Dumber and Dumb

Steven Pinker: “so cliche” is so not good.

The other week, I got an email that referred to an online article I wrote last year, “7 Grammar Rules You Really Should Pay Attention To.” The email read, in its entirety: “There are three grammar errors in the title of your article.”

I was pretty sure that one of the alleged errors was using a preposition to end a sentence with, which isn’t an error, and isn’t really a question of grammar. But I couldn’t figure out the other two, so, against my better judgment, I asked the email writer what they were. He or she replied, “Numbers under 100 are always written out in composition.” In fact, in Associated Press and most other styles, numbers are never written out in headlines. The response went on: “The personal ‘you’ should be avoided in composition; however, I will give you a pass on that one since the entire article is written directly to ‘you,’ the reader.” All right, then.

Lately I’ve been mentally cataloging some of the dumb arguments people make about language mistakes and “mistakes.” Being simultaneously sure of yourself, dismissive, and wrong probably tops the list—and my email writer, being wrong three times and being so self-confident as not to provide any evidence beyond an 11-word assertion, is the top of the pops.

He or she belongs to the so-called prescriptivist camp, but that camp is hardly alone in making dumb claims and assertions. A couple of weeks ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article about a local young man who’s started a landlord-rating website, along the lines of RateMyProfessors. He calls it WhoseYourLandlord.com. The article noted that the guy’s freshman English professor pointed out to him that the first word should be “Who’s,” not “Whose.” Any legitimate response would have started by noting that apostrophes are problematic in URLs. The young entrepreneur did not offer a legitimate response. He offered a dumb response. As he told the Inquirer reporter, “We use the possessive form of who because we’re giving renters ownership of their situation by putting housing in their hands.”

Give me a break.

I give the young man credit, however, for not invoking to the go-to dumb argument of folk descriptivism, which is phrased along the lines of, “Everyone understood what I meant, so what’s the problem?” Here’s the problem: You can sustain your body with a diet of Pop-Tarts and Cheeze-Its, but doing so would be a bad idea. You can protect your body from the elements with a jumpsuit made of rags duct-taped together, but no sensible person would wear such an outfit to an office job or bar mitzvah. Language delivers meaning but can also be a medium for grace, style, eloquence, and personal expression. In part that’s because it relies on some mutually understood rules and conventions, concerning, for example, the difference between “whose” and “who’s.”

Prescriptivists also have a dumb argument related to understanding. It actually isn’t as dumb as the positions I’ve described so far. Rather, it invokes spurious alarmism. You used to see it in hopefully peeving, and it was out in full force in recent discourse about literally. Some people don’t like it when that word is used figuratively, as in a statement like, “The sun was so strong, I literally burned to a crisp.”  Fine. A solid argument can be made that this is a lazy cliché. But more common is the ambiguity objection, that is, “When people do that, you can’t tell if they mean literally or figuratively.” I repeat: Give me a break. The next time I see a sentence where I can’t tell which meaning of hopefully was intended, or if the speaker is a blackened cadaver or merely sunburned, will be the first.

Similarly, these folks like to bemoan the loss of old-fashioned meanings of words: “What a shame. You can’t call something a ‘gay party’ anymore without people getting the wrong idea.” Get over it! That is how language works. No one bemoans the loss of disinterested more than I do, but I know there’s literally nothing I can do to slow its descent into oblivion.

The descriptivists counter the prescriptivists’ agita with a spurious serenity. You often see one particular ploy on blog comment sections, in response to a sputtering fulmination against “between you and I” or “I could care less” or “10 items or less.” It’s usually phrased something like this: “You don’t have any right to object to this usage. But no need to be upset or bothered. After all, you don’t have to use it!”

Besides being presumptuous, this line paints any reaction to usage as a whim, akin to not liking purple or kale. That is willfully and disingenuously incomplete. The Harvard sociologist and prolific author Steven Pinker can be said to have kicked off the descriptivists’ modern offensive with his 1993 New Republic article “Grammar Puss.” Among other interesting material, Pinker’s new book, The Sense of Style, has a chapter called “Telling Right From Wrong.” And, what do you know, he’s heavy on the wrong! In the “Diction” section, he lists 25 “fussbudget decrees you [sic] can safely ignore,” such as not using aggravate to mean “annoy” as well as “make worse,” or anxious to mean “eager” as well as “worried.” But he lists nearly twice as many (49) “usages you’d be wise to reject”—including cliché as an adjective and begs the question to mean “prompts the question.”

Thankfully, books don’t have comments sections. If they did, I’m sure someone—call him Mike—would take Pinker to task for telling people not to use phenomena as a singular, then add, “Of course, you don’t have to use it that way.” I’d bet the farm that Mike, when writing for the public, would never perpetrate a sentence like, “It’s a surprising phenomena.” Why not? He would know full well that it would make him sound dumb.