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a peeve named grammar
back to: my pet peeve ∙
duck & cover
 If you
didn’t know already, I’m a writer. Not a published one, of course, but if
you write because you’re compelled to do it, then that makes you a writer. Or so says my husband, at any rate. I used to describe myself as someone
who loves to write – a distinction in my mind from those who actually make a
living doing so – but a few years ago, Sal and I had an interesting
discussion regarding these two things. Sal had introduced me to a friend as
“my wife, the writer” and when I asked him about it later, he said that as
long as I felt this driving need to stay up until all hours working on
various books and insist on carrying a notebook with me to capture that
flash of inspiration wherever it might hit, I ought to own up to the label. So he convinced me to identify myself as a
"writer"
versus “one who enjoys writing”.
Why do
I write? Well, why do you breathe? What compels you to draw air in and
expel it roughly 21,600 times a day? (Google, how I love thee…)
Can’t
help it, you say? You would have to do it or die?
I
guess you have your answer.
I love
words and language. I love the idea of forming pictures with letters and
symbols. I’m amazed that a brilliant turn of phrase can create a feeling or
an emotion or an image. I’m fascinated by the idea that ink on paper can
breathe life into imaginary people and places.
Words,
to me, are paints in somber browns and bright yellows and lustrous purples.
They’re a chef’s precious truffles and rich chocolate and juicy berries, a
composer’s chords and arpeggios and diminished fifths.
Words
have value, texture, weight. They are not to be squandered. And just as a
passion for the art of painting or food or music will turn you into an
elitist snob on the subject, so too will a passion for the art of words.
It’s a
thing.
Being
a writer, having a love of words, consider me more sensitive than most about
how they’re used and (often) abused. It’s why I'm a perfectionist about spelling
and grammar.
See,
mistakes like “it’s” in place of “its”, “orientate”, “believeable” …these all
make me twitch like a Tourette’s patient on speed. With the exception of
e-mail, newsgroup posts, instant messages, and chats, there is nothing that
needs to be dashed off with so much haste that it cannot stand a cursory
once over with the spell checker. (And I would submit that rarely can
a case be made for those, though I've done my share of hasty mistakes so
whatever.) Don’t even get me started on the
disturbing trend of netspeak, with such charming corruptions as “kewl” and
“u r m33n” and “thatz stoopid”.
Obviously, we all make mistakes. I’ve made the “its”/“it’s” mistake in
haste. I’ve been known to get my “i” and “e” switched around in “receive”. I sometimes end sentences with prepositions and I’ve
been known to split infinitives with reckless abandon. These kinds of errors
happen.
And sometimes they're not errors. Sometimes ending a sentence in a
preposition is more graceful. Sometimes, it's a matter of style. But as my
Differential Equations instructor once admonished: “You must know the
rules before you can break them, moron”. (And also, "recieve" is never a
matter of style. It's a matter of spelling.)
Really, is it so hard to at least try to do it right? Unless you’re
dyslexic or a non-native speaker of the English language, who really has a
good reason to send out a letter using “administrate” to describe their
skills in the office? I know two dyslexics and at least seven people who
learned English as a second language and they know the proper verb form of
“administration” is “administer”.
Now, spelling. Let's face it, spelling doesn’t come naturally to some
people. Some people can spell, some can fix cars, some can read a financial
statement. Some can do all three. I'm not one of them. After all, I
may be able to spell "onomatopoeia" without a second thought, but I would
just stare at you dumbly if you told me to locate and replace the fuel line
in my car.
But here's the thing: even if you’re a lousy speller, when you’re not sure
how to spell a word how hard is it to look it up? If you're reading
this, you have internet access so even if you don’t have a dictionary OR a
word processing program with at least rudimentary spell-checking capability,
you DO have access to any number of dictionary sites online, including…and
this is a real stretch, I know…
www.dictionary.com.
(…deep
breaths…)
Despite my sensitivity about the subject, I manage to remain calm when
confronted with exhortations from direct mail advertisers making the claim
“we warranty you’ll be satisfied, Mrs. Hall!” if I switch to their service. And when a newspaper columnist writes, “The reason the electorate no longer
trusts their government is because to many politicians trade their
credentials of respectability for the promise of power in Washington”, my
heart rate doesn’t rise a jot.
However.
Certain
things will turn me into an iron-fisted overlord of grammar quicker
than you can say "ex setra".
Until
recently, “irregardless” topped my list of the spelling and grammatical
mistakes that make me want to sharpen a Number Two pencil and ram it through
my ear. Other gems like “accept” vs. “except”, using apostrophes to
indicate plurality, and incorrect usage of “there”, “their”, and “they’re”
all rank up there in my list. But the insidious, pseudo-intellectual manner
in which “irregardless” has slowly crept into our lexicon drives me
absolutely bat-shit. The day I heard it used by a reporter during the
national evening newscast was the day I actually contemplated setting my
dictionary alight and spreading its ashes across the grave of common sense.
Recently, however, I’ve become aware of a more heinous corruption of the
English language that has skyrocketed to the very tip top of my list and
will probably stay there forever unless George W. manages to get his mitts
on the
editing rights for the next edition of Strunk & White (The Elements of
Style…no home should be without one).
What
could possibly push “irregardless” from the pinnacle of asinine malapropisms? Well, I happened to be
researching new technology when I stumbled upon an article in which the author makes the pronouncement: “…for all intensive purposes,
programmers, engineers, and hardcore gamers will keep using their desktop
computers.”
Yes,
you read that correctly: “for all intensive purposes”.
I chalked it up
to the author parsing the phrase incorrectly when he was ten and never being
corrected on it to date. After all, I used to think the word “brooch”
rhymed with “pooch” until a humiliating incident in the fourth grade when I
was complimenting snotty Becky Junila on her “brooch” (trying to impress her
by calling it a brooch instead of a pin), for which she mocked me
mercilessly until she moved away at the end of 6th grade. So maybe that guy
never had a snotty Becky Junila to keep him from embarrassing himself later
in life.
I tried to reassure myself that
it was a one-time occurrence. The author is a techie, which means anything
he writes should be viewed with a healthy skepticism regarding his spelling
and grammar skills. I speak from experience here. A semester of Technical
Writing with my fellow engineering students taught me that engineers and
computer geeks, with few exceptions, cannot write their way to an easy “A”
no matter how much they might need the boost to their GPA. (Gary, I love ya
like a brother but honestly…”force testes”? You had to know I would never
let you live that one down.)
Being
a techie doesn’t excuse the guy, but most of the blame falls on his editor.
Because um, hello? Isn’t that his job? To edit, as in to proofread,
revise, and otherwise polish? The phrase “for all intensive purposes”
forced me to contemplate dropping the editor of that particular article with
an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. Good sense prevailed, of
course – I value the OED far too much to mar it with the bloodied scalp of
some incompetent blockhead.
Seeking to restore my faith in all that is good and right in this world, I
googled for the phrase “for all intensive purposes”, believing the return
would be something similar to “Please rephrase your query in a language
other than gibberish.” The following is but a sample of the hits from Google:
It was
then that I realized we are only seven plagues away from the apocalypse.
I’m
not a fan of clichéd phrases like “for all intents and purposes”, but these
stock phrases do perform a certain function, especially in formal business
writing. Mangling the phrase, however, doesn’t make it better. Deconstructed, it doesn’t even make sense. I mean, what the hell are
“intensive” purposes? I’ve heard of altruistic purposes or nefarious
purposes, but intensive purposes? To do anything purposefully is to do it
with a certain determination – one could even say willfulness – but can any
of us say we’ve been so driven in purpose that we could classify it as truly
intensive? And if we could say our purposes were indeed intensive, how many
intensive purposes do we have that we could use the quantifier “all”?
Googling also finds that a band called Napalm Death has a song called
“Intensive Purposes” and reading through the lyrics, I suppose they make a
case for such a thing. Or, they could be just as mistaken as the rest of
the boneheads who apparently think that’s the correct phrasing. But what
the hell, I’m feeling magnanimous so they get the benefit of the doubt. I
hereby give them special dispensation for the phrase “intensive purposes”. Anyone else using this phrase better be singing the damn song or expect a
thrashing with the fearsome OED.
I know
that comparatively speaking, “for all intensive purposes” is not the biggest
crime ever committed. Oh, it’s right up there with bringing a screaming
baby to a movie theater, sure, but it’s not stealing-money-from-old-people
evil. Really, it’s not the malapropism that bothers me so much as the fact
that it’s become accepted in some capacity as correct.
It’s
these sorts of mutations that convince me more and more the words we speak
and spell and write and read must be protected. Mock me if you will, but I
say language snobs are the guerilla fighters in the war against ignorance. Militant we may be – extremist…possibly – but be glad we’re out there
fighting for the English language. Because the alternative is this: a national
affairs reporter on the primetime evening news covering a story about a
crazed Portland woman who’s locked herself in the county library with a can
of gasoline and a box of matches. The news anchor will ask the reporter,
“Do we know yet what caused her to take the library hostage?” To which the
reporter will reply, “No. What we do know is that before today, she was
regarded as reasonable, intelligent, and mild-mannered. For all intensive
purposes, she simply snapped.”
01.09.03 |
