Turn Every Page: Why grammar should still matter
In an age of texts and tweets, do people care about grammar anymore?
There is a popular and educated author whom I follow. He often bugs me when I hear him speak. I am generally a stickler for good grammar—there needs to be a good reason to break a rule (and, more importantly, you should know that you’re breaking the rule)—but this guy repeatedly uses some phrases or words that are simply incorrect.
There are other people, including some who write for the New Yorker on occasion, who do not use standard grammar in their podcasts, presentations, or less-formal writing. Their formal writing goes through a thorough editing process, as all good writing should, before it appears in print. I find it annoying, however, that the same authors do not give the same grammatical attention to their less-formal pieces.
The phrase this one author misuses is “hone in” when the phrase should be “home in.” Look it up. When you home in on something, think of a homing pigeon, getting closer and closer to the nub of a problem, an answer you’ve been seeking, etc. Hone in doesn’t really exist. To “hone” something is to sharpen or improve it, like honing your tools or skills to prepare for some confrontation, be it physical or psychological. To hone in does not make any sense when the word is used properly.
But, you’ll say, you actually looked it up and some dictionaries allow for hone in as an accepted use, meaning the same thing as home in. The basic dictionary on my Mac does this: “3 (hone in on) [no object] another way of saying home, (see home): the detectives honed in on the suspect | I started to hone in on the problem.”1
Dictionaries list it as a valid use, but is it really? What constitutes a valid or standard use? Are dictionary authors simply bowing to the pressure of decades of poor usage, or is there a deeper lesson about language?
In my estimation, the best discussion of these usage and dictionary issues is probably David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present,” published in Harpers in April 2001. The piece was, on the surface, a review of Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage (ADMAU, in DFW’s article) (the latest edition is here). But DFW focused on several dictionaries—traditional dictionaries and usage dictionaries—and discussed the merits (or lack thereof) of each.
DFW spends most of the article talking about ADMAU in comparison to other modern dictionaries. Bryan Garner, as DFW says, “is one serious and very hard-core SNOOT.” (42)
Garner is also, for DFW, a kind of linguistic special-forces operator who has gone behind enemy lines in the usage wars to expose the enemy and offer a way for SNOOT soldiers to follow.
The battle lines were drawn in 1961 with “the notoriously liberal Webster’s Third New International Dictionary” that “came out in 1961 and included such terms as heighth and irregardless without any monitory labels on them. You can think of Webster’s Third as sort of the Fort Sumter of the contemporary Usage Wars.” (43) The usage wars occasioned by Webster’s Third were between “descriptivists” and “prescriptivists.” As explained by Philip Gove, the editor of Webster’s Third, and recounted by DFW, “‘A dictionary should have no traffic with . . . artificial notions of correctness or superiority. It should be descriptive and not prescriptive.’ These terms stuck and turned epithetic, and linguistic conservatives are now formally known as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.” (44) DFW has no love for Descriptivists:
For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively-via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling,” a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today’s socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmentalist movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. (45)
The Decriptivist approach explained in Gove’s introduction to Webster’s Third is what DFW takes issue with: “Gove’s now classic introduction to Webster's Third outlines this type of Descriptivism’s five basic edicts: ‘1-Language changes constantly; 2-Change is normal; 3-Spoken language is the language; 4-Correctness rests upon usage; 5-All usage is relative.” DFW then goes on to critique each of these tenets as, well, untenable.
Words end up in a dictionary because an editor, or team of editors, made decisions about what to include and what to exclude. Those decisions are necessarily based on some value judgment, just as I stated at the beginning when I said that I think hone in is an improper usage of the word. As DFW writes, “decisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer’s ideology. And every lexicographer’s got one. To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.” (46)
DFW’s dislike of descriptivists is, in part, that they do not seem to consider the purpose of language as part of their decision-making process. Descriptivists, in his mind, are “census takers” who survey the linguistic landscape around them and identify what people are saying and writing. They then record those various usages and call the compilation a dictionary. But that process includes everything—even clearly wrong usages—despite the fact that our language has evolved based on communicating truths to one another. Including in a dictionary all the ways people use words, even when they fail to communicate accurately, is a disservice to the language. Think of people who misuse modifiers. DFW again: “‘People who eat that kind of mushroom often get sick’ confuses the recipient about, whether he’ll get sick only if he eats the mushroom frequently or whether he stands a good chance of getting sick the very first time he eats it. In other words, the community has a vested practical interest in excluding this kind of misplaced modifier from acceptable usage; and even if a certain percentage of tribesmen screw up and use them, this still doesn’t make m.m.s a good idea.” (48)
Not everyone agrees with DFW, of course. David Skinner writes of DFW’s “Tense Present” that, “[l]ike many earlier critiques, it showed little understanding of the thinking that went into Webster’s Third. It was unique, however, in its brazen misrepresentation of the book itself.” Skinner defended Gove and his dictionary and the principles on which the words were chosen and defined. For example, DFW critiques Gove’s 5th principle, that “all usage is relative.” DFW writes:
5-Huh? If this means what it seems to mean, then it ends up biting Gove’s whole argument in the ass. (5) appears to imply that the correct answer to the above “which people[’s usage do you follow]?” is: “All of them!” And it’s easy to show why this will not stand up as a lexicographical principle. The most obvious problem with it is that not everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not? Because you can’t observe every last bit of every last native speaker’s “language behavior,” and even if you could, the resultant dictionary would weigh 4 million pounds and have to be updated hourly. The fact is that any lexicographer is going to have to make choices about what gets in and what doesn’t. And these choices are based on . . . what? And now we’re right back where we started.
In response to DFW’s criticism, Skinner says as follows:
All usage is relative (5), Gove made plain elsewhere, but only to the standards of a relevant linguistic community. Formal platform speech with precise use of who and whom will not get you far in prison; prison slang meanwhile will not get you far up the corporate ladder. That change is constant and normal (1 and 2) is not to say that at any moment night can mean day and day can mean chocolate, but that, among other phenomena, some words fade from usage while others accrete new meanings. Even the head-scratching idea that “spoken language is the language” is an oblique way of saying speech is the primary form of language, writing (historically, developmentally, and quantitatively), secondary.
It seems sensible enough to say that usage changes depending on the circumstances of your communication. Formal English prose style in a text message or locker room is likely unnecessary, but it is certainly necessary in other contexts (like a legal brief or academic paper). But to DFW’s point, that does not mean you should put all of these usages in a dictionary without some explanation or, at the very least, some heuristic to know what is worthy of keeping. And what about run-of-the-mill conversations in society where there are many people from many educational, socio-economic, racial, and other backgrounds? Or discussions on podcasts that you are putting out to a wide audience? Shouldn’t there be some accepted-by-most standard usage that applies to those more general situations?
DFW makes the point that using the principles of Standard Written English should be normative because it is “considerate” to others, mostly because it is the most effective way to communicate what you are saying: “W/r/t [with respect to] confusing-clauses like the above, it simply seems more ‘considerate’ to follow the rules of correct SWE . . . just as it’s more ‘considerate’ to de-slob your home before entertaining guests or to brush your teeth before picking up a date. Not just more considerate but more respectful somehow—both of your listener and of what you’re trying to get across. As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English ‘Makes a Statement’ or ‘Sends a Message’—even though these Statements/Messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you're trying to transmit.”
You know it when you meet someone who uses English properly, and you know it when you meet someone who, like, does not, ya know? But in a society where people are not always attentive to correct usage, and in an age of texting and abbreviations (LOL, LMAO, CUL, etc.), should we still care that a gerund takes a possessive when you describe the agent doing the action?2
Some people have capitulated already. I found a list of “Internet Abbreviations” on a website purportedly devoted to English grammar. These are Descriptivists letting you know how people are speaking, which is enough to make it “standard.”
The debate about whether grammar should develop as actual usage changes is something SNOOTs still argue about. On the usage and language questions, I am firmly on the side of DFW and Bryan Garner. There have to be rules and one should only break them (1) knowingly and (2) for a particular reason. Sometimes the reason is simply readability and style. The former injunctions against And or But at the beginning of a sentence, or a preposition at the end, are happily part of the past. As Winston Churchill allegedly stated when an editor mashed up one of his sentences to remove a sentence-ending preposition, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” We all have our limits.
But the rule cannot be that Standard English is whatever-you-happen-to-be-saying-at-a-particular-time-and-in-a-particular-context. That is a rule without any limitations, which ends up being no rule at all. The principles underlying the debate surrounding the change from Webster’s Second to Webster’s Third is, then, maybe something more people should consider. It raises the question: “What use of language is required to be considered an educated speaker/writer of English?”
The answer to that question, I think, comes through reading broadly. You need to see how many different authors use the language, how well they communicate their ideas, and what lasting impressions the writing leaves you with. And we should all have a usage dictionary on the side of our desks. As DFW explained in a conversation with Bryan Garner:
I urge my students to get a usage dictionary… To recognize that you need a usage dictionary, you have to be paying a level of attention to your own writing that very few people are doing . . . . A usage dictionary is [like] a linguistic hard drive . . . . For me the big trio is a big dictionary, a usage dictionary, a thesaurus — only because I cannot retain and move nimbly around in enough of the language not to need these extra sources. . . . Everybody needs one of these things. Whether or not you use a usage dictionary, which gives general norms and guidelines for how different words work, how things that might appear to be synonyms in fact aren’t—all kinds of stuff.
This is a world-renown author and teacher, and a masterful user of the English language, saying that even he needs a usage dictionary at hand.
So what are we to do as normal, educated English speakers out in the world where we need to communicate clearly to others? We could get frustrated with other people’s poor use of the English language. “This is the downside of starting to pay attention,” DFW says3. But by being attentive to grammar and usage, he says you also “become an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that is all around.”
Perhaps as “agents of light and goodness” we take DFW’s other advice about writing to heart rather than worry about the niceties of grammar. He says that “writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. When there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader—even though mediated by a kind of text—there’s an electricity about it.” Quack this Way, at 26.4
None of us will use grammar perfectly every time (test yourself here). But that does not mean that we should not try. We should try to write well and clearly. We should try to communicate truth to other people. And we should probably not take ourselves too seriously in the process.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best,
Aaron
I received an email this week from an attorney who said that if a company took a particular litigation position, it would have a “tough road to hoe.” That, you’d have to agree, is just completely wrong. I’d expect an attorney to know the idiom is a “tough row to hoe,” and is an agricultural reference. These misuses of idiomatic phrases are signs, I think, that people do not read as much as they should. These errors are easily explained if you tell me that someone hears these phrases rather than reading these phrases. It’s easy to mistake “road” for “row” or “hone in” for “home in” when you do not see them written out.
If you are a SNOOT, you will appreciate H.W. Fowler’s discussion of this issue in his Modern English Usage, 225-26. If you are not a SNOOT, you should read more Fowler to become one. Here’s what he says:
4. Gerund and possessive. The gerund is variously describable as an -ing noun, or a verbal noun, or a verb equipped for noun-work, or the name of an action. Being the name of an action, it involved the notion of an agent just as the verb itself does. He went is equipped for noun-work, by being changed to his going, in which his does for going the same service as he for goes, i.e. specifies the agent. With the verb the agent is usually specified, but not always; it is seldom, e.g., used with the imperative (go, not go you or you go) because to specify the agent would be waste of words. With the gerund it is the other way; the agent is not usually specified, but sometimes must be, i.e. a possessive must sometimes be inserted; and failure to distinguish when this is required and when it is superfluous leads to some ugly or unidiomatic writing. Scylla is omission of the possessive when the sense is not clear without it; Charybdis is the insertion of it when it is obvious waste of words; but these are the only extremes, rarely run into. Jones won by Smith’s missing a chance; if you omit Smith’s, and say Jones won by missing a chance (as in fact he did, only the missing was not his), Scylla has you. If you say He suffers somewhat, like the proverbial dog, from his having received a bad name, you and your his are in Charybdis.
Bryan Garner (mostly) agrees. Under the entry “Fused Participles” in Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd), he says that “Fowler overstated his case in calling fused participles ‘grammatically indefensible’ and in never admitting an exception.” (383) Garner goes on: “But Fowler had a stylistic if not a grammatical point. Especially in formal prose, the possessive ought to be used whenever it is not unidiomatic or unnatural. . . . A modern rule might be formulated thus: when the -ing (present) participle has the force of a noun, it preferably takes a possessive subject, especially in formal contexts. But when the -ing participle has the force of a verb, a nonpossessive subject is acceptable, especially in informal contexts.” (383)
DFW’s statement was part of a discussion he had with Bryan Garner, which was transcribed in Quack this Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan Garner Talk Language and Writing (2013). Garner’s question about prior to in the video was the last question he asked, and the transcript for this section begins on page 120 of Quack this Way.
Another author, Anne Lamott, puts it even more simply: “good writing is about telling the truth.” Bird by Bird, at 3. Lamott is also a realist: “after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.” Bird by Bird, at 3.