Grammar Rules Will Live On--Hopefully

Intellectual pastimes have vogues, like women’s fashions. One year trousers are in; the next year, short skirts. Happily, one rarely hears from the deconstructionists anymore. Only a year or two ago, deconstruction was infecting our campuses like a virus.

I never really understood deconstruction, but I think it held that, if subjected to enlightened analysis, nothing ever written makes any sense. It was certainly true that the deconstructionists themselves didn’t make any sense.

The latest plague, I notice, is an attack on standard grammar as it is practiced by the self-styled maven William Safire and the authors of grammar and style books.

Certainly we have been bombarded by treatises on grammar in recent years. My bookshelves are loaded with them. I am no maven, nor even a grammarian, though I try to write by the rules, if only for the sake of clarity.

But I realize language is a living, changing phenomenon, and I am not bound to outmoded rules. I have read Theodore Bernstein’s “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins” and no longer fear to split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition.

Recently my friend Alfred Wolf sent me, without comment, an article from the New Republic by Steven Pinker, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and author of “The Language Instinct.”

Pinker’s article is a defense of English as it is spoken, and not as the “mavens” say it should be spoken. He is especially hard on Safire, whose essays “On Language” in the New York Times Magazine I find enlightened and charming.

Pinker is only one of several linguists (for lack of a more definitive word) to argue that the rules of grammar as stated by people like Safire and “his group”’ are silly. “Maven, Shmaven!” he snorts. “Kibitzers and nudniks is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules for the language mavens are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago. . . .”

With one breath he blows away all the rules we learned from our grammar books in school. In one quite grammatical sentence he says: “Indeed, most of the ‘ignorant errors’ these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammar and texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.”

Far be it from me to take lightly the counsel of a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. What chance does an old rule like verbs and nouns ought to agree in number have against that kind of academician?

Pinker easily demolishes a couple of silly complaints of mine against what I consider misuse of the language. He says there is nothing wrong with hopefully in the sense of “It is hoped” or “We hope.” He notes that the alternatives “It is hoped that” and “If hopes are realized” display four sins of bad writing: passive voice, needless words, vagueness, pomposity.

Pinker also defends “I could care less” when “I couldn’t care less” is clearly intended, arguing that the phrase is delivered in a tone of sarcasm that makes its meaning obvious.

Perhaps Pinker’s learning could spare me the embarrassment I felt recently when a friend, Laura Segal Stegman, pointed out a grammatical error of mine in a column.

“Enjoyed your column . . . about the Hollywood High School Museum,” she writes, “but I was shocked at your glaring grammatical gaffe in the second paragraph.” She points out that in recalling when Duke Russell read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in the Hollywood Bowl a year ago, I wrote that “his only auditors were me and his daughter Colleen. . . .” She adds: “If you were a student in my monthly grammar seminar (through the Learning Annex) I would have to give you a failing grade.”

I was about to concede that “me and Colleen” was my first error of the year, but wait. Perhaps Prof. Pinker can come to my aid. He defends George Bush against Safire’s criticism of his campaign slogan, “Who Can You Trust?” on the grounds that whom is “clearly moribund.” Similarly, he defends Bill Clinton’s “Give Al Gore and I a chance” with an argument so convoluted that I can’t even paraphrase it, much less explain it. But it ends, “By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants.” You dig that?

Although Pinker does not deal specifically with such locutions as “me and Colleen,” I’m sure a master of cognitive science would find a way to justify it.

Therefore, I conclude that I have yet to make my first error in 1994.

By the way, Pinker’s essay, like most essays by his debunking colleagues, adheres strictly to the old-fashioned rules of grammar. In other words, as free as he is with other people’s prose, him don’t make no mistakes in his own.

* Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.