On Readers Who Applaud My 'Crusade'

Don’t tell my column readers I said this, but sometimes they worry me. Since I started writing a grammar column for a couple of community newspapers in 2002, I regularly receive e-mails that say things like: “I applaud your crusade against the erosion of the English language” and “Like you, I’m a stickler for proper usage” and “Keep up the good fight to protect our language!”

Those might be lovely and welcome replies except I don’t crusade against erosion of the language, I’m not a stickler, and, I don’t fight to protect the language.

In fact, the lion’s share of my columns demonstrate why sticklers are wrong and why there’s no reason to resist the natural evolution of the language. Yet for some reason, people see a grammar column and assume it’s either a crusade against teenagers saying “Where are you at?” or a crusade against adults using “hopefully” as a sentence adverb.

Isn’t that weird?

As I tell them, the language doesn’t erode. It just evolves. Some people think that’s terrible because the evolution is often driven by “misuse.” The irony, of course, is that every one of the language tenets the sticklers hold most dear -- the usages they fight to preserve -- were born the same way: from "misuse." Every word we now use was once “wrong.” So the very language the sticklers hold dear is an abomination unto a language someone else held dear.

If it weren’t, we’d all still be saying “thou” and “thine.”

Many of my column readers are them older people who are longtime subscribers to their community newspaper. They worry that the language is eroding, losing its integrity, or going to hell in a handbasket. But the irony is that they simply lack historical perspective. When English changes, it's just doing what languages do. That's what I've been trying to tell them along. But somehow I've failed.

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2012 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “On Readers Who Applaud My 'Crusade'”

  1. April 5, 2012 at 8:19 pm

    I love your stuff precisely because you take on the peevers. FWIW, I have the same problem in conveying the point to some of my fellow copy editors. I try to provide historical background, but it doesn't seem to work, even as they will acknowledge that language changes. I think the problem is that for some people, historical perspective isn't enough. I'm not sure yet what kind of argument would be persuasive or compelling to these folks, but I'm working on it.

  2. April 23, 2012 at 5:27 am

    I hear you on that one. I've heard between you and I in moevis, on news shows, everywhere where they should know better. My goal is for people to use the Grumble Party page to vent these kind of issues. (It's a place where grammar snobs can be grammar snobs and feel welcomed and accepted.) I hope you feel free to use it. My hope is that people can just start commenting on the page and we can start conversations that way. A sort of group therapy for word nerd types.