Friday, February 16, 2018

A Petulant Screed (on English Grammar)

Note: I'll try to get back to my "Glimpses of Grace" series shortly; they just take a little more time to compose, and I've been rather short on time the past few weeks.

I have two pet peeves when it comes to grammar--first, people who intentionally flout the actual rules by which our beautiful language operates; and second, people who flaunt arbitrary, made-up rules, and then try to force everyone else to follow them. Unfortunately, most English speakers fall into one or both of these categories.

Here's a quick background to anyone who might be wondering, "Who is this guy to tell us how to use our own language?" I'm an author who has been published multiple times, a professional whose main weekly work revolves around verbal compositions, and I hold a degree in linguistics. I've also been inventing lots of my own stylistic quirks for years and years, and I resent anyone telling me that I'm wrong to use them. So with that in place, now I'm going to tell you why the grammar you've been using is wrong.

You see, grammar is a discipline that describes how a language operates--the internal logic of its pieces, one might say. And all languages have very specific rules by which they operate. The only trouble is that, a few generations back, some enterprising grammarians decided that they were going to invent their own rules for English, not based on what the language actually does, but based rather on what they thought the language ought to do. And this system of prescriptive rules (rather than descriptive rules) is what most of us came to learn as "grammar" from the hands of our instructors.

Now, there really are rules that can't be broken in English. I'm not saying that anything and everything is OK as far as grammar goes, not even given the distinctions between formal and informal speech, dialects and idiolects, and so on. No, there are rules you really shouldn't be breaking. For instance, there's one very popular Christian song on the radio these days that makes an obvious and egregious error in grammar. Its central line declares (in a poor quotation of Eph. 1:19-20): "The same power that rose Jesus from the grave is in us!" It's a powerful song, and I would love it...if only it didn't make a glaringly basic grammatical mistake. It takes a situation where a transitive verb is called for, and uses an intransitive verb instead. Here's what I mean: the line should read, "The same power that raised Jesus from the grave is in us." But instead, it says rose. The only trouble is that that word doesn't do what it's being asked to do here. The verb to rise (of which rose is the past tense) cannot take a direct object; it is intransitive. That is, you can't say, "I'm going to rise this book onto the shelf." You must say, "I'm going to raise this book onto the shelf." To raise is a transitive verb, taking a direct object. God's mighty power raised Jesus from the grave. You may say, "Jesus rose from the dead," but you may not say, "God rose Jesus from the dead." It's simply the wrong word, and it doesn't function in the way it's being asked to. So there are rules that simply can't be broken. But there are other "rules" (like one I broke just two sentences ago) which are totally fine to break.

The one I just broke was the rule that says, "You may not end a sentence with a preposition, lest I rap you across the knuckles with my ruler!" Now, this is a "rule" that is sometimes still advisable to follow, depending on where you are: if you're speaking or writing in a very formal setting, to snobbish, elitist sorts, it's probably best not to end a sentence with a preposition. Or, if you just want to sound wicked smart and elitist yourself, you can follow this made-up rule, and say, "It doesn't function in the way in which it's being asked," or, to be even more abstruse and redundant, "It doesn't function in the way it's being asked to function."

This is an example of a made-up rule. English usually works perfectly well when you end sentences with prepositions, and the resulting sentences come across with an easy, colloquial charm, and no loss of clarity or understanding. Sometimes the people who like these arbitrary rules trip themselves up because they don't even realize that in English, the words we call "prepositions" are sometimes used as parts of independent syntactic phrases, and not as prepositions at all. For instance, in the example I cited above, the "to" at the end of my sentence was, properly speaking, not even functioning as a preposition: rather, it was part of the infinitive verbal phrase "to function," and the "function" had been dropped because it was contextually understood from the first part of the sentence. Similarly, I was recently flagged in a paper for ending a clause with this phrase, "the construction went on," because my professor thought I was ending the sentence with a preposition. But that's not correct. In this instance, "on" is not a preposition; it is part of the verbal phrase "to go on," which is a very useful verb, in that it presents an active aspect to the idea of "happening." For instance, no one would object to ending the sentence "What's going on?" with the word "on," because it's clear that it's not a preposition, but actually a part of the verbal phrase. Even without this often misconstrued exception, it's still usually fine to use prepositions. So go out there and ask your friends, "Who were you hanging out with?" (unless, of course, you want to sound elitist, in which case it's also fine to say, in a snobbishly affected tone, "Out with whom were you hanging?")

Here's a few other rules that it's fine to break unless you're being forced to unnecessary formality:

- Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction like "and" or "but."  Observe this rule in formal writing, because it was made up by the people who hold the power in formal settings, but otherwise don't bother with it. It's unnecessarily stuffy, and colloquial English makes broad and powerful use of opening conjunctions.

- Don't use a split verbal phrase, and especially not a split infinitive. This rule has an odd history: like a few of our arbitrary rules, it's actually a rule derived from another language (Latin, where verbs always stay together, mostly because they're one word) that some self-appointed genius once thought it would be fitting to introduce into a totally different language (English, in which verbal phrases are often constituted of multiple words). But in English, you can, unless you overdo it, throw an adverbial modifier here or there in the middle of a verbal phrase (as I just did in the previous parenthetical clause). The truth is, it just sounds better to say "I was duly appointed to carry out this task" than to say "I was appointed duly to carry out this task." Also, don't pay any attention to people who tell you not to split infinitives (unless they're your poor, benighted professor, and you're trying to get an A), because this is another Latin-esque rule. As Star Trek in its radiant wisdom long ago realized, it sounds way cooler when you say "To boldly go where no man has gone before!" than to say "boldly to go" or "to go boldly." The cadence and flow of the Star Trek line is better than the ostensibly proper alternatives, and no clarity is lost. So go ahead and split those infinitives. (With one exception: I'm not wild about throwing negative particles into the middle of infinitives: that is, I've found that it does sound better to say, "I would prefer not to go," than to say, "I would prefer to not go.")

- Avoid the passive voice. This is a rule which, thankfully, is swiftly falling out of fashion, though you'll still find a few particularly fastidious professors who will insist upon it. Now, clearly the passive voice can be overused or used in a clumsy and inelegant way; but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used at all. As my immediately preceding sentence (which was all in the passive voice) demonstrates, passive constructions can be used easily and well. There's a reason why pretty much every language in the world has a passive voice: it's tremendously useful. It's a great way to highlight the object of an action, especially in cases where the subject of that action is understood by context, or is unimportant to the point of the sentence. For instance, you simply can't take the famous aphorism "Rome wasn't built in a day" and improve it by putting it in the active voice. You'd have to go for some clunky arrangement like "The Romans didn't build Rome in a day," which sounds redundant and stupid, and which would never have caught on as an aphorism. As Kate Turabian (one of the leading teachers of proper academic style) advises, passive voice can be preferable to active voice in situations where it keeps the subject of the sentence simple and clear.

Those are just a few examples, but there are many more. Grammarians have a long history of taking rules from Latin or from arbitrary methods of personal style, and then turning them into the inscrutable edicts of the next generation's classrooms. Their power is crumbling now. And while the evaporation of their fantasy will likely result in a lot of atrocious writing from people who don't follow any grammatical rules at all (even the real rules), at least we'll get a little breath of fresh air from the pretentious nonsense of prescriptive grammar.