Ask Not for Whom La Belle Scolds : Keeping prepositions and infinitives in their place signals respect for rules of grammar and of life.

Spring quarter has finally ended at Caltech. I’ve just finished grading one last stack of essays. Although most of the students probably won’t look closely at my corrections, I still circled dangling modifiers and noted errors in subject-verb agreement. A book on the art of teaching says one should avoid making annotations in red ink because it looks as if the professor has bled all over the students’ papers. Well, I’ve done my share of hemorrhaging over the years.

The importance of good grammar was instilled in me at an early age. When my brother and I were children, my mother bought us a record of “The Three Little Pigs.” A few days later, she replaced it with “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” We both howled in protest as we had become fond of the little porkers and all that huffing and puffing. But she was adamant. The Wolf, questioned as to his identity, answered, “It’s me, the Big Bad Wolf.” But when the Troll roared, “Who’s that crossing my bridge?” each of the Billy Goats replied, “It is I.” My mother, realizing that children learn chiefly by imitation, was not about to take chances with personal pronouns.

“It’s me” is now an acceptable expression. But, like a stubborn goat, I stick to the old rules and use the nominative case after forms of to be. There’s even a metaphysical issue here. The subjective case places the person in the role of perceiver and actor; the objective case makes the agent into an object. Complex philosophical problems are embedded in grammar.

Student essays aside, do I point out grammatical violations? Usually not. Wasn’t it Erasmus (or maybe Miss Manners) who said, “It is part of the highest civility if, while never erring yourself, you ignore the errors of others”? Besides, there’s always the disagreeable--though unlikely--possibility I might someday be caught making a minuscule mistake myself. Silence is best.

I admit, however, that I make corrections in my head. If a nurse tells me to “lay down,” I think “lie down.” Anytime someone says, “I feel badly,” I feel bad. When Bill Clinton pleaded, “Give Al Gore and I a chance,” he lost my vote. Then George Bush asked, “Who can you trust?” and I was left without a candidate whom I could trust. I know that to judge popular speech according to formal rules is pedantry, but grammar is a part of me. And I am a part of grammar.

Happily, there is a group of people whose errors it is a permissible pleasure and even a duty to correct: fellow pedants. To catch a purist making a slip in print gives special gratification. Although Times columnist Jack Smith says he is not a grammarian, he does say that he tries “to write by the rules.” Readers seem to relish telling him how “shocked” they are about some “glaring gaffe” (usually just a minor error) he has made. Even after more than 20 years, I recall my joy in writing to Goodman Ace of the Saturday Review. He had censured Vikki Carr for her plaintive cry, “Let it please be him.” But Carr was right because the complement of the infinitive to be is in the objective case when the subject of the infinitive is expressed. What Ace should have amended is the song’s title: “It Must Be Him” must be “It Must Be He.”

Am I ever willing to relax my standards? There are situations in which I throw good usage to the winds. If a brand of cookies contains fewer calories than the other leading brands, I buy a box even if the label says “less calories.” Further, so that I can eat more cookies sooner, I head for the “10 items or less” lane.

Also, I am ready to ignore the rules if a line is otherwise a gem. The Bible’s “The wages of sin is death,” T.S. Eliot’s “Let us go then, you and I” and Star Trek’s “To boldly go where no man has gone before” would all suffer from revision by cranky grammarians like me.

You may find my concerns irrelevant to the great issues of our time. Shouldn’t the editorial page be about catastrophes, not apostrophes? Serbs, not verbs? Family structure, not sentence structure? How to make the future perfect, not how to use it? Yet perhaps some of these difficult problems result from a disruption in the same underlying cultural paradigms that find expression in good grammar. Yes, grammatical rules are arbitrary and subject to change, but so too are the rules of everyday life that keep families together and neighbors from shooting one another. Good grammar won’t save our souls, but it is one way we can express our respect for the nuances of custom that make us civilized.