Misguided Grammarians

        Bear with me here...

I am not proud that I have always been a card-carrying member of the word police. I cringe when I read a text from someone saying they were “to” tired to go for a walk, that “John gave cookies to my friend and I,” that “there” friends don’t care about the news “there” listening to. Even in casual correspondence, I have to hold myself back from wielding a red pen and crossing out misused words, adding letters to misspelled ones. Trying to subtly demonstrate, I have been known to write back, for instance, “I’m sorry you were too tired to go to the bookstore talk. You can watch their recording online...” 

I was almost shaking one day after a friend wrote “I and my friend went to the beach on Saturday.” My hand hovered over the keyboard, wanting to reply, trying not to, valuing the friendship while wondering how I managed to become friends with a person who would write this. I knew why – this was a friend I met when I was nine, not a friend I’d made as an adult. I am not proud of this realization.

Thinking this, I felt like a word snob, or worse, a word bully forcing her agenda onto others, though this is something I come by naturally. My mother was a word snob from childhood, correcting friends’ spelling and pronunciation errors, full of pride at being the best speller in her class. In a grade school spelling bee, squaring off with one last student, her word was “division.” Without taking a breath, she blurted, “Division: d-i-v-i-s-o-n,” followed by her audible wide-eyed gasp as she realized she had left out, in her reckless, overly-confident rush, the third “i.” She knew, as most of us do, that it is against the rules to correct oneself in a spelling bee. I heard this story as many times as I shared my horrible childhood memory of assigning two syllables to the word “tongue,” pronouncing it “tong-goo.” I had been out sick the day my class learned the word, and was humiliated at being corrected. This was the only mistake I recall making in grade school. 

Word misuse, like these stories, can make for fun discussions between like-minded pals, but friends and strangers who use the wrong words and don’t care “to much about there problem” (which probably happened over time, and not "all the sudden"), don’t appreciate being corrected. They blame my working in an elite university for nearly forty years, while reminding me of my humble Waltham roots. (Some old Waltham friends are also word snobs.) In fact, most of the women in my writing group have similar reactions to incorrect spellings and word usage. We can’t help ourselves.

While having a good chat with myself, I remembered the flicker of a discussion I’d had with Noam two decades before, and wrote him to check it out. Since I’d just had a conversation with a writing friend about word order, I threw in another question. 

I wrote:

     I was telling a friend yesterday about Gene Searchinger's Language Series, and the fact that a child knows instinctively to say, for instance, "red ball," and not "ball red." But she threw me a curve ball: what about in French, where the syntax switches to "balle rouge?" Does the child instinctively say it correctly in French because of the rules it has picked up and applied even at two? I'm probably not explaining this well, as I'm obviously not a linguist... 

     Also, I recall you telling me why "my friend and me [went to the park]” is not incorrect, since it's the way a child might naturally say it. Am I remembering that correctly? 

Noam replied:

    Children know instinctively that they can construct the unit {red, ball} (a set, with no order).  But whether it’s “ball red” (as in most languages) or “red ball” (as in English) is a choice determined by experience, a parameter in technical terms.  Same with “read books” (English) or “books read” (Japanese).  There’s by now a large and important literature on how parameters are set by the child, quickly and with very little evidence.

     What children naturally say is “me and my friend were here.” That’s because they are speaking English properly and ignoring Victorian social conventions.  Misguided grammarians tried to force children to speak a Latinate form of English that they invented, and to impose the social conventions, so you’re supposed to say “my friend and I were here” in a language that does not exist and with social conventions that you do not follow naturally.  Causes endless confusion.  That’s why you hear people say things like “between you and I,” overgeneralizing the error of misguided grammarians. A lot of it traces back to Bishop Lowth, 18th century prescriptive grammarian.

**

        This was not the first time I was left with more questions than answers as I rode the endless train of lessons at the feet of Noam Chomsky. I did some research. The first article I found mentioning Lowth was in a May 6, 2016 issue of the journal The Conversation. The title: Grammar police belong in the 18th century – let’s not inflict their rules on today’s children. 

I wonder how that’s working out? I could ask Noam more about Lowth, but maybe better to ask my grammar school neighbor. She’s less likely to send me away with homework.