h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

***ESSAY ALERT***

We haven't had a good old argy bargy about the misinformed stupidity of linguistic pedantry for a while.

It never cease to puzzle me why some folk get agitated about 'Korrect English'. There seems to be a bizarre view that grammar consists of a set of top-down Rules, that we speak and write by applying those rules and that deviation from them is Wrong. Similarly, there is a fixed lexicon: We must be able to define our terms!

This is, of course, tosh. Grammar is a description of how we speak, not a prescription of how we should. Naturally we reach a consensus so that we can communicate with one another, but we do this unaided and there's a lot of room for variation - if you pretended to be confused by an offer of 'ale' instead of 'beer' you'd have to be particularly thick* - and even the standard, such as it is, inevitably evolves over time.

Now - let me say from the outset, very clearly: *** I think it is important that children be taught a Standard English ***. If we don't have standard, then we might as well have one person speaking Bokmål and another Nynorsk and another Riksmål and another Høgnorsk and then where would we be? Well, we'd be in Norway obviously - plus maybe it was a bad example - but that's not my point. Yes, a Lingua Franca is useful, to communicate both at home and globally.

Also, if we don't teach our children the dialect of the employer class - which won't be every child's native dialect - then employers will throw their CVs in the bin and they'll generally be thought of as stupid and even chavs. Given that we cannot easily change these power relationships and the attitudes that support them, we'd better teach our children to conform. I'm 100% in favour of empowering children this way.

(Although I've argued before: formal grammar lessons are not the way do do it! Native speakers simply don't acquire language that way.)

But we should definitely relax about the nitpicky points. Why do some get into something akin to a moral lather about these?

Some recent examples from this august site and elsewhere (not necessarily the subjects of complaint):

- Who/Whom. 'Whom' is definitely on the way out - and we won't miss it. 'Whom did you give the book to?' 'I gave it to Philomena?' 'Whom?!!'...'Whom are looking at'? No.

- While/whilst. I've never been given a good reason for insisting on 'whilst'. Never. It's on the way out, and the only reason we retain it is that people who would never say it believe it is 'more correct' to write it.' It's from the dialect known as Train Driverese.**

- Less/Fewer. There is no useful semantic reason to distinguish between countable nouns and nouns of quantity. Other languages do fine without and nobody is the least confused.

- Data is/are. Yes, that's right, there is such a thing as a datum and it has a specialist meaning. But 'data' is that bunch of numbers in the table/file. Mentally it can be thought of as one thing - if we so choose. Or plural. if you like. Who cares?

- Fora. Symposia. Formulae. Latinate plurals are perfectly acceptable in English***. But before anyone gets sniffy about their being anglicised, they better know the plurals of pyjamas, Kindergarten (sic) and opera.

- -is/-ize. -ise is British, -ize is American. Oh yeah? If you're British and you give a flying feck you'd better start swatting up which verbs are derived from Greek 'cause those are the ones that take -ize. Or -ise, for all I care. Our current position is that we have a dual standard (I natuarally use -ise), but chances are we'll move to -ize. No biggy.

- ible/-able. There's a dead simple rule here. If the verb stem makes sense in latin but not in English, then it's probably -ible (edible, feasible, possble, credible)...and then there's the other ones (digestible, collapsible, suggestible, reversible...). Ach, don't worry about it. There's only 900 odd to learn by rote - all in a day's work if you're learning Chinese. Fortunately nowadays Mr Gates does it for you by sticking a red line under the ones you get wrong, so you can give the impression of being Dead Clever At English.

***And now the biggie ***

Duh-duh-duh...

'Apostrophes are the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.'

No.

They.

Are.

Not.

Now I'm biased here. I'm a bugger for confusing your/you're (and their/they're/their) in written communication. Strangely...I never confuse them when I speak (think about that for a moment). The confusion is an artefact of technology. Until very recently, writing either involved working slowly by hand - or writing by hand, giving the handwritten copy to someone to type, getting it back and correcting it. We did less written communication. Anything substantial would be checked by a specialist.

Nowadays writing is easier so we're writing more than at any other time in istory and making more mistakes. Give us a break. If we misplace apostophes now, all it means is that we are don't touchtype so don't see the screen before we hit 'Post'. And we can't be bothered taking the time to Perview - after all it's only a 'kin website and all the half decent ones have an Edit facility. And besides - who cares?

*** Although I would strongly advice people to have their CVs etc checked and for enterprises not to shortcut their formal document review processes.***.

But...but...SPLUTTER...where would we be without apostrophes!!! They *mean* something!!!

Well, yes...it is possible to dream up pairs of hypothetical sentenced where the meaning is changed by the removal of the apostrophe:

'Those things over there are my husband's.'

'We had nothing in for dinner so we ate the dog's.'

But...a bit contrived, no? And notice that they'd still be ambiguous if spoken.

In fact, the (alleged) grammatical rules governing the apostrophe are arcane and inconsistent. If they were easy, Bill Gates could correct them for us. If you delve deep unough into their history you realise that they have no grammatical function whatsoever but are simply typographical conventions to show that letters are missing. In possesives they show that an E would be missing if we were speaking Middle English. Which we're not. And they're on their way out because they feck up teh interwebs and they're too finicky to type on phones.

REQUIRED READING: http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/politics-and-lies-of-apostrophe.html

So. Standard English is useful and should be taught but for different reasons to those that some seem to think. We shoulsn't pretend that all we have to do is teach children the rules (and then sneer at them if they don't catch on or if they forget them later) because that ain't how language works. And we shouldn't fetishise Correct English and needn't sweat the details - which will change anyway.

OBLIGATORY QUESTION: Am I right?







* Yes, yes - I know beer bores distinguish the two. Shut up.

** Service users are informed that this service will terminate at the next alighting point due to an incident of a technical nature.' (The train's faulty. You'll have to get off at the next stop.) Don't blame the drivers - someone will have made them speak like that.

*** A mathematics don phones up his colleague one Sunday: 'Come around at once. I wish to discus certain conundra concerning maxima and minima in pendula.' His colleague says 'Surely we can find something better to do on such a lovely day than sitting on our ba doing sa?'

Shouldn't it be "Anti-Grammar"?

Yes, you're right.

I never correct people's spelling or grammar, except when I'm trying to tidy it up for publication - where "correct" spelling and grammar do make the text easier to read for a larger number of people.

Edward, your grammar is impeccable, so I'm surprised to see you argue for loosening the rigidity of grammar. Can we expect to see Boris Spasky argue for abolishing chess, or Superman orate about what a good guy Lex Luthor is?

Thanks for the compliment, paulh, but it's not like I did anything awfully clever or worked awfully hard to acquire my dialect. It wasn't even taught. I just picked it up by being around the right people and by seeing it written down in books. I don't think I deserve to feel superior for doing something that just happened.

paulh, do they teach grammar in American schools? I was never taught it.

In the UK it's quite common to fulminate about how schools should go back to the days when grammar was taught formally. This ignores the fact that it was often taught very badly and inaccurately and didn't do a jot to help people communicate.

(actually it's part of a general animus towards modern teaching. you'd think some people didn't know that there was such a thing as a professional discipline called 'pedagogy' and that those who study it might have developed a few good ideas over the years.)

Duh-duh-duh...

'Apostrophes are the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.'

No.

They.

Are.

Not.
---

Fine. Don't bother with them. Or commas. Or any of the other fidgety bits of grammar that make your message clearer.

In fact Ed, why not absolve yourself of all responsibility when it comes to being understood?

If your clumsy grammar makes it more difficult for everyone else to understand, and makes them spend more time trying to devine meaning because you can't be arsed, then that's THEIR problem, right?

You've got a point when it comes to -ize/-ise and some of the fidgety bollocks, but why should I spend time working your whether you mean that you know your shit or that you know that you are shit?

Do apostrophes make my speech clearer, then? OK. I'll start using them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA

Most punctuation serves the purpose of putting in the breaks that would be there in spoken language, but are absent when you write things down. The secret to learning how to punctuate is to think how you would say it and punctuate it that way.

Apostrophes don't do this. It's and its sound the same. So do your and you're. If you can figure out a spoken sentence without apostrophes, you should be able to figure out a written sentence without apostrophes. But they certainly make it easier, if they're there and their position is correct.

Excellent. And you might want to start dropping tone, inflection, stress and non-verbal cues into your writing too.

Or are you going with "speech and writing are exactly the same" as a counterpoint to "grammar can make intention clearer"?

Let me know now Ed, because I'm not Hoo. I'm not going to work myself up into a frenzy for you. I'll just unsubscribe and leave you to it.

Do read the link I provided and see if it changes your view any of whether apostrophes add meaning. I think it's a rather good article by someone who knows a great deal about both English and education.

Once more: http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/politics-and-lies-of-apostrophe.html

I do somewhat agree that if we lost them overnight (it won't happen: any change will be evolutionary), some might stumble while reading. But that would be simply because they'd be used to seeing apostrophes there, not because the meaning had been fundamentally changed.

Does 'Waterstone's Bookshop' mean something different to 'Waterstones Bookshop'? If so - what?



>>and makes them spend more time trying to devine meaning

I only point such things out under special circumstances.

Shame on you

I believe that George Bernard Shaw decided apostrophes were unnecessary and dispensed with them. As Recumbentman said, he wrote cant.

I don't agree, Ed, but I don't have time to go into it now.

But i will say, from the POV of a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language that people who are taught the grammar of their native language (or their major language, mother tongue whatever) as a child in a systematic way don't tend to look at their French/Urdu/Danish teacher with big blank eyes when they start to explain why Whom is merely the English form of the Dativ and that the possessive apostrophe is a form of Genitive.

As this is the internet, YMMV.

The Waterstone(')s thing is to make the company name conform to their domain name, isn't it?

We use language to communicate. Grammar is simply a way to make it standard so that we know when someone is giving us our own excrement or telling us we're rubbish (or were rubbish, maybe we are not rubbish now...)

>>Excellent. And you might want to start dropping tone, inflection, stress and non-verbal cues into your writing too.

But the cues for spoken possesive pronouns (actually ellisions in Middle English - see link) are not tone, inflection and stress. They're word order and context.

btw...I'm not saying we *should* drop them. Nobody died and left me in charge of English. But there are good reasons why they *might* be dropped. Nothing can be done to stop that...and we'll still be able to understand one another. See also less/fewer; while/whilt.

I must also stress that I'm all in favour of the *functional* parts of language - to a degree. Althoug variation is permissable. It doesn't matter a hoot to me if, for example, someone is sensible enough distinguish singular 'you' from plural 'yous'. There's one for you! That would add meaning and remove ambiguity. I have *definitely* needed to disambiguate plural and singular 'you' on many occasions. If clarity is the issue - why haven't we adopted it?

(Answer: because clarity *isn't* always the issue. Not really)

swl - I think you'll find it should be Anti Grammar-Nazi, not Anti-Grammar Nazi. Two very different things.

>>The Waterstone(')s thing is to make the company name conform to their domain name, isn't it?

Yes. That isn't necessarily wrong, any more than dropping commas at the end of each lines on addresses is wrong (see link).

It wasn't the reason Harrods dropped their ' over 100 years ago, though, nor why churches dropped them in their saints' names.

Comformity.

Eddie, I'm with you in that I will continue to do what I do and try to ignore those who complain about it.

What everyone else does....

is up to them.

I will comment that the apostrophe thing is, to me, more and more an age thing. When I see proper punctuation I assume maturity.

I always thought that changes like Waterstones and Harrods was all about exclusivity as opposed to ownership- was Harrods' place, is THE Harrods.