of their necks, causing bytes to spurt into the...

Alright, this metaphor is quickly descending into the disgusting. It's unnecessary too. You know EXACTLY whom I'm talking about, and I don't think I need to elaborate on this. Now let me explain why I, an English major who aneurysms over word choice and sentence organization, hate them.

These people have absolutely no idea what "grammar" actually is.

(Those of you with sensitive stomachs or allergies to ch4tsp34k should look away from the next paragraph.)

Believe it or not, the sentence "cn u come 2 c me l8r 2day" is completely grammatically correct. The sentence "Can you comes to sees me latest today?," easy as it is on the punctuation-parched eyes, is not. However, most Grammar Nazis will at least begrudgingly accept the later, possibly even as a jovial jape. Yet say the first example out loud. Yes, really. Ignoring the vowel slashed out of the first word, it is phonetically identical to the properly-typed "Can you come to see me later today?" Those of you who know a little bit about linguistics already know what's happening here, but for the rest of you, let me tote out my handy dandy Bag O' Definitions.

Grammar is the set of rules or properties which govern the usage of the language. I imagine that you are now a bit confused. "But how is that different from...?" Ah ah ah. Sit down. I'm getting there. Grammar concerns things such as... verb-subject agreement, tense, word order, verb valency... the like. Most of the rules of grammar you know without having to think of them. You have to actively think to break most of them. If you are an English speaker, you do not say things such as "I have a cat brown" or "I'm thinking of" unless you intend to do so for some specific reason (such as right now, when I consciously broke the rules of English to bring you those examples). You say, "I have a brown cat" or "I'm thinking of going for lunch."

Now say the following, grammatically correct sentence out loud: "I can't imagine it, Suzie."

You did NOT say, "Capital-I can-apostrophe-T imagine it comma capital-S Suzie period."

This was meant to illustrate to you the difference between grammar, the rules governing the structure of a language, and conventions, the prescriptions made for the use of written language. Conventions concerns the the standards we make for writing. They concern things such as capitalization, punctuation, et cetra. Conventions are things that we, as writers, have invented for the ease of reading. They help us divide up ideas into sentences. They help us mimic the patterns of speech in writing. They help us do many things. But they have nothing to do with grammar.

Conventions Nazis, as they should properly called, have an artificial job. Punctuation and conventions have no real bearing or presence on language. They only apply in the sphere of writing, which is in itself little more than a pale analogue of actual, fluid, dynamic human speech. Many of the thousands of languages spoken in the world today don't even have written forms. Oh, yes, I suppose, you will get the occasional hound who has a problem with sentences ending in prepositions. But this is as far as they'll generally go. (That is a nasty, artificial rule, by the way. It was invented by pompous snobs who were embarrassed to be seen speaking English--the language of common folk!--and tried to "dignify" it by making it more like Latin, instigating passels of odd "rules." But English is not a Romance language and it never was, despite the many words of Latinate origin we've picked up over the centuries. Face it--our closest linguistic cousins are lederhosen, kilts, and, far back enough, saris.)

The truth of the matter is, very rarely will anyone flub up true grammar. If they're not making a Felines that Laugh Out Loud caliber I-can-has joke, they're probably using a dialect with different rules than the "prestige" version of whatever they're speaking. Or they're not a native-speaker. There are many possibilities. If you're going to be a Grammar Nazi, there's really not much to persecute. But if you like to nitpick, there's plenty of work to be found in the camps of the Convention Nazies. But "Convention Nazi" isn't a catchy title, so their spies have covertly snuck into the enemy Grammar Nazi camps and stolen their identity. Now thousands of these disguised Convention Nazis walk among us, sullying the name of Grammar wherever they dare raise their heads.

There are a few convention-related gripes that I will side with the Convention Nazis on, but they are few and far between:

1) The use of the apostrophe-s suffix as a pluralizer is abhorrent and needs to stop.

This is not a simple matter of punctuation, however. Apostrophe-s is one of the Seven Sacred Inflecitve Affixes that serves a distinct grammatical purpose. Using it in place of a regular s IS a grammatical error, because pluralization and possessives are matters of grammar. Also, it causes me to mentally aspirate at the end of words. "Chicken Pot Pie-eh-s" just sounds silly.

2) Two, to, and too; their, there, and they're, all that junk.

Again, using the wrong word causes a substantial difference in meaning, so this one occasionally irks me. It's usually not worth being a pedant about, but if it's in a register where correctness is necessary and expected (such as academic writing), I will point it out. I usually don't bother getting my dander up over it, though.

3) OK, there really isn't a number 3. The two issues listed above are more or less it.

If they would call themselves what they are, I might not have a problem with them--well, OK, this is a lie. I have a problem with officious, bloviating jerks(for lack of a better word) with holier-than-thou attitudes wherever they spring up. But even more so when they claim to enforce a standard they scarcely understand. I don't think the informal register of the Internet demands perfection, and while I myself tend to use my prestige dialect here, this is simply the way I speak. And I use "like" as a quotative, too.

Of course, neither Grammar Nazis nor those they pursue will bring about the downfall of civilization. So long as we humans can communicate--which we are notedly adept at--society will chug steadily on.

But I'd be wary of anyone you see wearing a schwa armband.