The Transcript

On Grammar, Usage, and Not Being a Great Big Jerk

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Hello, hello, hello, dear one. Good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant.

My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over in the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, as well as the complete show archive, by going to Copyblogger.FM.

So I was sorry to see that legendary Washington Post copy editor Bill Walsh died recently. Now, this of course is not the same Bill Walsh that coaches football. This is a different Bill Walsh, who was a truly amazing language maven, persnickety language person, self-identified language snob, a great copy editor, and a really entertaining and interesting writer about English language, about what errors mean, about his very opinionated thoughts on correct English versus not-so-correct English, versus abominations.

For whatever reason, it’s just a thing that this kind of conversation, conversations around grammar and usage are always popular with people who are interested in writing and interested in English. I thought in honor of Bill Walsh’s life, ended much too early, I would do an honorary episode about some of my favorite peeves, some of my favorite things that drive me crazy, and some of his favorite, along with a recommendation for a book he wrote.

He wrote a couple of books about grammar and usage. The one I’ve been compulsively reading all weekend is Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk. Usually when we do this kind of content on Copyblogger, it mainly consists of errors or less beautiful ways of writing things that we describe so that you can look smarter when you write.

But one of the things I found interesting about Walsh’s book is it has a fairly lengthy conversation about this distinction between prescription and description when we’re talking about errors in English.

The Tight Relationship Between Usage and Unity

The prescriptives are the people who say, “These are the rules. This is what you should do. This is the correct way, and this is the incorrect way. You should do it the correct way.” Walsh was pretty much a prescriptionist, although he was a thoughtful one.

The descriptionist is the other side that says, “Language is about how people use it. That the rules come from the way people actually use language and that it’s a bit silly to insist on rules that no one is following.”

Both of these arguments have their merits. Walsh makes the interesting observation that the descriptionists, who are mostly academics in linguistics, all use the prescriptivists’ set of conventions to write their essays and their books with.

I think the important thing to remember about this whole conversation is, there actually isn’t a single set of rules that you can learn and memorize and then you are all done — everything you write will be correct.

English is a particularly vibrant language. It is a mongrel language. Its roots come from both Latin, via French and the Germanic languages, but it also is quite a promiscuous little fellow. It includes words from all kinds of languages, all kinds of traditions, technology, history.

English borrows, steals, tweaks, adapts, and evolves words from all over the place. It’s one of the things that makes it an interesting and an exciting language, as well as a singularly frustrating language if you’re learning it as your second language.

So how do we decide? How do we decide which rules to follow? How do we decide what set of standards to adopt? I will illustrate this, as I pretty much never do, by talking about a story from the Bible. Specifically, the story of the shibboleth.

This is a story in the Old Testament, and the basic gist is this. That word, ‘shibboleth,’ was pronounced in one way by the Ephraimites, and it was pronounced a different way by the Gileadites. And is so often the case in the Old Testament, if you said it the wrong way, somebody killed you.

That word shibboleth, one of its meanings — I would say its primary meaning — is this idea of a signal, often a linguistics signal, that identifies you as a member of a particular group, a particular tribe. Language is the ultimate signal of unity — what Robert Cialdini calls ‘unity’ — that sense of oneness. You and I are the same.

So the words that we choose and the way that we put them together speak volumes about who we are. Do you say nuclear (new-clee-er), or do you say nuclear (nu-cu-lar)? There’s a whole world contained in that one difference of pronunciation.

So any kind of conversation that we have about grammar and usage — especially usage, and I’ll talk about that distinction in a minute — has to start with a really deep understanding of your audience. Attorneys see and use language very differently from musicians, and gym rats use a completely different vernacular from English teachers.

On Copyblogger, we tend to go very strongly toward the more standard side of the equation, the persnickety language person side of the equation, because so many of our readers are writers. And writers tend to be just fascinated by, “What are the rules, and what are the exceptions? What are the little fine points?” To honor that audience and to speak to them, that’s the kind of language we use.

But we also always choose clarity over confusion, and we try not to be so fussy that we become completely sort of 18th-century caricatures of ourselves.

Speaking of shibboleths, I’ll give you one for free. Here’s a shibboleth for word geeks, which is the difference between grammar and usage. ‘Grammar’ essentially refers to a set of rules. Grammar is about the structure of the language.

How do you conjugate the verbs? Do adjectives come before or after the noun? How do you form an adverb? How do you form the past tense? It’s the actual structures of the language.

“I doesn’t got no money” is a grammatical error. That’s not the way we form the negative in English, and it is not the way that we conjugate the verb ‘to do.’

Most of what the web refers to as ‘grammar problems’ are actually usage problems. Usage is a much more fluid, changing, complicated creature. “My head literally exploded” is a usage error since it would not be possible for you to say the sentence, “My head literally exploded,” if it had, in fact, literally exploded.

Nonetheless, you will notice that the site is called Grammarist not Usagist and Grammar Girl not Usage Girl. Grammar is the shorthand that we use to refer to this word. But people who are persnickety at least know the difference, even though you might not use the difference in a headline if you want to get all of those usage enthusiasts onto your site leaving comments.

Sonia’s Favorite Usage Peeves (Twitch, Twitch)

This kind of post is no fun at all if we don’t talk about some of our favorite peeves. Here is the place where normally I’m going to put in a lot of gnashing of teeth, the renting of my garments, and wails about how people who don’t use these things correctly are subhuman. I’m going to skip all of those for the reasons I just mentioned. I think it matters a lot who you’re speaking to.

However, these are things that I have to confess make my lower left eyelid kind of twitch the same way that Clouseau’s boss did in the Pink Panther movies. Young people are saying, “I have no idea what that even refers to,” but they were very funny. You should look them up.

I will give you three. They’re all quite trivial. The first two are spelling issues, ‘a lot.’ Like, “I have a lot of patience with people who use language differently than I do.” A lot is two words — ‘A’ and then there’s a space, then the second word, ‘lot.’ It is not one word. It’s just not one word. It’s two words.

Now, most of you are going along with that one, but I’m going to throw a more controversial one at you. Now, I am correct in the sense of, if you were my English teacher, if you were any English teacher of the generation of my English teacher, this was an unambiguous error, which is that ‘all right’ is also two words. ‘All’ and then the word ‘right.’ “Are you all right?” is two words.

Now, that just freaks people out. ‘Alright,’ kind of mushed together as one word with a single ‘L,’ has become much more acceptable, much more standard. And a lot of dictionaries now will say that either is okay. It’s just my personal persnickety-ness. I like the more traditional, more old-fashioned version. To me, that’s the correct version. All right is two words. For you, it might not be, and I’m working very hard on my Zen to be okay with that.

Again, it really comes down to your audience. If your audience are writers, I would suggest you go with two words, all right. If your audience are attorneys, those people were all English majors or history majors before they went to law school, I would go with two words, all right.

If your audience are normal regular people, it probably really doesn’t matter. Go with whichever one you feel just works for you.

The final one I’ll give you, which just makes me bananas every time I see it, is using ‘over’ when you mean ‘more than.’ This is kind of a fussy little rule. In the olden days when I was a young person, ‘over’ was something that you would use for quantities, general quantities. And you would use ‘more than’ if you could count the items, if they were discrete countable items.

The converse of this is ‘less’ and ‘fewer.’ ‘Less’ is for kind of a general amorphous quantity, and you use ‘fewer’ if you can count them. So the grocery store sign should be, “The lane should be for 12 items or fewer,” and it almost never is. It is in a couple of places, but usually it isn’t.

I always fix this. If it’s something that can be counted, I switch it from over to more than. So “over 642 subscribers,” I change to “more than 642 subscribers.”

This, again, is a good distinction if your audience is writers, if your audience is made up of attorneys, things of this nature, people who tend to be maybe a little more on the old-fashioned side in terms of correct usage versus non-standard usage.

However, over and less are becoming more and more common, and it’s probably not worth it declaring war over these.

So I’ll just throw in a couple of Walsh’s eye twitchers. One is that ‘literally,’ and I have to stand with him on this one, using the word ‘literally’ when you mean ‘figuratively.’ So, “I was so embarrassed, I literally died.” Well, you just literally did not die.

My 11 year old is really pedantic about this, which is kind of hilarious to see. People use literally to make a kind of a comic overstatement, to create a hyperbole, an exaggeration.

Exaggeration is a perfectly great way to communicate. I have no problem with exaggeration. The issue with literally is you have literally one word that means, “I’m not exaggerating. This is actually what I mean.” So it would be great if we could just keep it for that.

It’s a useful word, and it loses power when we don’t use it correctly. Literally is literally the only word that we don’t use to express hyperbole. I think that’s kind of exciting.

Walsh’s other eye twitcher, which is contained in the topic of his book, is “I couldn’t care less.” The expression you hear — I would say maybe even more often if you’re just talking about speech — is, “What’s going on with Brad Pitt’s marriage situation?” “You know what? I could care less.” That’s just a very common verbal statement.

The proper way to say it is, “I couldn’t care less.” That is the more correct way to say it. It is the phrase that makes literal sense since “I could care less” doesn’t make sense. I will share with you now that I actually could not care less about whether or not you get this right. It does not bother me. It does not make my eye twitch.

However, it makes a lot of people’s eyes twitch, so I think it’s wise to go ahead and use the more standard version. I couldn’t care less when you are writing, and whether or not you remember to say it when you’re speaking is up to you.

Why Do We Care About Grammar?

All of this brings up the question by the way, it does not ‘beg’ the question, which is a frequently, frequently misused phrase that doesn’t mean raise the question. It refers to a slightly complicated rhetorical flaw that I won’t get into right now — but it does raise the question, why on earth do we care?

In all of these examples, the meaning is genuinely clear, and usage people and persnickety language people like to say, “Well, it’s about meaning. You have to be clear, and if you’re sloppy with your language, then you really run the risk of making yourself unclear.”

That’s certainly true. However, a lot of these little things that make us so annoyed, really most of the time don’t affect meaning. They very rarely affect meaning.

As I’ve been hinting at not very subtly throughout this episode, the reason we care is because the audience cares. How we use the words, how we put them together, which kinds of usage we prefer or do not prefer — really comes from what matters to our audience.

What is the voice? What is the tone? What is the collection of phrases and statements that works for them, that’s their language?

Now, I’m certainly not saying you should be unclear, and I’m actually not saying you should be sloppy. Sloppiness is not a good habit in writing or in very much else. But I don’t think you have to become a usage obsessive if that’s not who your audience is. If you use good, clear, standard, appropriate sentences, nouns, verbs,...