If Not Me Then Who?

“The anti-pedant zealots,” said a recent Lingua Franca commenter, “have become tedious and repetitive, and one can’t help but feel that all the strawmen getting the stuffing beat out of them is an exercise akin to watching a terrier worry a squeaky toy.”

I’m the main anti-pedant zealot the commenter had in mind. So let me begin by pointing out that zealotry in the defense of accurate analysis is no vice, and moderation in the struggle against pedantic foolishness is no virtue.

But remember too that the mock-mauling behavior we see in a dog with a toy has a purpose: It develops their instinctive skills, and keeps them in shape for future battles with actual animals in the real world.

And so it is with me. Sometimes, to keep in shape, I practice on material that might reasonably be judged silly enough to be in the squeaky-toy category.

Take the case of the Internet commenter who asserted that these days essentially all infinitives are split (“I have not seen a ‘whole’ infinitive in years”). I responded to this utter hogwash as if it were worthy of my attention. But I was just exercising my argument muscles, practicing for future live tussles the next time some blathering know-it-all at a wine reception tries to tell me that the English language is falling to pieces and the speech of the young these days is disgraceful and grammar is a forgotten art yadda yadda yadda yawn. If I don’t keep in training, I may not be ready to answer such braying dimwits when I meet them.

And meet them I do. At a meeting of the English Speaking Union in Edinburgh in 2009 I met an awful woman with a Lady Bracknell manner who insisted loudly that Americans have abandoned adverbs completely. “No adverbs at all!” She went on and on about it (wildly overgeneralizing, perhaps, from the slightly greater tendency for colloquial American English to use adverbs of plain adjective form, as in real nice of you, or don’t act stupid, or drive careful now). I tried to protest that her claim was nowhere near true–that in my 25 years of living and teaching grammar in America I had met with many an adverb. But she wouldn’t pay any attention to me on the topic. I wasn’t forceful enough. I should have trained harder.

Why answer people at all, I hear you ask? Why not just make an excuse to slip away from this ghastly sort of person and let them rant on at others less fortunate?

It’s because I take my job description seriously. I’m a professor of general linguistics at a public research university. During the whole of my career, spent almost entirely in public institutions, I’ve been paid by public funds to teach and do research on the properties of human language. If someone like me won’t publicly challenge ridiculous misinformation about language, who will?

Someone should. Because propagating myths can do actual harm and waste actual money.

Suppose we just limit attention to Standard English for the moment (though the point could be illustrated more broadly). Many Americans hold, and foist on others, utterly false beliefs about English: That it is a grammatical blunder to allow immediately preverbal adjuncts in infinitival clauses (to immediately resign), or prepositions at ends of clauses (what they were thinking of), or hopefully as a modal adjunct (though hopefully we won’t have to), etc.

Teaching stuff like this is expensive and harmful as well as pointless. Expensive because teaching such silliness wastes costly classroom time; harmful because it makes people feel insecure about using their own native language and contributes to counterproductively impossible admissions tests that fail to predict likely success in college.

So to those who say I fall upon vehicles of prescriptivist poppycock like Strunk and White’s awful little book of nonsense like a dog savaging a squeaky toy, I say: Yes, but not nearly enough. I should repeat myself and overstate my case on these topics far more than I do. So far the majority of the public is not paying any attention. When newspapers and magazines and how-to-write books no longer publish flagrant falsehoods about English, perhaps I’ll relax a little.

(Oh, and just in case some wag should decide to comment below that my title should have been either If Not I Then Who or If Not Me Then Whom: Don’t even go there. I haven’t relaxed yet. I’ll be the grammarian here, OK?)