real life

Confessions of a recovering grammar snob.

By David Rutledge for Earshot

I saw something on a major news website this morning that provoked a complex play of emotions.

It was the following sentence, from an article about the troubled Pie Face fast food chain: “The one-time, high-flying, hot-pie business has left behind a trail of destruction.”

My first reaction was a sense of loathing so thick that I almost struggled to breathe.

Those bloody commas. What on earth are they doing there?

Not only are they redundant, but they completely destroy the sentence, giving it an odd jerky rhythm and calling unwarranted attention to those prosaic hyphenated descriptors.

Speaking of hyphens, since when does “hot pie” get one? What the hell is going on? Are there no subeditors left on the face of the planet?

My second reaction was more meditative, more detached.

Like everything else, language changes, and with change come new conventions, new modes of expression.

Maybe this comma thing is well on its way to accepted usage status, like split infinitives and starting a sentence with “and”.

The white-hot fury passed, and in its wake came a serene acceptance. All will be well.

Like baking a cupcake

As a language pedant in recovery, that push-pull of outrage and resignation is something I’m learning to live with. But it’s a tension I suspect will never be resolved.

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There’s a scene in the movie Bridesmaids where Kristen Wiig makes a cupcake.

Her character has recently emerged from the ruins of a one-time high-flying cake-making business (see how much better it flows without the commas?).

She’s out of work, out of love, out of prospects, out of money, out of luck. But man, can that girl make a cupcake.

Step by step, she constructs the tiny confection with elaborate care, baking the base, creating an exquisite topping of marzipan leaves and flowers, piping a delicate pattern of whipped cream over the marzipan, and the result is a slightly ridiculous but perfect work of culinary art.

That’s how I feel about putting a nice sentence together. It’s very much like making the perfect cupcake.

You separate the clauses (comma or semicolon? don’t get me started), sift the whole thing for redundancies, dangling participles and unnecessary adverbs, carefully calibrate the adjectival flavours, and like a contestant “plating up” on MasterChef, you dot it with perfectly placed apostrophes. Satisfying and fun!

But it can be a bleak sort of satisfaction, a sad sort of fun. Alone in the kitchen, Wiig regards her cupcake for a glum second before sighing and biting in, chewing with a mournful expression and a blob of icing on her nose.

That’s how the language pedant looks to the rest of the world: a little pathetic, a little unloved, a little in need of a life.

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Hence my New Year’s resolution: to relax, take a breath, and try to see the ever-expanding universe of linguistic atrocities as more of a sunny fertile meadow wherein bloom the thousand flowers of the old cliché.

Nobody likes a snob.

Let’s face it, nobody likes a snob. And while it always feels a little weird to talk about class in Australia, if we do have class divisions, then language usage marks them out very clearly.

It’s one thing to talk about the inherent beauty of language and the need to protect it from uglification. But the line between disliking “youse” and wanting to distinguish oneself morally from the people who say it is a very blurry one indeed.

Language snobbery is also predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of the ways in which language actually works — much like music snobbery, where the notion that this or that genre is “not really music” betrays a thoroughly unmusical turn of mind.

“Correct usage” did not spring organically from English, but is the highly artificial product of an age when adherence to the rules reflected upward social mobility.

Knowing when to use the subjunctive became important around the same time, and for the same reasons, as learning to play Chopin etudes: it was entwined with notions of propriety and class status.

The rules have always been an imposition, forced to play catch-up with both the incorrigible messiness of English and the fact that people insist on flouting them. Or do I mean flaunting?

The former is “correct”, but to my horror I read recently that the latter is beginning to make its way into dictionaries as an acknowledged variant.

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If dictionaries are in the business of describing linguistic usage rather than prescribing it, then where does the language pedant turn for unwavering authority?

Certainly not to style guides, which are constantly being updated to reflect change.

Break rules, then break them again

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no such thing as an aesthetically disinterested love of language, or that taking pleasure in getting the fundamentals right makes you some sort of toffee-nosed prig.

But try this thought experiment: imagine living in a society in which there were no linguistic rules, a society beyond standardised spelling and grammar and Fowler’s Modern English Usage, where language was a free-for-all and you could totally, like, say whatever.

Would you be fine, remembering that the works of Jane Austen, George Herbert, John Milton and Shakespeare himself all emerged from a world devoid of final authority on usage matters?

Or would you feel outraged that the forces of decadence had won, that the barbarians had stormed the citadel (and it’s worth remembering here that etymologically, the word “barbarians” carries the precise sense of “uncivilised oiks who don’t speak like us”)?

I’m not a laissez-faire linguistic liberal, but I’d quite like to be, which is why I call myself a snob in recovery.

I still have pet language peeves and harbour a kneejerk distaste for incorrect usage (and as a snob, I do mean distaste — a supercilious curl of the lip, a fastidious flaring of the nostril), but this usually passes on reflection.

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I’m beginning to wonder if style guides, grammar primers, the whole architecture of correct usage could be done away with altogether, or at least relegated to the category of specialist interest. What would be lost?

A tradition, I suppose, but perhaps a tradition that stifles creativity, makes people feel inferior and tries absurdly to stem a tide that can’t be stemmed.

People like to argue that without the rules, we’d flounder in a swamp of misunderstanding. But is that really the case?

Examples abound of a dystopian post-Fowler future (e.g. without initial capitals, you could never safely write that you’d helped your Uncle Jack off a horse), but they tend to be the same amusing ones endlessly recirculated.

It’s hardly as though passenger jets would suddenly fall from the sky if we got rid of the apostrophe.

Other languages get along perfectly well without it, as well as without gendered pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, arcane spelling conventions, plural noun forms, and the entire future tense.

All languages are in a continuous state of flux. Why should English be protected from itself?

This post originally appeared on ABC News.


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