Don’t Be Scared of These Grammar Demons

Because usage rules are so esoteric, the decision has been made by some people to simply give up and leave grammar for others to worry about.

How do you feel about that first sentence? Some of you, I suspect, are developing a nervous tic. You might have even started an email to dress me down or perhaps merely to ask “Et tu, Brute?” The rest of you sailed right through that sentence, and now you are much more troubled by this paragraph. What’s the fuss?

In my opening sentence, I deliberately flouted four common “grammar rules”:

1. Never start a sentence with the word Because.

2. Avoid the passive voice.

3. Never split an infinitive.

4. Never end a sentence with a preposition.

Where did these “rules” originate, and why does anyone care?

Flashbacks to Grammar School

You may recall from last week’s column that I made a distinction between prescriptive linguistics and descriptive linguistics. The former approach to language involves prescribing the “right” ways to speak and write (and proscribing the “wrong” ones). The latter involves merely describing the ways people form words and sentences without passing judgment.

If you are even faintly familiar with prohibitions on split infinitives and the like, then you have been exposed to prescriptive linguistics, probably in school or maybe even at home—especially if you grew up with parents who were writers and editors, right, Canada offspring? There’s value in prescriptions about usage, I would argue, although I think some people take them too far. My point in this column is not to rehash pros and cons of prescriptive linguistics, but to shed some light on the dubious origins of these well-known “rules.”

Some of you will thank me for taking some stress out of your lives. Others of you may curse me for shaking your grammatical foundations. Still others never even got to this paragraph because they stopped reading at the word “grammar.”

OK, brace yourself, ruler-wielding schoolmarms, here we go.

Never start a sentence with the word Because.

This one is both fascinating and infuriating—to me anyway. Now, bear with me for a moment because explaining it requires a little bit of linguistic jargon. The word because is called a subordinating conjunction because it introduces subordinate clauses. In the preceding sentence, for example, it introduces the subordinate clause “because explaining it requires a little bit of linguistic jargon.” Subordinate clauses are very useful; you probably have employed them many thousands of times without realizing you were doing it. We call them “subordinate clauses” to distinguish them from independent clauses, which can stand alone as sentences.

If you have ever heard this line, I think I know why. I suspect that English teachers got so tired of seeing sentences that said something like “Because I like butterflies” and marking them as sentence fragments (because they are) that they finally just forbade all sentences beginning with Because. In short, the “rule” was a shortcut similar to telling students to put commas where they pause or take a breath (and don't get me started on that one).

Beginning a sentence with Because is not only perfectly sound in terms of usage, but also can be quite effective, as long as the subordinate clause it introduces is followed by an independent clause, as is the case with my opening sentence.

This explanation, I hope, is good news for those of you saddled with this prohibition all these years. Because you now understand and embrace this point, you can expand your “sentence vocabulary” with a clear conscience.

Avoid the passive voice.

This one deserves a whole column or even a month of columns. Because I am committed to holding on to the readers I have managed to amass over the past two years, however, I’m going to restrain myself—for now anyway.

The passive voice is a grammatical construction in which a noun or noun-like thing that technically is serving as a verb’s object in the underlying sentence appears as its subject in the actual sentence. (That’s a bare-bones description, but I’m trying keep this discussion brief. You’re welcome.) Passive constructions are fairly easy to recognize because they typically feature a form of the verb be (am, is, are, was, etc.) followed by the past-participle form of the verb. (This form usually ends in -ed, but it also might end in -en or other sounds/letters.) Here are some examples:

The school was established in 1985.

Certificates are given to the children with perfect attendance.

I have a feeling this game will be won with a walk-off hit.

There is nothing wrong with the passive voice, at least not in terms of usage. There are, however, a few legitimate reasons why writing teachers and editors look askance at it.

For one thing, it allows the speaker or writer using it to “hide the subject.” A famous example is the sentence “Mistakes were made.” Uh, who made the mistakes? People typically don’t want to admit to mistakes or, in some cases, to expose colleagues who made them, so they sometimes use a passive construction such as this one to avoid naming the actual subject—that is, the person or persons who made the mistakes. That’s an understandable move, but audiences often deserve to know who was responsible so that they can address a problem and, in some cases, prosecute offenders. In short, the passive voice allows speakers and writers to get away with telling only part of the story. (Attorneys, take note: maybe you could insist that witnesses tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and use only the active voice.)

The passive voice is also an indirect way of speaking. Since English sentences typically have doers in the subject slot, so to speak, moving the actual subject out of the subject slot makes the audience have to work a bit harder to figure out what’s happening. Consider these two sentences:

1. Every attempt was made by the company to complete this project on time.

2. The company made every attempt to complete the project on time.

The second sentence, which has a verb in the active voice, is, I would argue, a bit easier to process.

Finally, because of the way they are constructed—with the addition of a form of be and often with the preposition by introducing the underlying subject—passive sentences are typically longer than their active counterparts when the subject appears in the sentence.

Despite these drawbacks, passive sentences are often better alternatives, particularly when the underlying subject is not all that relevant in the context of the sentence. For example, in the first example above, “The school was established in 1985,” the chief interest is probably in the school itself, not in the founders.

The passive voice, in short, is a like a Set Schnittführung: useful for the occasional job, but often unwieldy. (The name says it all. Just pronouncing “Schnittführung” is more trouble than most of us want to take.)

Keep the active voice in your tool belt and the passive voice on a high shelf.

Never split an infinitive.

It must be hard to be a Trekkie and a prescriptive linguist. On the one hand, you want to follow your beloved Captain Kirk wherever he leads you. On the other hand, you don’t want “to boldly go” anywhere. As the brains of the outfit, Spock must have groaned every time he heard Kirk say it—that is, at the beginning of every episode of Star Trek. I’m fairly certain that offstage Bones occasionally lost his cool and shouted, “For the love of Tribbles, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a grammarian, but even I know not to split infinitives!”

If you are my age or older, you probably remember this “rule”—and, if you’re younger, you’re wondering, “What’s an infinitive?”

For the uninitiated, the term infinitive is one we use for an uninflected verb preceded by the word to. Infinitive phrases—to read, to correct, etc.—are common in English sentences, often serving as direct objects (”I want to read the dictionary A-Z”), adjectival phrases (”She just can’t resist the urge to correct her friends’ usage”), and more.

To split an infinitive is to put a word between to and the verb, as in ”to boldly go.”

If you have ever thought much about it—and I know you haven’t because you have a life outside grammar—it’s an odd prohibition. I’m reminded of a story my brother-in-law Erik told my wife many years ago. He was living in Germany, and he ordered applesauce and sauerbraten. The waiter let him know that “Das ist verboten.” Erik ordered the two items separately and then told the waiter, “Watch this” and proceeded to enjoy the applesauce with his the sauerbraten.

The world did not implode. The stars still shone in the heavens. The time-space continuum remained firmly intact.

Splitting an infinitive prompts the same question that must have occurred to Erik in that restaurant: who cares?

Eighteenth-century English grammarians, that’s who.

Back in the Age of Enlightenment, when intellectuals such as Benjamin Franklin were trying to find—and often impose—some order in what sometimes seemed like an all too disorderly (or just mysterious) world, some people who thought a lot about language wanted to do the same for language. The world had no Grammarly back then, no grammar check, no Professor Canada pontificating about participles to students fast asleep in their seats. Heck, English didn’t even have a proper dictionary until Samuel Johnson came out with A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. (Johnson thought the project would take about three years, and it wound up taking him nine. Writing some 40,000 definitions and compiling more than 100,000 quotations to illustrate the words’ meanings, well, that takes time. Johnson had a few assistants, by the way, but not a single one was named ChatGPT.)

These language mavens looked to Latin for some guidance as they sought to establish some rules for English. Latin was a dead language by then—that is, it was a native language for no one alive in the eighteenth century—but it still garnered quite a bit of cachet (a word that, appropriately, goes back to Latin). It was, you could say, the language of the learned, so it seemed like the right model for the upstart English.

Most of what I know about Latin I learned from my wife, who studied it in high school while I was learning Spanish (which comes from Latin), but even I know that Latin infinitives, like Spanish ones, are single words. There’s no to to be found anywhere in a Latin or Spanish infinitive. For this reason, it’s fair to say that no sober Roman ever split an infinitive. That would be like putting a word inside another word in English: “Have you heard about Mark’s news(free)letter? I en(really)joy reading about Poe and Douglass, but Mark’s never going to make it as a com(standup)edian.” Putting a word inside another word is so strange that it’s hard to read. (There’s one exception, by the way, and I promise to cover it in another issue if you promise to laugh at my jokes.)

Since it made no sense to split Latin infinitives, the logic went, it was wrong to split English infinitives, even though English infinitives are made of two words: to and a verb.

There you have it: the rationale behind one of the most commonly known proscriptions in English usage. It’s a stretch, isn’t it? Still, it has survived for more than two centuries. I doubt it will last much longer, though, so you free(grammar)thinkers can start planning your celebration.

Never end a sentence with a preposition.

The origin of this proscription is somewhat complex, but it definitely goes back centuries. In the late seventeenth century, the English poet John Dryden called out fellow poet Ben Jonson for ending his sentences with prepositions—“a common fault with him,” as Dryden put it—but even earlier a writer named Joshua Poole had written about placing prepositions in “their naturall order.” Briefly summarizing this history, a writer for Merriam-Webster concludes:

If we are to be fair we may credit Poole for creating the rule, and Dryden for popularizing it. Both Dryden and Poole were likely motivated by a desire to make English grammar more in line with Latin, a language in which sentences syntactically cannot end in prepositions.

Like the proscription on splitting infinitives, this one has lasted a long time, but it’s gasping for breath these days.

By the way, I’m pretty sure many writers have been falsely accused of breaking this rule when in reality they were ending their sentences with particles, not prepositions. English has a number of what we call phrasal verbs, which are made up of familiar verbs followed by words that look like prepositions (and in fact often function as prepositions in other contexts), but are actually particles in these instances. Consider this sentence:

The board will not take up the proposal during tonight’s meeting.

The word up can be a preposition, as in “The cat ran up a tree,” but here it is a particle because it is part of the phrasal verb take up, meaning consider. What happens when someone puts the phrasal verb at the end of a sentence?

This proposal is not something we wish to take up.

This kind of sentence is sure to set off (another phrasal verb, by the way) any number of amateur prescriptivists, sending them into a frenzy of crying, like Gomer Pyle, “Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!”

To Follow or To Boldly Break

What’s a writer to do?

Alas, there is no easy answer. You might be amused by my approach, but I think you will understand when I explain it.

I generally don’t split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions even though I know something about the dubious origins of these proscriptions. Instead of leaving readers thinking I made a mistake that actually isn’t even a mistake—or, even worse, attaching pedantic footnotes to all of my suspect sentences—I just save all of us the trouble and avoid making the non-mistakes in the first place.

That’s my logically illogical approach, but you do you.

Now, let me get back to checking out that Set Schnittführung. I’m starting to think seriously that this is a tool without which I cannot do.