None of Us Needs a Grammar War.

Quick, what are the subjects you should never bring up in polite company? I’ll bet I can guess the two that came to mind, but you might have missed one.

Did your list include grammar?

Grammar Fireworks

Religion and politics are famously controversial subjects, and you may have noticed their absence in my columns. (OK, there was that one interview with historian Scott Billingsley about deism, but we both stayed pretty objective about this religion, and I’m proud to say we have not received one angry letter from a deist—unless you count that one written with a quill).

As for grammar, well, let me share an experience I recently had on Substack. I noticed that a fellow Substacker posted a question about the word none—namely whether it takes a singular or a plural verb. Of course, I had to respond. You might as well have been dangling a tennis ball in front of a golden retriever. I posted this brief comment:

I’m going to respond as an English professor and former editor. Traditionally, prescriptive grammar calls for a singular form of the verb on the logic that “none” actually means “not one.” I always treat it as a singular, so I would write or say, “None of us is home.” I suspect many people would say this construction sounds strange, and I certainly can’t control what other people say or write, but I can control what I say or write, and “none” will always be singular to me!

It was an innocent comment, right? I’m anything but a provocateur, even when it comes to grammar, and I wasn’t trying to start a fight, but the responses started popping like fireworks. Most were positive, but a few insisted none was plural, and some made a case for allowing an accompanying word—namely, the object of a preposition following none, as in “none of us”—to dictate whether to use a singular or a plural form of a verb.

I’m going to stick by my approach (and I can elaborate for anyone who’s still curious), but I’m not too troubled by the other approaches. The point of this column is not to rehash this debate, but rather to answer this question:

“Why do some people get so revved up about grammar?”

Grammar and Usage

On the one hand, I’m one of those people, but, on the other, I’m not.

I find grammar fascinating. Really, I do. The system we use to communicate ideas is intricate and generally orderly, but occasionally quirky. English, for example, has something called the verb-expansion rule, which speakers use to form constructions such as “She has studied grammar” and “We will be studying grammar.” Every native English speaker “knows” this rule and applies it consistently, but very few can describe it. (I would like to think all of my former students can, since we studied it in my grammar classes, but it’s probably a distant memory for most of them by now.)

How do children learn this rule without ever consciously studying it? Why did it change a few hundred years ago around the time of Shakespeare? Such questions are fun for us linguists to consider and discuss.

There are many other such questions about grammar, as well as punctuation and related matters:

• What’s behind the order of modifiers that precede nouns?

• Why are introductory appositives generally found in written English, but not in spoken English?

• How did English wind up with different derivational affixes for different words?

• Why did English lose most of its inflectional affixes?

Yes, I can get very revved up by such questions, but none of these questions has anything to do with “correctness,” which is what most people typically think of when they hear the word grammar. For these people, the word grammar really means usage. In short, probably because of the approach they encountered in their English classes in middle school or high school, they are thinking of the conventions that mark “Standard English,” the dialect that is commonly used (and preferred by many) in what we might call “professional communication.”

The question that elicited my response on Substack was really a question about usage. The person who posted it—because, as I learned later, it came up in her daughter’s editing class—was asking whether Standard English calls for a singular or a plural form of a predicating verb when the subject of that verb is the pronoun none. It’s a fair question, one I was more than happy to answer, but it’s important to point out, I think, that the only difference between “None of us is ready” and “None of us are ready” is the way that others regard it—that is, as standard or nonstandard. The two sentences mean the same thing, and they are equally clear. The sentence doesn’t fall apart because of the choice the writer or speaker makes in regard to the verb.

The situation is very different in, say, math or chemistry. Claiming that 100+200=400 is just plain wrong, and the claim will have real, measurable effects if you don’t fix it (especially if you are an accountant).

A Way to Be “Right”

What’s the big deal then?

This question has multiple answers. One, I suspect, amounts to an interesting little quirk of our personalities, and the other is related to a disturbing phenomenon with its own real-world impact.

We’ll start with the quirk.

Most of us like to be right about things, and some of us really thrive on being right. Some of the people in this latter group are easy to spot because they go out of their way to show they are right, often by correcting others’ errors. The ones obsessed with usage carry the verbal equivalent of a ruler everywhere they go and rap people on the knuckles when they hear something they believe is “wrong.” Most of us are exposed to a number of usage rules in school: you may have learned not to split infinitives or dangle participles, for example. Even if you are not one of those people wielding invisible rulers, you probably still carry these rules with you and take them pretty seriously, as if “to boldly go” is as wrong as “2+2=5,” when, in reality, many of these rules are actually arbitrary. Because they care about being “right” (and, in some cases, worry that others will look down on them if they are “wrong”), many people care about usage more than they care about, say, the chemical makeup of the ozone or the applications of the Fourth Amendment (although both could wind up having a far greater impact on their health and welfare than anything related to usage).

After mentioning that I am an English professor, I sometimes hear responses like “Ooh, I’d better watch my grammar.” Anyone who knows me, however, knows that I don’t go around correcting my friends. (That’s why I still have friends.) I do know a lot of usage rules—well, actually just about all of them—not so much because I teach grammar, but largely because I spent years working as a copy editor. I cleave to the conventions of Standard English in my own writing—partly because I write and speak in venues where this form of English is expected and preferred, but also, if I’m being honest, because language has become a central part of my identity. I don’t insist that what is right for me is right for anyone else; I’m just more comfortable using whom where Standard English calls for it than I would be not using it. I suspect that actors feel similarly about their pronunciation and that physical trainers feel similarly about their breathing techniques when they’re in the gym. What they do is part of who they are.

A Prescription for Usage

Fixating on correct usage falls under the heading of what linguists call “prescriptive linguistics.” When your teachers taught you to avoid the word “ain’t” and instead use “am not” (or some other construction), they were being prescriptive—that is, they were prescribing a “correct” usage. There is some value in prescriptive linguistics, as it helps to create consistency, which in turn reduces the number of distractions we experience while reading. When I was a copy editor, I was supposed to change any instances of “flyer” (in reference to a paper announcement) to “flier.” The latter is not “better” than the former; however, if readers see different spellings of the same word while reading our newspaper, they might think they refer to different things or may simply—for an instant anyway—think about the inconsistency instead of the content of the article.

Thinking of grammar in terms of “right” and “wrong” can be pretty innocent as long as we are considering it merely as a curiosity or a convention. Some people might choose to wear white after Labor Day while others won’t, but, in the end, the difference doesn’t carry a lot of weight. You say to-may-to; I say to-mah-toe.

Divided by Dialects

Sometimes, alas, treatments of usage can do real damage. Just ask the many English speakers who speak cockney (a dialect spoken by many Londoners), Black English, or any of the many varieties of Southern dialects. All of these dialects work perfectly well in conveying meaning; if they didn’t, the people who speak them would have trouble communicating. The work of describing the grammar of these and other dialects is known as "descriptive linguistics;" it involves description without judgment.

Too often, however, these nonstandard dialects are regarded as inferior forms of English, and, more important, the speakers are regarded as inferior people because they don’t speak Standard English. In this respect, usage can divide people and even serve as a tool for discrimination and oppression.

Take the so-called “double negative,” for example, as in “She never said nothing to me.” It’s found in cockney English and other dialects, but it’s not part of Standard American English. Some might take it as a marker of low intelligence or at least ignorance and use it to dismiss speakers who use it. Like the “grammar police” who go around correcting people, such people wield usage like a ruler, but they’re doing more than rapping knuckles; they’re using those rulers to measure people, deem them inferior, and dictate how high they can rise in their careers, social circles, and more.

Language doesn’t have to divide people. We can be speaking different dialects and still, because of—and for the sake of—our shared humanity, be speaking the same language.

That’s the best use of language, after all. When we take care to use words thoughtfully without judgment, we stand a better of chance of connecting and moving forward together, so that none of us has (or have) to face exclusion.