Jonah and Sarah Share Grammar Grievances

Good grief.

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47

Jonah kept Sarah around after The Remnant to needle her about her hosting skills. The conversation quickly devolved into a litany of linguistic peeves.

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  1. Avatar photo
    BWG

    "... willing to die on that hill." Like Cory Booker's "Sparticus moment". How silly and simultaneously depressing that this passes for political debate these days.

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  2. Avatar photo
    BWG

    'Fess up Jonah, Sarah is the sister you never had, and you now realize what an immense void there was in your life growing up without one.

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  3. Avatar photo
    Addicus

    Us Math People, might use; grammar in all the worst - possible ways!?! It's because: we spent our TIME doing cal-cu-lations so Your bridges don't (do not) fall down... You can thank us Later!

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    1. Avatar photo
      BWG

      I'm indorse this commant!

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  4. Ackemma1

    I don't have many grammar grievances. I make too many mistakes myself. But I cringe every time my teen daughter utters the word "literally." As in "Mom, I literally walked all the way home!" And then she rolls her eyes when I thank her for clarifying that she hadn't walked home figuratively. If I say something she agrees with she'll say, "Literally, though!" and that's really annoying but she's 15 and doesn't endorse what I say very often so I'll let it go.

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  5. Avatar photo
    CP

    Really fun conversation, as always. (Ooooh, notice the sentence fragment! How dare I?)

    Nothing makes me sadder than telling people I'm an English professor and having them say, either, "Oooh, I'd better watch what I say around you!" or else "I'm a grammar nazi, too." (Okay, that's overstating it--a few things make me sadder than that.) That's when I tell them I'm a medievalist, and that most of the texts I read don't really feature what they think of as "good grammar."

    Here's the thing. Most of these rules are, at best, a century old--many of them invented by Strunk and White in a book that also violates them. A few of them are two or (maaaaybe) three centuries.

    Read Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, Chaucer--heck, even Orwell and some of the writers from the early twentieth century, and you'll get a sense of just how arbitrary these rules are.

    Speaking of Johnson, long ago, he was commissioned to create the best English dictionary to date. Part of the scheme was that folks were worried about the language changing too quickly. He was on board with this mission at first, but as he painstakingly researched each word (drawing quotations from the very best of dead authors), he came to an interesting conclusion:

    "Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

    "With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength." (From the Preface to the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language)

    Notice how Johnson misspells words like "subtile"? What a dummy. Seriously, though, his point certainly applies to grammar as well. Good grammar is grammar that is understood by someone else.

    Obviously it's reasonable to require a certain publication to follow a certain style consistently. Obviously, too, as Orwell writes, this doesn't let us off the hook for writing vague rubbish, either. But using arbitrary (and mostly very new) "rules" to pretend we've been educated correctly and others have not has more to do with vanity than with anything worthwhile. Let's talk about ideas as clearly as possible, and leave off point-scoring ("Technical foul! Split infinitive!"). Communication isn't a game.

    In the meantime, read old books! They tend to set this and many other matters in perspective!

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      BWG

      "... to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, …." That's so good.

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        CP

        Isn’t it great? And he’s alluding to Herodotus’ story of a Persian king (I think Xerxes) who tried to discipline the wind and waves for disrupting his campaign by having them flogged!

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      BWG

      Yes, unlike French, there's no official body that sets English language rules. And honestly I like it that way. I grew up in the MD suburbs of DC, and if you were in a middle-class or wealthier family you spoke what we called "network neutral" English, basically what Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Connie Chung sounded like. (The rural and lower class kids spoke with a Maryland accent, which is Larry Hogan's native tongue.) My mother, however, was born in a small town in western PA, and we would visit her sister/family there often. The kids in the neighborhood would say things like: "Is you'uns goin down to the store?" in a lovely singsong cadence. Sometimes their accent and grammar was so different I'd have to ask them to repeat things. But I came to understand everything and could mimic some of it, though I was never fluent. Eventually I was introduced to many different accents and realized there's huge variation in language in the US. Unfortunately I think we're losing much of that regional variability.

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        CP

        We are, but something even weirder is happening, I think. Language has always been partly about group identity and belonging. The extent to which young people “belong” to a particular group online (without reference to place) is the extent to which they will begin to adopt the mannerisms and cadences, the verbal ticks, of a particular group of fans or enthusiasts. It’s comparable, I guess, to RP or maybe the transatlantic accent (neither of which were quite place-dependent), though there is no very clear “prestige” accent at this point.

        I do think the official “correct” dialect and set of grammatical rules is actually far more democratic than the others, because it can be taught. When you use it, nobody calls you out for being a “poser,” whereas in all the others, you’re a fake if you try to pretend to belong to that speech community (remember the suburban white kids in the nineties trying to sound “gangsta”?). Although, again, that’s with traditional regional speech communities. I suppose the online ones that have to do with fandom only require you to be genuinely interested in something.

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  6. Loriensmith

    I’m sorry to say that Sarah is a regular source for my own grammatical wincing while listening to AO. Every episode there is at least one, but often more, “there’s” when it should be “there are.” “There’s so many things” for instance. David does this occasionally, but not nearly as often as Sarah. I find Dan Crenshaw guilty of the same on his podcast, so maybe it’s a Houston thing. 😉

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  7. Mjfswim+Jg

    While we're at it, can we stop all the "likes"? For example, Jonah at approx. 6:27, "...and he was like, 'I don't know'...I was like ." Not, "He was like," but, "He said," yes? And please don't tell me this is ok because Jonah and Sarah are engaged in informal conversation. If that's the excuse (reason?), then all the discussion of grammar problems can be ignored for the same reason, yes?

    Also, "He goes" to mean "He said." Not as bad, but it still grates.

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      Thomas Grimmer

      One assumes the seven minute podcast about grammatical pet peeves is meant mostly tongue in cheek and in good humor.

      'Like' like it is used in modern colloquial English serves multiple functions. First, it's a space-filling word like 'um' or 'erm.' Second, it can be a marker that something that is about to be said is important. ("He said he would pay me to kill his mother. Like, what kind of psycho is he?!") Third, it can denote quoting another person ("She was, like, get a grip.").

      I'm sure there are fancy terms for those things, but to say that like is not linguistically valid, is like, totally 1990.

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      1. Mjfswim+Jg

        Thanks, and I agree. I didn't say they weren't linguistically valid. The podcast was about grammar and correct usage, not linguistic validity and colloquialisms. Yes, tongue in cheek, and I added my two cents.

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  8. Mjfswim+Jg

    I agree! Esp. well vs. good. But Sarah, did you really use the term, "effete dick"?! Or did my ears fail me? (At approx. 3:30) Let's fix that along with correcting grammar (IMO).

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  9. Wynn.Netherland

    It makes me twitch when podcasters say they’ve released a new “pod” when they mean episode. The “pod” was the device, as in the iPod. Just say episode.

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      Thomas Grimmer

      'Pod' is short for 'podcast episode,' just as TV is short for television.

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      CP

      Language changes.

      But I admit I feel some sympathy here—it seems to me we should leave off the “pod” and just say “cast.” As in “broadcast.”

      But language change rarely follows logic.

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        C C Writer

        One is not obliged to accept changes for the worse.

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          CP

          What’s your metric? How do you sort out “worse” from “I don’t like it”?

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            C C Writer

            I'm used to making that distinction. I am a freelance copy editor, so I can take my "I don't like it" instinct and pivot to looking up the rules in my (or my client's) style guide of choice--I know my way around the Chicago Manual of Style and I'm starting to use Garner's as a supplement on usage--and the guide usually has some guidance and confirms I'm right not to like it. Rules in these guides are generally consistent and reflect certain principles. In that sense they are much more reliable than someone's dim memory of what they thought their fifth-grade teacher told them but misunderstood (or the teacher was perpetuating a myth). The fact that rules can vary from guide to guide is a known thing. That's why one usually picks the most relevant guide for the kind of material one is publishing/editing, and sticks with it.

            If the guide doesn't offer specific guidance, I go to the meta level, what I consider the spirit of the guide: General principles like "don't confuse the reader," or "don't follow fads," or "British English and American English do have differences and that's as it should be," or "don't allow a perfectly useful word to be lost by letting it mutate into its opposite when there's already a word for that." Or I might find rules on similar situations, and extrapolate from there what a logical rule should be.

            If the guide does say I'm wrong, I either take their rule on board (if I feel it's backed up by arguments and logic) or make a recommendation to the managing editor (client) that we ought to make an exception to the guide's rule in this area because I think it was an iffy decision or doesn't quite fit certain issues that tend to come up for them, and add the exception to their style sheet.

            One thing copy editors can't approve of is allowing misuse, however widespread (like what people too often do with apostrophes, or confusion between hyphens and dashes) to be treated as a new standard. Because those misuses generally don't make much sense and they mess with comprehension. That's why they're wrong.

            Bottom line: When you're a professional copy editor, you come to feel you have a responsibility, as a member of the community of people who know about this stuff, to help hold the line against language deterioration--and also that you have enough guidance available to you to take appropriate and defensible positions.

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    3. Richard Kennedy

      It is concise and even the skeptic such as you know what it means. In a world of “u r 1derful & i luv u” it is comparatively literate.

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  10. Dave from Denver

    We need more of this, as a culture. Suggestions - bring versus take, the Oxford comma, the massive over use of the word unique, which versus that, and why is it that people think two conjunctions in the same sentence is acceptable.

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