Got a Pet Language Peeve? Tell It to Anne Curzan

Create “Grammar Night” and they will come. Seriously.

Two weeks ago, my That’s What They Say co-host Rebecca Kruth and I hosted Grammar Night at a local barbecue restaurant. Our radio segment — which packs as much interesting linguistic information into four minutes as we can — has been airing every Sunday morning on Michigan Radio (the local National Public Radio affiliate) for almost six years, and the station organized the evening event. A little on-air advertising and information on the website and voilà: a full house of people who had brought their questions and their peeves.

I recognize that Grammar Night sounds geeky, and it is geeky in the most delightful sense of the word. Here is a room filled with people who care deeply about language and who are keen observers of language variation and change. They might call it “sloppy usage” or “the decay of language standards” rather than language variation and change, but we’re all there because we want to spend a Wednesday evening eating some barbecue and talking about words. It is my challenge — which I happily embrace — to see if I convince people that their peeves can be positively and productively reframed as interesting observations about the history of the English language.

Some of the questions started as thoughtful observations about the language, such as the woman who noted the semantic expansion of the word talk to encompass a range of electronically mediated communication. What ensued was a conversation about whether talking, which many agreed encompassed texting, could also include email. Is electronic chatting broader than talking? Questions worthy of further investigation.

Another attendee raised the wonderful question: If literally is really coming to mean ‘figuratively,’ what word is going to replace literally to mean ‘literally’?

Other observations came out as peeves: for example, annoyance at people who “mix up their pronouns” in “between you and I” and “Me and my mom went” (which, one person noted, is also rude because speakers are putting themselves first), distaste for invite as a noun, and exasperation at all those like’s out there in the world. I get it. As I have written about here, I have my peeves too. What a linguist’s perspective allows you to do, though, is step back from the peeve and see it in the context of ongoing language change — and ongoing peeving about language!

I reminded the person who doesn’t like invite as a noun that Benjamin Franklin didn’t like notice as a verb. What seems ignorant today may seem completely standard within a generation or two. With like, I shared the fascinating observation in Alexandra D’Arcy’s recent book on like that, in addition to being a verb, adjective, noun, preposition, conjunction, complementizer, suffix, approximative adverb, sentence adverb, discourse particle, discourse marker, and quotative (be like), like also can sometimes be an infix (e.g., for-like-ever). How fun to have a new non-taboo infix in English. And as for “between you and I,” I posed the question many of my linguist colleagues have usefully posed: How many educated speakers need to use this construction before it becomes educated usage?

One of the many great features of a night like Grammar Night: My fellow keen language observers alert me to changes afoot in the language that I haven’t been tracking. At the end of the night, one person shared their husband’s concern about the verb spike being used when there is no spike: there is just an increase. Shouldn’t a spike refer to a burst that has to come back down? Evidence from the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that things have been able to spike up — just up — since the late 19^th century. And as a noun, a metaphorical spike has been able to go rapidly up without coming rapidly back down since at least the 1980s. (Of course, in volleyball, spikes go rapidly down.)

I fully recognize that my responses may not convince people at Grammar Night that there still isn’t something wrong with the construction that drives them crazy. And I’m OK with that. My goal is to convince them that there is another reasonable way to look at it. And to make the case that you can enjoy language variation and change (and the human creativity and diversity they represent) and still teach students the conventions of formal, standard, edited English and still be a meticulous copy editor (which I am, and I am going to let this sentence fragment be the final word).