Grammar and related subjects can be a surprisingly touchy topic, and that touchiness comes in many flavors. For instance, I’m in a discussion group entirely for professional copyeditors (names withheld to protect the innocent, guilty or whatever you want to call them). There was a thread on a fairly common error, unintentionally substituting one homophone for another, and I’d made the point that the “wrong” one actually had some legitimate ground, albeit within a small, narrow, sharply defined and limited set of parameters, so it would behoove the wise copyeditor to check not only the immediate context but also what the author’s intent might be, then query if not absolutely certain. Reasonable, right? Standard practice?
Ohhhhhhhhhh, hell, no, apparently. While a number of responses saw the point and agreed to varying extents (mainly agreeing with the principles but not necessarily with the potential interpretations/applications of the two homophones in question), there were a few that put their metaphorical foot down and said variants on “Wrong! Never the twain shall meet!” There was such a strong reflex in response to the superficial error that some people simply wouldn’t accept the possibility of nuance. Well…okay, if you’re in a hurry, under a soon-to-implode deadline or trying to make the text as simple and non-nuanced as possible. All more or less legitimate factors (although I have a world-class horror of not giving something a full, 360-degree treatment because of purely mercenary/simplistic reasons, I do get the all-too-understandable powerful urge to sweep troubling little issues under the rug and move on). Be that as it may, I thought the principle of “think before knee-jerk application of the rule” was more or less accepted.
But that’s not the Big Problem here. There was one participant in the conversation who not only disagreed but also declared any nonadherence to the rules exactly as written to be (and this is a quote, not a paraphrase) to be “ignorant,” among other pejorative descriptions that confirmed that his use of “ignorant” not to be simply “unaware” but the sub-definition that carries intentionally negative connotation. Furthermore, said participant lashed out at “mistakes” that I had made in my attempt at thoughtful, deeper analysis of the reasons for the homophone mis-usage, apparently in an attempt to undermine the credibility of those arguments. (For the record, his main accusation of “mistake” hinged on my use of asterisks around a word for emphasis—which I had used in full awareness of widespread internet practice in forums where italics are not available—and he disparagingly referred to them as “weird quotation marks.” I noted in response that they were asterisks and referred to the aforementioned online usage of them for emphasis; his dismissive response was “I’ve never seen that, so it can’t be in widespread use, and anyway, what’s wrong with all caps?” in obvious unawareness that widely accepted “netiquette” holds that all caps is equivalent to shouting.)
It devolved from there, with a level of vitriol that I, perhaps naively, had absolutely not expected in a professional forum. Trying to understand where he was coming from, I did a bit of research…and found that he has a long-running newspaper column on grammar and language usage in general. I read a random selection of his columns and found them to be—if I may be absolutely honest—condescending, dismissive, denigrating, belittling regular lists of typos and usage errors. And that is what I just don’t get: he pointed and tittered and sneered in each and every column that I saw at the errors, but never bothered to try to explain why they were errors. There was zero effort to help but a constant stream of unsubtle jeering and put-downs.
This. Does. Not. Help.
There’s already a strong undercurrent of “fight the rules because they don’t get me” out there, and smarming at people that they’re “uncivilized” and “ignorant” and “boneheads” (again, direct quotes) is in no way ever going to motivate them to learn the rules. If his intent were to, as he put it, “stamp out ignorance,” his absolute lack of concern for what does motivate people to learn a thing scuttles that intent at every step. In truth, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that his column is nothing more than an excuse to hurl insults at people every week.
Cui bono? Whom does that benefit? It’s especially inexcusable in light of the fact that the rules are not now and can never be absolute. The rules are there to provide a base, a framework, a starting point upon which to build real, living writing. Not only are there exceptions, but it happens all too often that following the rules can actually be counter to the author’s intent. There is a balance that MUST be struck between the rules and the reality.
Yes, most of the time, the rules do apply and work. And they work very well, for the most part, or they would never have reached the status of “rule.” But, as any linguist can tell you, the rules’ only true validity is as a description of the most broadly accepted usage, not as some tablets-from-on-high list of fundamental “truths” of the language. He dismissed that concept with a reductio ad absurdum of “We can’t give in to usage shift, or we’ll face the utter chaos of having to change the rules daily to match what morons are doing” (that may not be an exact quote; I have a policy of blocking toxic posters, so I’m not absolutely certain that’s precisely what he wrote). Er…if language didn’t shift in spite of purists’ pleadings, we’d still be speaking Chaucerian English. And it’s a fact that attempts to reduce writing to absolute adherence to the rules removes the language’s life. The only perfectly quantifiable, definable, unchanging languages are dead languages.
Don’t mistake me; we need the rules. There must be some common ground where we can begin discussion. And it seems painfully obvious that you have to know and understand the rules intimately if you want to know best how and why it’s best to bend or break them…and the copyeditor needs to, if not understand, at least be open to the concept of all this in order to be able to do his or her JOB.
Being utterly closed to that concept, however, accomplishes nothing but division and resentment. Insisting on absolute adherence to the rules risks being counter to the fundamental reason for the copyeditor’s work: to improve as much as possible the clarity of the communication. And if clearing the path between writer and reader is less important to a person than is strict allegiance to the rules, I firmly believe that person is doing a disservice to both that writing and the profession in general.
In the end, we can sometimes only guess at what the “best” ways will be. We’re not privy to the writer’s most internal thoughts, and sometimes the existential gap can make that incomprehension maddeningly difficult in our work. But to assume that the rules are always exactly right for every single situation risks an arrogant undermining of our job. We have to find that balance point, and that’s not a fill-in-the-formula (or, in my physics days, “plug-and-chug”) process. At the risk of sounding self-important, I say that that process is ultimately an art, not a crystal-clear science.
We’re none of us smart enough to decide what’s always right, forever and ever, amen. A bit of humility helps our work. Let’s recognize the inarguable fact that we, simply put, do not know everything.