If You’ve Ever Had Your Grammar Corrected–Read This!

“Thou shall not place thine preposition at the conclusion of thine sentence”! That's the eleventh commandment, right? Or is it “Thou shall tense thy verbs perfectly” or “Never shall thou split an infinitive”? It's a toss up. And that’s before we even get to punctuation, with regard to written language. Or starting a sentence with “and”.

The rather painful irony of those who hold true to these beliefs is that they are, to put it nicely, misinformed about language in many ways. I certainly was before I began to study language holistically and scientifically in college in the Linguistics Department. The amount of raised eyebrows that I've received upon explaining this to people tells me that this is a rather niche area of study, but I prioritized it as an offered area of study while I was searching for colleges at seventeen.

I love language and I have for as long as I can remember, but I’m not the best at spelling. Spell check has been my companion since the 90’s. The letters “d” and “b” are barely distinguishable to me outside of the context of a word, unless I write in cursive. And yet, my love for language was never deterred due to lower grades in “Language Arts”, as they called it. Although I adore the art of writing now, I genuinely believe that it is more of an art form than it is an integral part of language.

Written language is a convenience, rather than a necessity. As such, the rules of punctuation are of very little importance to me when it comes to overall language. Yes, they are important, just as the essentials of grammar are crucial to language as a whole, but they are not an integral piece of what language itself is. For example, as a fiction writer, I often find it difficult to determine where I want to end sentences when I’m composing dialogue because when we speak, periods don’t exist. I focus on making my dialogue sound natural, and natural dialogue couldn’t care less about punctuation.

Spoken language, after all, is far older than writing systems. Moreover, language has one purpose: communication. It gives us the ability to turn a thought into something that can be presented to another human, so that they may understand our thought. In this case, if one is understood by their interlocutor then they have successfully utilized language, no matter how critical anyone may be of the quality of the grammar used in the process.

Understanding that this is the exclusive property of language already sheds light on how prescriptivists (“grammar police”) are misinformed. If the meaning was understood, then language was used correctly. However, this misunderstanding is actually borne of the reflection of cultural ideals in language. Specifically, prestige.

In Linguistics, Prestige is the term for the concept that one way of speaking is better than another. For example, in Britain there is a “posh” accent held by Aristocrats and educated people. If a person were born into a family of cockney speaking working class Londoners, but they desired to better their situation, even through domestic service, it was in their best interest to mimic the accent of the “upper class”, the “posh” accent. In other words, they would attempt to adopt the accent of Prestige.

This, of course, is relative because the prestigious accent will vary from place to place, or even industry to industry. Almost like street cred; linguistic street cred.

Specific grammar is also a piece of this prestige, but it is actually more cultural than might be obvious. As a baseline, I want to establish what grammar actually is. I'm sure most of us know the nuts and bolts of grammar, meaning verbs and nouns and other “parts of speech”, but that's a “can't see the forest for the trees” situation. Grammar is the structure of language, the bones, if you will, and, just like real bones, grammar comes in different shapes and sizes.

The structure of the English language is derived from word order, like its Germanic ancestors, which means that we know what a word is doing in a sentence (subject vs. object) by word order. “I love you” = Subject verb object. Yes, there are words that change based on what they are doing in a sentence, “I” becomes “me” when it changes from subject to object, but word order is still of the utmost importance in English.

The “dead language” Latin, utilizes different word endings, in categories called “cases”, to denote what a word is doing in a sentence. This means that the last few letters of the word, the final sounds, essentially, will change when the word goes from subject to object or another function. Verbs are also one word, instead of multi-word verbal phrases, like in English, and the ending changes based on the tense, which denotes when the verb happened. The terms for these processes are “declining” for nouns and “conjugating” for verbs. Word order does matter, to a certain extent, but what a word is doing is determined by its ending.

This is where the misinformation comes back into play for the grammar police among us. English is a Germanic language that uses word order. Latin comes from a different language tree, or rather, it is one of the main branches of the language tree, being the root language for Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian. Or, as they are called as a group, Romance languages, as they are derived from Rome, not because they are somehow more “romantic” than other languages.

However, despite its not being a Romance language, English has a significant Latin influence due to invasion. Modern English was born in the year 1066 after William the Conqueror defeated the English, or the Angles, in the Battle of Hastings and brought his cultural and linguistic influence from Normandy (Now Northern France) to Britain. Additionally, Latin became the language of prestige all over Europe, due to the influence of the Holy Roman Empire, aka the Catholic Church, and its overwhelming control over European culture.

Due to this influence, Latin grammar rules were applied to English. As I explained, English and Latin utilize different methods of grammatical structure, and so they have different rules that they follow. However, due to the prominence and social prestige of Latin, it became popular to use the grammar rules of Latin while speaking English.

Why were we told in school that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition (in, of, at, etc.)? Because in Latin, a preposition has to precede the noun that it relates to because prepositions had to align with specific “case”, or word, endings. Except that English doesn’t work that way; “the situation, of which I became aware” and “the situation, which I became aware of” are both perfectly correct sentences according to the true, essential, grammatical rules of the English language. Most importantly, both sentences successfully convey an idea, which is the real purpose of language.

Have you ever heard that one shouldn’t split an infinitive? If you know what an infinitive is; I’ve received many confused looks when I mention this particular grammatical element. In all fairness, I did hear this one from my dad, who was born in the 1940’s, but it was a genuine grammar rule in schools at one time. It’s also silly. Remember that English uses “verbal phrases” while Latin uses one word with different endings to denote the tense of the verb. An infinitive is the “to do” or “to run” form of a verb. Being multiple words in English, other words can be put between the “to” and the verb, thus “splitting the infinitive”. But this is perfectly fine in English; “He needed to quickly run to the store” and “He needed to run to the store quickly” are both grammatically correct sentences that convey the meaning with equal adequacy. In Latin, however, this isn’t even possible because the infinitive is one word; “amare” means “to love”. It cannot be split, and so the rule of keeping the infinitive together was born, however unnecessarily.

The essential point here is that anyone who uses language to discriminate against someone, or to feed their ego by correcting someone’s grammar, is silly. There’s no other word for it. It belies a deep misunderstanding of the purpose of language in general, not to mention it reinforces class based prejudice and constructed social hierarchy. It keeps the idea alive that people who use “proper grammar” are somehow better than those who don’t adhere to the pointless, misapplied grammatical rules.

Like a house, language shouldn’t be a status symbol. A home is shelter, a car is transportation, and language is communication. As long as a thought or idea or memory has been conveyed to another person and understood, then language has been used properly. So the next time someone corrects your grammar, ignore them with confidence, knowing that language is meant to lead to connection, not competition.

Photo: Remington Typewriter from the 1950's that I inherited from my grandfather.