I get tagged in a lot of memes and Twitter-sized polemics about common grammatical errors. They’re usually written by people who take pride in referring to themselves as “Grammar Nazis.” I appreciate a good discussion, so I try to ignore the perversity of comparing oneself to Nazis just to establish that one talks good.
We all have Grammar Nazis (GN) in our lives. Most of them are extremely knowledgeable about language and some of them are even helpful, but too many of them seem overly concerned with enforcing grammatical rules without regarding their histories, and maintaining stasis when the nature of language requires it to be in constant flux. But the worst and most basic versions of the GN are those that loudly and acerbically defend English spelling for its own sake, often drawing llines in the sand at the border of four or five commonly misspelled or misused words, or trivial cases with complicated histories, such as /it’s/ and /its/.
For reasons I’ll supply, it’s my opinion that being a stickler for these common issues shows an ignorance of the inner workings of the English language, leading to arguments that are predicated on faulty premises, and show a lack of empathy for English’s speakers. And far too often, the conceits of the Grammar Nazi are defined by the lines enclosing economic class, race, dialect, or geographic location.
Those who are in the know—and not terribly prescriptive about English grammar—might argue that the /its/ vs /it’s/ conflation is a flawed choice both for mounting attacks on bad grammar, and for mounting attacks on people who cannot suffer Grammar Nazis.
To be clear, I’m not a linguist or historian or an expert in language of any sort. I’m a hobbyist with a deep interest in language, and I work as a technical writer. My work as a technical writer requires that I take special interest in the declarations of the Linguistic Prescriptivist. But as a hobbyist, my positions on language are generally from the standpoint of Linguistic Descriptivism.
In the service of descriptivism, and with the intention of defending Rightness vs. Correctness, I will attempt to show that the ubiquity of this friction over the usages of, for example,
/then/ vs /than/
or
/to/ vs /too/
are reflective of the origins of these words, and that they evolved into their current usages relatively recently and through often arbitrary processes. In some cases, bad usages are based on sound instincts about English and were, linguistically speaking, correct until fairly recently.
I’ll argue that weak education is not always to blame for spelling failures, and that the rules for English transcription are faulty, clumsy, and inconsistent.
I should be clear; the Grammar Geeks, the grammarians, the GNs or whatever, they’re not wrong about the need for standards of English. Some of their prescriptions are important, and internalizing the rules they defend to the annoyance of others will enrich one’s life by informing speech and writing habits in such a way that we are able to communicate effectively to the majority of English speakers. These standards are necessary for everything from technical manuals, academic and political discourse, and television programming. The Grammar Nazis are correct, but they’re not ‘right.’
The distinction between being right and being correct depends on the strength of supporting arguments, not the veracity of their conclusions. The rightness I’m talking about is something like ‘correct, with qualifications.’
Despite the manner in which we’re taught English in the grade school setting—that a rule or spelling is correct simply because it is—there are no naked facts in English. Language is a historical object, and little if anything about modern English has been “factual” from its inception.
I should also clarify my position so that I’m not accused of painting the Grammar Nazis with too broad a brush, and I should state that my focus is on a particularly mean subset of grammar enthusiasts. If they’re not clogging my Facebook stream with memes that say “When you say ‘I seen’, I assume you won’t finish that sentence with ‘the inside of a book’,” then I have no quarrel with them. Even the self-praising grammar nerd is tolerable. At least they’re helping to maintain a standard at a time when English is said to be suffering from a usage authority crisis. We need them. I learn a lot from them, and so can you.
Okay, let’s go.
Here are the most common issues GNs post about:
/their, there, they’re/
/its, it’s/
/too, to, two/
/than, then/
The first thing we notice here is that the words in these hot-button issues are homophones. Specifically, homophonic heterographs, meaning they sound the same, but are written differently.
By definition, to be homophones, the two words in question must have different etymological origins—different histories. Depending on how far down the etymological rabbit-hole we’re willing to go, what we’ll find about many of these stickler examples is that they generally share a common origin. For example, words like /then/ and /than/, and /to/ and /too/ actually have their origins in the same words.
And besides, history has shown us that the mistakes which so offend the more virulent grammar enthusiasts were either correct in the past or will be correct in the future.
When we really examine the spelling rules of English, it becomes clear that criticizing those who struggle with grammar—on the premise that the rules are intrinsically obvious or sensible—is disingenuous or just arrogant. The rules cannot always be derived as one might derive—outside of Standard English—the tenses of /bring, brang, brung/ from /sing, sang, and sung/ (see here). Most rules require exposure and memorization. And exposure is often dependent on circumstances beyond our control; economic class, language geography, ethnic and culture background, and son on.
Take, for example, the large population of English-speaking dyslexics (about 17%). A subset of dyslexics lack a strong visual memory. For those affected by dyslexia in this way, the expression and severity of their condition is heavily influenced by the orthographic system in which they’re communicating. English, with its inconsistent phonic rules and writing system that generates endless exceptions has an exacerbating effect on this expression.
Similarly, those with a form of dyslexia known as surface dyslexia—inability to recognize whole words—rely heavily on high grapheme to phoneme correspondence: words that are spelled the way they sound. Unfortunately, English does not have high grapheme to phoneme correspondence. In fact, in a hierarchy of languages considered to be the “worst offenders,” English is second only to Tibetan, whose spelling was frozen in place in the 9th century, but whose spoken dialects dropped prefix consonants, simplified massive consonant clusters, and developed a complex tonal system to compensate. Tibetan’s written language is a fossilized version of its ancestor. And it demands that its readers cluster of 5 or 6 letters, ignore the prefixes and suffixes completely, and pronounce a single toned syllable that sound nothing like the letters that formed it.
By comparison, English also went through a fossilization phase which began in the 15th century and ended in the 19th century, and this phase hinges almost entirely on the invention of the printing press.
While many other writing systems have consistent relationships between the way words are spelled and the way they sound, called Shallow Orthography, English speaking dyslexics must rely on a faulty transcription system; one where the rules they were taught consistently fail them (Deep Orthography) .
In some part, the orthographic depth of a writing system precedes the expression and neurological source of dyslexia for a person who writes in that system. We know, for example, that Mandarin-speaking dyslexics, who like all Mandarin speakers must learn and memorize up to 3000 glyphs (other estimates say 5k) of Hanzi just to be considered literate, exhibit different writing troubles than their English-speaking counterparts.
Instead of letter reversals, a person exhibiting dyslexia when reading Hanzi has difficulty extracting meaning from shapes, and the areas of the brain responsible for this are different from those of the English-reading dyslexic. In short, a person can be dyslexic in one writing system and have no detectable signs of dyslexia in another. This, however, may be due to how the features of a given language also prevent dyslexia’s detection, as well as the criterion being tested (e.g., reading scores vs. testing scores).
In the July 1968 issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Dr. Kiyoshi Makita argued that the apparent rarity of dyslexia in Japanese children (at the time) was due to the fact that Japan’s writing systems are highly homographic. However, this has been proven to be a flawed supposition. As there are at least six different expressions of dyslexia and no biological tests for the condition, only tests of reading performance and self-reporting can detect them, so again, the prevalence of dyslexia is highly dependent on the criteria being used to diagnose it.
From ‘The Myths and Truths of Dyslexia in Different Writing Systems’ (Hoeft MD PhD, McCardle PhD MPH, and Pugh PhD, 2015):
When Japanese readers were assessed using the syllabic Kana writing system, the prevalence was estimated to be 2 to 3 %—because of the shallow orthography and transparent grapheme-sound correspondence. In contrast, when these readers were assessed using the logographic system, Kanji, the prevalence was 5 to 6 % (Wydell, 2012). Further, the prevalence of dyslexia in Chinese speakers has been thought to be around 3.9 % (Sun et al., 2013), a rate similar to the prevalence for dyslexia in orthographically shallow languages (e.g., 3.1 to 3.2 % for Italian: Barbiero et al., 2012).
Still, some studies report that orthographically shallow writing-systems expose as many dyslexics as orthographically opaque writing systems (e.g., Spanish vs. Hebrew). The problem of Hanzi-reading dyslexics (the system from which Kanji is historically derived) being unable to draw meaning from shapes revolves around a central challenge of the Hanzi writing system: readers must first derive meaning from shapes, and then must access rote memory of a symbols phonology. Consequently, dyslexia in Chinese is said to be a more complicated disorder, involving both a phonological disorder and a visuospatial deficit.
Some aspects of Mandarin, such as its orthographic opaqueness and its rifeness of ideograms with different meanings and different pronunciations, are considered a strength. Characters with more than one meaning are useful for generating occult superstitions or for punning, giving Chinese readers and speakers access to a rich and poetic vocabulary of symbols and phrases. Still, Chinese is among the orthographically deepest systems ever tested, and it relies heavily on memorization and context.
Like English, Hanzi also has two categories of homonym:
If you’ve ever seen a list of English words commonly misspelled by dyslexics, it may not have been obvious that what you were looking at was a list of weak-points in English orthography. Native English speakers take these orthographic rules for granted, but speakers of other languages know: it is not characteristic of all languages to require a strong visual memory to spell words. Ideally, word spellings should be easy to generate from a simple set of rules. But this has not been true of English for hundreds of years.
English has deep orthography—irregular spelling. A letter combination like /ch/ as in “chicken,” can represent multiple sounds. In contrast, languages with shallow orthography, like Finnish, Spanish or German, have high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence and ‘regular spelling’. The latter two examples are extremely important to this discussion, as English shares common ancestry and countless cognates with both, but uses a comparatively inconsistent spelling system.
The perplexing inconsistency of English orthography reflects its history; English’s spelling rules were absorbed from multiple language systems and historical contexts, leading to multiple rule-systems for spellings and pronunciations. These ancestral language systems left relics and often hidden quirks dispersed throughout the language and are a major part of the reason for English’s comparatively deep orthography.
You may have encountered the [Fish = Ghoti] example (origin unknown, but attributed to George Bernhard Shaw). The idea is that the word /fish/ can be spelled /ghoti/, if one simply uses
/gh/ as in /tough/
/o/ as in /women/
and
/ti/ as in /nation/.
A similar method gives an alternate spelling of /potato chips/ as /ghoughpteighbteau tchoghs/. While these demonstrations conveniently ignore the rules governing how these graphemes are sounded-out according to their placement in a word, their point is well struck: the English writing system is inconsistent, needlessly clunky, and difficult to grasp. And it’s a point that proponents of English spelling reform have been arguing for centuries.
/gh/ vs. /ch/
Take the /gh/ consonant in the aforementioned alternate spelling of fish [ghoti]. This consonant is an example of an uncritically accepted “exception to the rule” which hinges on a historical relationship many grammar enthusiasts take for granted. For many words in which the /gh/ consonant appears, it does so as a relic of English’s (and German’s) Teutonic ancestors. This Teutonic relic finds itself in words like /night/, /light/, /laugh/, and /nought/, and it leads directly to confusing and inconsistent English spellings for foreign and native speakers alike.
The ‘gh’ in English words of Teutonic ancestry has analogs in modern German cognates, namely the German /ch/ sound:
night – Nacht
light – Licht
laugh – lachen
brought – gebracht or brachte (where the -/ge/ prefix in German denotes the past-perfect tense, and “bring” is /bracht/)
But the difference is that the German writing system—also based on the Latin alphabet—has extremely shallow orthography, playing word pronunciation mostly straight. Nearly anywhere the /ch/ digraph appears in German, it is pronounced exactly the same way. Pronunciation of the English cognates, however, exposes the problematic orthography of English.
Depending on the quality of their education, we should expect people to be confused by the differing spellings for words like “laugh” and “through.” Since the German counterpart for “through” – /durch/ – naturally uses a voiced /ch/ digraph, we might expect the English /gh/ digraph to behave in the same manner it appears in other aforementioned words. But it doesn’t. Some other underlying rule comes into play, as is evidenced by the silent /gh/ sounds in
naught – nichts
sight – Sicht
right – recht
height – hoch
fight – fechten
eight – Acht
The German /cht/ sound blends a voiceless velar fricative into a velar ejective stop (the hard /k/ sound) and finally into an alveolar stop /t/. The fact that something like this was lost in English should not be a surprise to anyone. It’s likely that as English made its way across the world, from population to population, the average speaker found the classical pronunciation difficult. And this reason—convenience and optimization—is at the heart of most changes in language. Changes are often influenced, if not completely governed by, lingual anatomy, glottal anatomy, or just plain slacker anatomy.
Similar changes occurred for vowels, including a massive change for most English vowels occurring between the 14th and 17th centuries, now called The Great Vowel Shift (which occurred for pronunciation but which left spellings largely intact). Historically—and I think broad access to the internet and social media is changing this, perhaps even being a point in the publisher vs. platform debate—changes in almost any written language lag behind changes in spoken language by about 500 years.
This lag leads to word pronunciation that is often woefully inconsistent with written forms. This inconsistency can be quickly remedied by updating spellings to match new pronunciation. The German language, for example, underwent similar shifts—the High German consonant shift—right before English’ Great Vowel Shift, but where English spellings did not adapt to the changes, German spelling did, thus preserving the relative simplicity of their orthography (there are some exceptions).
When English spellings finally begin to adapt to new pronunciations and meanings, people began to produce the errors that currently infuriate the Grammar N—:
“I like my family, but I don’t like there attitudes.”
Commonly misspelled homophones like /they’re/, /their/ and /there/ are often friction points under which the grinding tectonic plates of language eventually erupt with new usages.
Detractors of bad spelling defend the centuries-old historically inert written forms as ‘correct’ (often despite their being incorrect in the past) with few pleas for more sensible and consistent spellings. And many of them openly criticize those who simply do not understand these spelling inconsistencies.
Ideally, there shouldn’t be anything to ‘get.’ English speakers take it for granted that a spelling is just something one has to memorize. But a good language, one that is comprehensible to all people and easily taught to those on the outer edge of literacy, is not something to memorize, but something to calculate. To sound-out.
Many of us jaywalk with abandon at 3 am but would be reticent to do so at the same crosswalk during rush hour. Is it because the crosswalk rule is infallible, or is it because we grok the rule’s hidden design? Deep down we know that when there are no cars, the crosswalk rule is reduced to nonsense. But we cannot know what we do not know. And so even at 3 am, the crosswalk rule protects us from that one random car from out of nowhere.
To me, this is the secret of grammarphilia. Acknowledging that a word is not just an arrangement of letters, but a historical object that is flexible in various contexts, and perhaps even more powerful because of it. A word is a tacit agreement between nations, between cultures, tribes, villages, families and peers, but its malleability—as are the Chinese ideograms which lead to great puns and culturally useful superstitions—can be a strength.
So I’d now like to drive a wedge between two types of Grammar Nerd in order to distinguish them from one another, because it is this fact – that words are simply mutual agreements between speakers – and how one deals with it, that determines whether one is a Grammarphile or a Grammar Nazi.
/its/ vs /it’s/
In a recent debate on an internet forum, I witnessed a forum user dismiss the entire argument of one of the commenters (in a discussion unrelated to language) on the basis that they had committed the /its-it’s/ conflation. Being homophones, this is an easy mistake to make. And no one but a complete dick halts a dialog and declares themselves the winner over a simple misspelling. This person, it would seem, was a Grammar Nazi.
There is a curious relationship between the two words which lingers in the English speaker’s subconscious: the original spelling of the possessive pronoun which today is spelled /its/ was, until the 19th century, spelled /it’s/. With an apostrophe. Until the 1800s, writers would have written that they were “overwhelmed by it’s simplicity”, or “wooed by it’s consistency.”
The general rule for applying possessive apostrophes is that the possessive version of a singular noun is formed by adding the apostrophe and an /s/. Since /it/ is a singular noun, it is easy to see why the possessive apostrophe rule should apply to /it/ the same way it applies to phrases like “my grandmother’s rash” and “for fuck’s sake.”
The possessive apostrophe rule, by the way, is said by some historians to have originated with one person, Geoffroy Tory, a 16th century printer who had a habit of inventing grammatical marks (he’s also supposed to have originated the cedilla and the accent marks (specific to French, Catalan, and Portuguese.)
A single person, printer, publishing house, or printing is not an uncommon origin story for a punctuation mark, spelling, or letter. It’s actually fairly common. And in some ways, it calls into question whether or not we should be at one another’s throats over arbitrary decisions made by people with privileged positions and which eventually grate against common sense. But then again, once a linguistic habit takes hold, the matter is out of its originator’s hands.
The possessive apostrophe for /it/ was eventually omitted, by the 18th century, because in other arenas the word /it’s/ had become firmly established as a contraction of /it is/. To add more reason for the change, writers were already in the habit of omitting possessive apostrophes for personal pronouns like /hers/, /they/ etc., where we would, for proper nouns, write “Sarah’s box”, or “David’s junk”, or “the Harrisons’ genitals.”
It’s also important to note that the appearance of the possessive /its/ is so recent, that the possessive /it’s/ can be found in relatively modern writings, such as the collections of Thomas Jefferson (though I’ve never seen it because such works are likely to have been edited for modern audiences.)
Note: The word /it/ itself is a relic of gendered nouns in Old English, when neuter nouns were still in use. Originally it was /hit/, a third person singular pronoun, but it eventually shedded its h- because that sound could only be heard “in the careful speech of the partially educated” [Weekley, Ernest, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English].
With this fact, we see our first example of how some of the Grammar Nazi’s most infuriating usage errors might only be considered errors because of conscious efforts made by what were essentially oligarchies of academics and publishing houses, the habits for populations, or attempts to mimic or disseminate class-based pronunciations. Instead of changing naturally, prescriptions were made, and the language shifted upon this hinge. For its (/it’s/) apostrophe, this was a somewhat artificial change. For the shedding of its h-, perhaps inevitable (though this doesn’t explain how /his/ and /her/ managed to keep their h- sounds.)
The ability to internalize the logic of this change, one which ignores well-established rules elsewhere in the language, isn’t a good meter by which I should judge my fellow mensch. Our brains grok the underlying logic of /its/. The person who writes “It’s beauty is well known” is not blowing it completely. It’s not a chaotic error. It’s not a slip. It isn’t even compelling evidence of a lack of critical thinking or attention to detail because, on the contrary, it is an attempt to apply other rules where they rightfully belong.
The erroneous writer of “Look at it’s weird balls!” has reasoned themselves into the error by taking cues from symmetrical occurrences of possessive pronouns. They’re aware that the object under discussion “possesses” something: weird balls.
By re-writing the rule for special cases, modern English has failed the speaker and the writer. Instead of being something that can be easily derived, the rule for apostrophes is a detail which must be remembered. And language should be derivable to us – it should be “generative“.
One famous example of the value of an easily derivable spelling system is Hangeul (or Hangul); the Korean alphabet. (And, full disclosure on the following, there may have been some literati purges involved, I’m not completely sure, but I’m certainly not glorifying those…)
Sejong the Great of the Joson dynasty constructed Hangeul (“great script”), a phonetic what-you-see-is-what-you-get alphabet which so precluded the need for advanced education that illiterate farmers were able to master it quickly. Unlike the Chinese writing system Hanzi, this made literacy and mastery for Koreans attainable by more than just the elite, who could afford to hire instructors to teach them the complicated Chinese Hanja used before the Korean alphabet’s inception. (Like Kanji, the Japanese word for Chinese writing system Hanzi, the Korean word for the Chinese writing system is Hanja.)
It is easier to produce a new standard when comparatively few people are familiar with the old standard. So the irony is that perhaps the one thing hampering English spelling reform the most is widespread literacy and the continued of old writing standards. We break the rules because it makes things easier, and we make the rules for precisely the same reason. A further irony is that in so many cases, the rules we make are arbitrary, while the rules we break show some form of deference to some form of consistency—to the way things should be.
/to/ vs /too/
This is a good time to bring up /to/ vs. /too/, which is also among one of the Grammar Nazi’s most common complaints. We’ve seen countless criticisms of public documents, we’ve seen Twitter statuses and Facebook updates lampooned over their conflation. People are real dicks about it.
But again, showing so much vitriol over this common issue shows an ignorance of the word’s origin. Like so many other grammatical errors, this one follows has a typical profile:
/Then/ vs /Than/
What about /then/ vs /than/? This is another one of those memetic examples passed around by the Grammar Gestapo ad nauseum. I’ve seen people write “I can’t take you seriously when you can’t tell the difference between than and then” on Facebook. I don’t have to tell you that these words were typed by a very specific subspecies of North American Dickhead: Narcissus vulgaris. The people who think thoughts delivered in grammatical or dialectic variations have lesser value.
At this point does it even need to be said? You’ve probably already guessed it: the two conjunctions /than/ and /then/ shared the same spelling until the 17th century. Its original form was the adverb /then/.
Etymonline.com (certainly not the final authority) says:
“The earliest use is in West Germanic comparative forms introducing the second member, i.e. bigger than (cf. Dutch dan, German denn), which suggests a semantic development from the demonstrative sense of ‘then’: A is bigger than B, evolving from A is bigger, then (“after that”) B.”
This history reveals the word’s hidden logic, and even preserves the order of expressions, with ‘A is bigger, then B’ having the same size relationship as “A is bigger than B,” and we can easily imagine how this phrase would have morphed over time, with the spellings of /then/ and /than/ not distinguished from þanne, þænne, þonne until c. 1700.
There are no methods to grasp when committing the rules of /than/ and /then/ to memory. The way I see it, three issues make mixing the two words up perfectly reasonable, and consistent with our defense so far:
The internal logic governing the emergence of the conjunction /than/ still exists in thought-space as a sort of linguistic ghost. This is less a defense of those who understandably commit the /than-then/ error, and more of an attack on the decency of the Grammar Nazi.
I recognize that it isn’t enough to defend the /then-than/ conflation by pointing to the word’s little-known past. Doing so is considered an “etymological fallacy.” So I would try to avoid that. But someone who loves language enough to disparage others and politicize their educational backgrounds should know enough about the language to show empathy for those struggling with these issues. That is: A Grammar Nerd should know enough to know that criticizing common errors is not just an jerk’s errand, it shows a lack of appreciation for how their language has developed.
So I’ve argued that if an error is common enough, it is generally a problem with the language itself, not with the people committing the error. Bad language habits occur around issues where the language is particularly clunky or inefficient. Case in point, the /an/ vs. /a/ problem.
/an/ vs. /a/
It’s not unfair to imagine that many self-professed grammarians would scoff at someone who says “Man, I need to get myself a automobile.” This phrasing occurs often enough in Black and Southern vernaculars, and it’s regarded as an error to Standard English speakers. But on the other side of that error, I once heard a kid shout “Look! An puppy!” What caused this fledgling speaker’s error?
The word /a/, as in “a thing in your teeth,” did not come to us in its current form. It was originally just the word /an/, and the phrase “An puppy!” would have been accurate.
I pointed out earlier that when using the indefinite article /an/ before words beginning with consonants, a full glottal stop between /an/ and /dog/ is required. The glottal stop is that little cough between /an/ and /dog/ in the erroneous sentence “that is an dog.”
This nearly undetectable glottal stop between /an/ and words beginning with consonants led directly to the shedding of the /n/ sound when used before words opening with a consonant sound, not just a consonant symbol. This is an important distinction which should betray the word’s history, but it’s not something our English teachers would have explained to us. Instead, grammarians explain the rule without exposing the details that make the rule more sensible, such as in the following case where the author refers to the conflation of /an/ and /a/ as a “rookie mistake”: http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/a-before-consonants-and-an-before-vowels-is-not-the-rule
Yes, it’s a rookie mistake, but on some level one has to appreciate that the mistake itself is based on an intuitive understanding of the hidden relationship between /a/ and /an/, and that the rule being broken is actually just a codification of a common mistake.
As for the word /a/, which had completed its entrance into the English language by the mid-14th century, there was no conscious effort to change it. No marching in the streets or secret committees to rid the language of costly glottal stops. The people just pronounced the words as they came out, and then they wrote the words as they were pronounced. In other words, the splitting of “an” into /a/ and /an/ was dictated almost entirely by human anatomy. And it was inevitable.
In this rant, I’ve concentrated only on commonly disputed issues which take roughly the same form, but these examples should also be highly illustrative of the forces underlying grammar and spelling of all types: hidden etymologies and transcription rules, sweeping changes initiated by single persons, ruling classes ,or publishing houses, linguistic shift, historical anomalies, etc.
In a world with 1 billion non-literate adults, using one’s privileged access to education as a lever to take an extra helping of “fuck you, learn my words” is harmful to society. And like I’ve said, the pattern I’ve seen is that most of these complaints ignore some very basic details all lovers of language should know (I’ve just committed the “No true Scotsman” fallacy, by the way, but bear with me.)
For example, the meme “When you say ‘I seen’, I assume you won’t finish that sentence with ‘the inside of a book'” ignores the fact that the phrase /I seen/ identifies a dialect of English. Essentially, the person who says /I seen/ isn’t even speaking the Grammar Nazi’s language, so the speaker should be considered exempt from the prescriptions of Standard English.
Imagine going to Jamaica or Trinidad and saying “It’s not ‘I goin’, boy’, it’s ‘I am going, boy.'” In such cases, the Grammar Nazi is completely off the mark. It’s they that are ignoring the rules of some grammar. And with so many dialects in the United States and Great Britain, it pays to know when our prescriptions are valid.
Here we see that in contrast to the Grammarphile, the Grammar Nazi chooses to ignore the many reasons specific grammatical mistakes are so widespread, instead, turning the prevalence of common errors into a platform to politicize their own mastery of the language. By disparaging poor spellers, Grammar Nazis emphasize their education, their cultural background, and their privilege. To me, this is more than enough to separate them from their Grammarphile cousins. Both are of the Grammar Nerd genus, but they are not the same species. The Grammarphile loves what the common errors teach us about language; they know that the emergence of new languages and dialects pivots upon these errors; they know that whole languages can develop from what a ruling class might consider to be the speaking habits of the uneducated (like French, which some argue was historically just incredibly bad Latin.)
The quirks of a language are the result of idiomatic changes in spelling, meaning and pronunciation which are then handed down through the generations. They evolve to distinguish new usages, to soften or remove difficult syllables, making words easier to pronounce. These quirks obey an order and efficiency that is not made explicit by their written forms, because, again, written forms lag behind spoken forms by an average of 500 years. That is to say, many English words are spelled the way they were pronounced 500-600 years ago.
The rules which the Grammar Nazis defend to the point of hurlinginsults are borne of the very sort of change they actively resist. Because of this, it’s not difficult to imagine a distant future in which grammarphiles vigorously defend /your/ as a contraction of the phrase “you are”. It’s happened before. I’d say give it 200 years.
Maybe you’ve seen the following textbook example: “Ye Olde Cafe.” The spelling /Ye/ was absorbed into English based on a ‘best fit’ economy. The /Y/ in “Ye Olde” is actually pronounced /th/, and was intended to denote the Gothic/Saxon letter Thorn (þ, seen earlier in the “/then/ vs /than/” section), but the letter /y/ was the best fit available for /þ/ on their printing presses, which had been imported from Germany and other parts of Europe.
Consequently, “Ye Olde Cafe” is and was always pronounced “The Old Cafe.” That a decision made solely because Germany and Italy did not have printer fonts available for /þ/ is a perfect illustration of how and why knowing these things is the Grammar Nerd’s domain and not the speaker’s.
In the 90s, I actually called a cafe in San Diego with the name Ye Olde Cafe: they answered the phone “yee old cafe.” I asked what time they closed and hung up. It’s a name, after all. The spellings and pronunciations of names are entirely up to their owners.
If, historically, incorrect spellings were acceptable based on a best fit economy, why should today’s incorrect spellings (which are also based on a best-fit economy) be unacceptable? “Because grammar.” Again, I do believe in its importance, I just don’t dare try to change the way people speak or write.
“But there has to be a standard! How else could we read traffic signs and drug prescriptions?” I agree completely. And those standards exist. By definition, every person literate in English can read and understand Standard English. But Standard English should be regarded as a social and political tool. It’s not necessary in our Twitch streams and it’s not necessary at our birthday parties. It is better to speak the language of your audience and adjust accordingly.
Future spellings of problem words will retain their differences in meaning, but will likely converge on a single written form. People who take my position must concede that the advent of digital media and widespread literacy greatly retards the rate of changes like these, but this hasn’t stopped the appearances of new parts of speech like our newest preposition, /because/. Because inevitability.
I’m not asking Grammar Nazis to accept poor grammar completely. I’m just asking them to balance their vitriol with historical lessons and to stop being jerks on the internet. I’m asking them to know what it means when people make mistakes—that the rules are often to blame, not the people. I’m asking them to know when a grammatical prescription should be followed and when it’s appropriate to ignore. I’m asking them to respect that Standard English does not need to be used in every novel, or when people are speaking openly about their feelings, or when someone is relaying a story about their day. I’m asking the Grammar Nazis to become Grammarphiles. To defend the prescriptions of Standard English where it makes sense: on traffic signs, in instruction manuals, in textbooks and medical journals, in the narratives and expository text of novels, but not in day to day speech or personal confessions or status messages or Tweets.
I’ve said it before, but in conclusion, I concede that the Grammar Nazis are correct about the prescriptions. But not correct for the right reasons, which to me, means they’re not right. Just correct.
Only a fool looks at the finger that is pointing at the moon. I’d rather look at the moon “then” the finger.
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