Translator: Helen Tyson Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
How many of you in the audience have met a person
who insisted to correct your grammar even though you never asked them to?
Raise your hands.
That's a lot of you.
Do you know what those people are called?
Grammar Nazis.
Yeah, that's the title of my talk.
Grammar Nazis.
They are also known as:
grammar police, language pedants or language purists.
They are people with an OCD to correct your grammar
and your spelling.
So, if you come across them, make no mistake, they will correct you.
But literally,
make no mistake around them.
Don't you think that those grammar Nazis are such know-it-all show-offs?
Right?
Well, I will ask, do they actually know it all?
I shall claim that their behaviour
is not based on a supreme knowledge of the language,
but rather on a poor understanding
of what language really is and how it actually works.
But the point of my talk is not to merely show
how grammar Nazis don't know their wrong from their right,
but to show how you, normal people,
make a certain huge linguistic mistake
and don't know it.
And it's none of those that grammar Nazis accuse you of.
I'm sure you're dying to find out, but in order to gain self-awareness,
you have to first dissect the psyche of the grammar Nazi.
And I think I'm able to do that because I know them all too well.
And that's because I have been a grammar Nazi myself.
Now, my friends will go like, 'You, a grammar Nazi?
I mean, come on, you're more like a grammar communist.'
Well, back in my reckless youth, I used to be a language pedant.
I would drive my friends nuts with my linguistic pedantry.
I would draw ambiguous grammar-related graffiti
on my bedroom door.
I was like Ross Geller.
You know?
They guy from Friends.
He used to correct 'who' to 'whom' all the time.
You see, Ross was a respectable, knowledgeable guy with a PhD,
thus known as 'doctor whom'.
And I was like Ross.
I knew my Modern Greek very well, and that defined me.
That was what I did best.
And I would correct my friends' usage of Modern Greek
based on rules of Ancient Greek because, you see, I studied Classics,
that is Ancient Greek and Latin.
So, after graduating with a BA in Classics
and being left with no friends,
(Laughter)
I started wondering if I was doing something wrong.
I couldn't have explained it back then, but now, several years later,
I've found this study, this recent study, that explains it all.
Well, according to the study,
people who are sensitive to typos and grammos
are more probably introverts than extroverts.
When I say typos, I mean typing 't-e-h' instead of 't-h-e'.
And when I say grammos, I mean spelling 't-o-o'
instead of 't-o'.
Now, less agreeable people
were found to be more sensitive to grammos only.
And less open and highly conscientious people
were sensitive to typos.
And oddly enough, neurotic people were sensitive to neither.
OK, I was indeed an introvert, and I don't agree I wasn't agreeable,
but what does that have to do with me being a grammar Nazi?
Well, speaking in psychological terms, an introvert is not just a shy person.
The definition of an introvert is someone who gets overstimulated
by things that other people find merely engaging,
such as linguistic mistakes.
That's why they prefer predictable environments.
They don't like to get overstimulated by unpredictable things.
That's why they like their rules, everything to be predictable.
OK, that explains it now,
but I couldn't put my finger on it back then.
So let's go back to me having graduated university
and being with an old friend.
I decided to do something with my life.
I went to the UK
to pursue my postgraduate studies in linguistics now.
But from the very first days there in the UK,
I made a daunting realisation.
I was no longer the expert in the language spoken around me.
It was English now, not good old Greek.
And I would make actual mistakes there.
I would say things like 'I like sheeps more than goats.'
Not to mention, pronouncing both 'cheap' and 'chip' the same.
And those linguistic mistakes I made as a non-native speaker of English
put the 'who to whom' issue into perspective.
Because native speakers of English were incapable of making my mistakes.
But they all made that 'whom' mistake.
So is that really a mistake?
Well the answer to that came from my studies in linguistics,
where I found out that neurolinguists are able to detect brain activity
when you hear a linguistic mistake.
It's like an electrical current hitting your brain
when you listen to a mistake.
That's all really metaphorical.
So when you hear a mistake, your brain instantly knows it's a mistake.
You don't really analyse it.
You don't go like,
'That pronoun should have been in the nominative case.'
No, it's like how your body reacts to something to which you are allergic.
It's just an instant reaction.
So let's try a couple of sentences together.
If I tell you, 'let's went',
suddenly, you all know it's a mistake
because your brain goes like 'zzz'.
But if I say, 'let's go', no reaction.
If I say, 'Who did you spoke to?'
Zzz.
Yeah?
But if I say, 'Who did you speak to?'
No reaction.
But wait a minute.
There was no detectable real mistake in the last sentence,
but language pedants would argue that there are actually two.
'Who' should be 'whom', and 'to' should go at the beginning.
So it should have been, 'To whom did you speak?'
So why are things our brain does not detect as mistakes
judged as mistakes by language pedants?
Where is this discrepancy coming from?
Well the answer to that was more familiar to me than I thought.
Latin.
Let me explain that by giving an example.
In Latin, the word, the infinitive 'videre' means 'to see'.
If you want to say, 'to see clearly', you would say, 'clare videre'.
Now, language pedants say that in English you aren't allowed to say 'to clearly see'
because you cannot do the same thing in Latin.
You cannot insert the adverb inside the infinitive and split it.
So you are not allowed to 'split the infinitives' in English.
And that was kind of weird to me.
I mean, I know my Latin.
And I know that English does not derive from Latin.
So why would people insist on using the rules of a dead language
to judge a living one?
And then it hit me.
I had been doing the same thing with Greek.
I had been judging Modern Greek
based on grammatical rules from two and a half millennia ago.
The same thing English purists did with Latin.
Because Latin was the language of the sciences for centuries,
it was the perfect language with the perfect grammatical structure,
the rules of which English language had to follow
in order to be considered correct and logical.
Isn't it striking how language purists are stuck in the past?
I mean, with Latin and all.
Why are they stuck there?
Well, being introverts and all, they don't like language change.
Because they feel uncomfortable with language change.
So they believe that change makes language corrupted.
And so it's no longer pure.
That's why they're called purists.
So if language now is corrupted, then when was it perfect?
When was that golden age?
Was it 40 years ago?
Well, no, because in the 70s,
people were lamenting the disappearing of the English language.
How about the 40s, then?
Well, back then, George Orwell gave the diagnosis.
It was in a bad shape.
How about the 19th century?
Well, back then, English was sinking.
How about the 18th century?
Guess again.
At that time, English was undergoing vulgarisation.
Was it ever well?
Even in the 15th century, people were feeling uncomfortable
with how language changed within their lifetime.
But if we go to an era before English,
we find this guy Phrynichus complaining about the Greek of his time,
which was full of mistakes.
As it happens, he was referring to Hellenistic Greek,
the language in which the New Testament was written
and is now considered a sacred language.
And Latin was no exception to this.
Cicero, in the first century BC,
was complaining that Latin was full of barberisms.
And it's interesting that even in the fifth century BC,
Thucydides was complaining about the change in the meaning of words.
And even in the 2300s BC,
people were complaining how young people were ruining the language
based on this Sumerian teacher's complaint.
And I bet if we went to the Neolithic age, people would be lamenting
about the disappearance of the good old Palaeolithic language.
So maybe concerns about language dying come with a pinch of exaggeration.
But still, language pedants are not convinced.
They believe that change is not right.
Why should, for example, a word like anxious shift its meaning
from being worried to mean also being eager?
Well, language purists were uncomfortable with how language changed
a couple of centuries ago and shifted from 'thou art' to 'you are'.
And the language purists would ask, 'Why should we shift all the time?'
Well, long story short: shift happens.
Get over it.
(Laughter)
And you know what they cannot get over?
18th century.
Language purists are stuck there.
Because that was the time when language was standardised.
They standardised the dialect of the high society in London,
and they formed a codified formal register of the language for the first time.
Now, whatever was not the norm in that language,
in that dialect of London,
is now considered not to be correct, grammatically.
For example, if you have double negatives,
which were not the norm in the dialect of London,
like the phrase, 'I cannot get no satisfaction',
that phrase did not make it to the standardised form of the language,
simply because it was not part of that selected dialect.
And this is the biggest fallacy of the language pedants.
Their belief is
that their rules apply to the whole of the language,
when in reality, their rules describe, or better, prescribe
how language should be used in the formal register.
So they are talking about the formal language.
The English language is not just that register,
it's the sum of all its dialects, standard and non-standard ones,
and all the different ways different social groups speak
and all that.
It's not just that register.
So when you choose between, 'Who did you speak to?'
and 'To whom did you speak?'
it's not a matter of grammaticality at all.
It's just a matter of formality.
It's more formal to say 'To whom' when we are speaking formally.
And it's expected, and even appropriate,
to use 'who' when we are speaking informally
if you don't want to be perceived as a snob.
So that's their biggest mistake.
What is your biggest mistake?
Simply put, it's this.
It's your belief that the pedant's strictures
are scriptures.
You perceive grammars and dictionaries to be holy books,
the rules of which thou shalt not disobey,
or else you'll burn in eternal hellfire.
But it's not like that.
A linguistic 'mistake' is not a sin.
It's just a social construct.
Do yourselves a favour
and see those books for what they really are.
They are just attempts by not-so-divine creatures
to describe and prescribe language, the formal language.
And I, as a linguist,
have written a dictionary and a whole grammar booklet,
and I know I am not a God.
But still, language purists use dictionaries and grammars
in order to find the 'correct usage',
believing that the author of that grammar or the dictionary
somehow got the definition of correctness through divine emanation.
This is not the case.
Do you know where we go to find that out?
We search the usage.
We see what people say.
That's what we do.
And that's what I want to tell you.
This is what the Romans said, 'usus norma loquendi',
which means, 'the norm of the language is its usage'.
It's not a divine authority.
So do respect and cherish variety within your language
because that's what makes your language
vibrant, flexible, rich, and ultimately, alive.
Thank you.
(Applause)