The Grammarian Strikes

Over at El Rancho Deluxe My Guiding Light Twisty has decreed that any comments making use of ellipses will be held for moderation and are unlikely to be approved. Twisty hates ellipses, writing without capital letters, misspellings, and the public airing of poor grammatical constructions. Predictably, her comments section soon swarmed (if in a rather half-hearted, sluggish way) with those who suggest, not wrongly, that “grammar is oppression.” To which Twisty replies,

“Grammar as oppression?”

No! No! No! It is precisely the opposite. A treatise will follow today or tomorrow or the next, but until then: punctuation facilitates communication. It's hard enough trying to make sense of what people write on the Internet without having to watch them trail doofily off into nothingness at every turn.

 Well, this is clearly true; the Internet brims with disgustingly crappy design and incomprehensible spelling and sentence structure. Makes me shudder. And yet I would go further, to assert that it's not just on the Internet that standard English is owed respectful obedience.

But “there is no standard English, Bixi,” the masses whine, “you want to turn your own need for a reliable, unyielding universe of right and wrong into an elitist rulebook of judgement -- and you have a linguistically inaccurate and historically blind understanding of the development of the English language, to boot.”

Yeah, whatever. Grammar is a game.  And who can enjoy a sport in which, when observing foul play, the referee issues a tepid blow on her whistle, shrugs her shoulders, and says, “English is an evolving language, conventional usage says you’re both right, carry on?” That is not fun. What’s fun is the slam-dunk feeling of a conditional deployed correctly, an infinitive painstakingly reunited with itself, the adroit use of a double negative. Or even better, catching the unassuming nobility of someone else’s correct usage and sharing a high-five, or better still, reading William Safire and realizing there is an entire world of grammatical mistakes out there you are still making, and that, like with a magically unearthed unwatched episode of “Sex and the City,” you have more to discover.

It is so wrong that, for instance, “nauseous” is now defined in the dictionary as “affected with nausea” just because people have been erroneously using it in such a fashion. Dictionaries should not be populist! Other things are, like libraries, and that’s lovely. But dictionaries should hold fast as long as inhumanely possible. People are going to fuck up the language anyway, sometimes by mistake and sometimes deliberately; dictionaries shouldn’t be granting permission where they ought to be dispensing gentle but firm clarity.

And, finally, I also deeply enjoyed commenter MzNicky’s observation:

As with the wretchedly misused ellipsis, egregious lower-casing is simply passive-aggressive language abuse. Like you just can’t take the time to put your precious pinky over there on the fucking shift key already. You’re not e.e. cummings, or even bell hooks. Give me a break.

Ahhh. My day is done.

Comments

[eeelana]

i love this post! i like how you wrestle with grammar and all the ire it has wrought, but ultimately affirm the convention. i'm tired of being contrary! hail to grammar: laws, rules, structure. liberation through grammar is revolutionary indeed.

[Lauri]

I found your posting while doing a search for the misuse of the ellipsis mark. Funny that there was quite a bit of information out there. I was looking for information because I find myself guilty of overusing and *misusing* them frequently. (I'm also blatently guilty of never capitalizing; I did spare you this by putting my precious pinky on the fucking shift key this one time!)

But that's not why I'm writing... (ha!)

I found it funny that you put the cats' other names in quotes. I'm in school to be an vet tech ("animal nurse") and we had a coversation the other day about doctors putting animals' names in quotation marks. The teacher said that since the cat was given that name and was in fact called by that name, that it *was* the cat's name and therefore, did not require quotation marks. We all agreed that quotation marks should only be used when the animal's real name is Stinky but perhaps goes by "Sir Shits-a-lot."

I dunno, just thought you might find that funny.

"lauri..."