When Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the oath of office was administered
by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts,
who is known for being a stickler for correct grammar.
So much so that he decided to change the wording of the oath from,
“I solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President
of the United States,”
to, “that I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully.”
That I will execute...
The grammar crime that Roberts believed the Founding Fathers had committed
was splitting a verb phrase, “will execute,” with an adverb,
“faithfully”.
This is similar to the popular rule
against not splitting infinitives like “to eat,” “to run” or “to think.”
Which means Captain Kirk should have said “to go boldly
where no man has gone before.”
Doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?
Turns out that just unilaterally deciding
to change the wording of the Constitution isn't a good idea.
Some legal scholars worried that if the oath wasn't recited
verbatim, Obama might not actually be president.
Just to be safe, the two men repeated the ceremony later as written.
This is an extreme example of how being a grammar cop can get you into trouble.
But besides the social and cultural downsides of trying to police how others
talk, there are some persuasive arguments that many of the grammatical errors
that are frequently called out might not be errors at all.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky
and it's time to boldly break some grammar rules
on Otherwords.
Have you ever corrected someone's grammar and gotten the response,
“Wow. Thank you so much for pointing out my foolish mistake.
Please let me know if I make any others in the future.”
Yeah, not likely.
Being told that you speak wrong is uniquely insulting
because it's so tied to perceptions of class, education and intelligence.
The wealthy and educated have good grammar and the poor and uneducated
have bad grammar.
Believing in good grammar is inherently prescriptive.
It's concerned with how things ought to be.
But linguistics, like most sciences, is descriptive.
It tries to describe the way things actually are.
Just as it would be ludicrous for a biologist to say
that a species of bird doesn't fly the way it ought to,
it's equally nonsensical for a linguist to say that certain groups of people
don't talk the way they should. Instead of correct speech versus incorrect speech,
what linguists observe in the real world is a bunch of different dialects
with different sets of rules.
These rules can shift or change, but they're always internally consistent.
If a group of teenagers, for example, were just speaking a degraded
or sloppy form of English, then it should be easy for an adult to imitate.
Of course we know it isn't.
Their dialect has rules and they know instantly when they're broken.
Perhaps the most denigrated of dialects is African-American English
or Black English.
Many features of the dialect, like negative concord and zero copula
are common grammatical practices across many languages.
Yet some continue to use them as examples of bad grammar.
Throughout much of the 20th century,
many educational psychologists thought that low income black kids
spoke a stunted or inferior version of English, and some believed
that they had virtually no language at all.
Then, in the late sixties, a linguistic study of children in Harlem
found that the grammar they used was, in fact, rich and consistent, capable
of just as much nuance and precision as any other English dialect.
This was an important step in academics acknowledging that the disproportionately
poor school performance of Black children was due in part to the fact that,
unlike their white, middle class counterparts, they were being asked
to learn in a different dialect than the one they were raised in.
The study also found that when compared with upper middle class
speakers of so-called Standard English, speakers of AAE tended
to commit fewer grammatical mistakes, mismatches and redundancies. Why?
Possibly because what we call Standard English doesn't come very naturally.
It contains a lot of arbitrary rules made up hundreds of years ago,
which most of us have had to learn by force in school
rather than naturally with friends and family.
Take Captain Kirk’s supposed mistake: the split infinitive.
The foundation for this rule dates back to the 19th century
suggestion by the scholar Henry Alford:
The safest choice is to avoid splitting infinitives.
Somehow, this morphed into a hard rule
by the middle of the 20th century, with some arguing that since
Latin never splits infinitives, neither should English.
But you can't split Latin infinitives because they're always just one word,
like amare.
English infinitives are two words,
and there's no good reason why you can't split them.
Another supposed rule based on Latin conventions is not ending a sentence
with a preposition, like that infamous hack Shakespeare did when he wrote
We are such stuff as dreams are made on...
Again, in Latin,
prepositions can't be separated.
But that's no reason why we can't do it in English.
And would anyone really say, “To whom do you think you're talking?”
instead of “Who do you think you're talking to?”
Speaking of whom, it is technically the objective case for the nominative who.
But over the last century, it's largely fallen out of usage,
and that's hardly unheard of.
Plenty of other pronouns use one word for subject and object.
Like it, that, what, and where.
Until relatively recently,
there were four second person pronouns that all collapsed into you.
It seems pretty clear that whom will someday be as archaic as thee and thou.
Okay, so what about that most offensive of grammatical transgressions?
Me and Jennifer are going swimming.
We can all agree that's wrong, right?
After all, you wouldn't say “Me is going swimming.”
Believe it or not, some linguists even think this construction isn't so bad.
The head of a clause is the key word that determines its nature.
So in this noun phrase, the head is man and the verb must agree with it.
The man is going swimming. But conjunctive phrases,
those with multiple nouns, are considered headless.
There is no one word that determines case.
Neither noun on its own matches the verb are.
The individual parts are not required to perfectly agree with the verb.
Which of these two sentences are you more likely to say?
“Everyone but her won an award.”
Or “Everyone but she won an award.”
Even though the second is technically correct,
the vast majority of English speakers find it clunky and unnatural.
Why is that?
Linguist Joseph Emonds argues that English speakers have
a natural inclination to use the objective pronoun case in conjunctive clauses.
This is perhaps because
we mentally reserve the nominative case for subject heads only.
It just doesn't feel right to say he or she or they,
unless it refers to the sole subject of a sentence.
This is a perfectly consistent and reasonable grammatical rule.
Yet we've had it beaten out of us in favor of one that is no more logical
and a lot less natural.
If this isn't enough for you,
I am even going to defend the figurative use of the word literally.
As in, I am literally starving to death.
This could be called an ironic intensifier, like saying,
Oh, I could definitely use another problem today
and the usage isn't even new.
In Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens wrote: “His looks were very haggard and his limbs
and body literally worn to the bone.”
At this point, some of you may be literally gasping for breath at these grammatical heresies.
So let's say a few things in defense of so-called Standard English.
First of all, it has allowed English grammar
to stay remarkably unchanged for hundreds of years.
That's why Jane Austen sounds more or less modern to our ears.
Yet Shakespeare would have sounded archaic to her,
even though the two time spans are roughly equivalent.
It's also useful in expressing formality. If you're going to speak at a funeral
or go on a job interview,
using standard English as a social cue that you take the occasion seriously.
And like it or not,
Standard English is still associated with proficiency and education.
Many career fields require that you be able to speak and write it
if you want to get far.
Being proficient in Standard English is a valuable asset, but
it's not necessary for everyone or every occasion.
Expecting people to use a formal dialect in casual situations
like a party or comment section is ludicrous.
And if the point of language is to facilitate understanding
form social bonds, it's almost always counterproductive
to correct someone's grammar if they're not asking for it.
And maybe that's the main argument for not being a grammar cop.
No one likes it.
Literally, no one.
History lovers.
We need to tell you about a new series from PBS called
The Bigger Picture, hosted by Professor Vincent Brown.
It's a show that examines
famous photographs and unpacks the historical context around them.
In doing so,
we reveal what these photos
can tell us about our history, but also how we view ourselves.
Check the link in the description and head to the PBS YouTube channel
to see it for yourself.
Tell them Otherwords sent you
some legal scholars worried
that if the oath wasn't Oath, oaf I said, oaf, okay.
But that's not no... that’s not
no reason why. It's time to boldly break some of gram--
That was all weird.
That was all sorts of not it.