Faves From My Bitch List

1

There is no polite way to do this, and probably no coherent way, so I will just jump in and confess that the phrase step foot in annoys the crap out of me, that hone in on makes me hiss at the TV, that could care less flays my ears like bad rap (and really, is there any other kind?). People who say such things believe supposably is a word and write suppose to, just the way it sounds. They have signs in front of their houses that say The Smith’s, or sometimes The Smiths’. Signs in their church basements read Lady’s Room and Mens’ Room. On their lawns they park their Dutchmen or Coachmen campers, not Dutchman or Coachman, unfazed by arbitrary pluralization of noun modifiers. 

Such folk write than for then and defiantly for definitely, but are proud of having mastered the differences among their, there, and they’re, even while mostly writing one for the other. They would not know an Oxford comma if it bit them in the bum. They are comfortable with unlike as a transitive verb, along with unfriend and unpost. They say the person that.They say forecasted. They say one of the only. They say sometimes you always.

Here in mid-central Illinois, these people say whenever in place of when, for reasons that utterly elude me.“Whenever I broke up with Jack, I was wearing my Daisy Dukes.” They say Him and Eustace are going, or sometimes is going. They say based off of, not based on, and on accident for by accident. They say perks up his ears, not pricks, which admittedly sounds a little improbable anatomically. They say as far as _____, over and over, without ever getting to goes. If they say We’re going to lay out, don’t hold your breath waiting for the direct object (the silverware? the clothes for next week’s trip?), because they mean they are going to sunbathe. They do not know that “ketchup” was once spelled “catsup” or that there are two acceptable pronunciations of “tomato.”

They say, I literally jumped out of my skin. They say, the problem are the illegal immigrants themselves. They say, Good thing Johnson had the wherewithal to call time-out there. (Or the presence, not quite hitting presence of mind.) They mangle irregular verbs, regularly conflating the past participle and the past tense: “I done what he asked.”  “That really sunk his chances.” “We never should of went there.”

No, you blockhead, I do not mean that such incursions annoy me to no end, but that they annoy me no end, period, because, for Heaven’s sake, the point is the intensity of my torment, not its uselessness. 

If you are a Homo sapiens and have passed the milestone of, let’s say, fifty, you will have noticed how grievously Other People have been abusing your beloved language, growing more brutal and heedless with each passing year. The old are irritable, everyone knows, and never more so than on this topic. Is that because the language has changed faster than we can change with it, so that the blame is ours, or because the world really has filled up with boors, stuffed shirts, odious little ignoramuses, heedless linguistic vandals, and enemies of truth? Tough call. The one certain thing is that the peeves are there, elemental and pre-reflective, requiring no sadistic prof or fussy editor to set them going. They are not artificial. You can ignore them now and then, in much the same way that you can hold your breath for a while, but not for long.

So just go with it, is my idea. Admit that you are exasperated. It’s a human feeling, after all.

Join me, then, in wishing a plague of boils on the talking heads who have lately concluded that verbiage means “wording” rather than “wordiness,” much as they have deduced that disingenuous is simply a more impressive way to say “dishonest,” and fulsome, without irony, unconsciously restoring the word’s largely pre-Shakespearean sense, a warm encomium meaning “thorough” or “complete,” because why would you bother to look it up, when studies show that, when it comes to making an impression, your diction matters ten times less than your haircut? 

These are the same perfumed louts who always say lifestyle when mere life would do, who use transition as a verb — “I am transitioning to my new role as a dandelion tea distributor” — who have over- and misused oxymoron and literally to death, who suspect no foolish redundancy when they send their children to Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School. Syntactic terrorists bent on hogging air time, they dangle sadistically long dependent clauses before the mesmerized host but never supply a main clause. “When the tension over the border has been increasing for decades, Ralph, and the president has campaign promises he needs to redeem, and both parties require red meat to take home to their base, and if everyone has stopped listening I will just slip out to pee here.”

These people put whomever in all the wrong places (“I speak with whomever answers the phone”) and confide “I relish in challenging authority,” picturing sweet pickles perhaps, never guessing that they should either drop the in or change the verb to revel. They use unlike and including in amazingly contorted sentences where even or in contrast to would go ten times better. “Unlike at many other companies, Zappos workers get full benefits.” “There are at least 405 dead zones worldwide, including near South America, Japan, China and southeast Australia.” 

They will not say long time, because, after all, long period of time is longer. They say reach out to in place of call or contact, and they lengthen rightly to rightfully and purposely to purposefully just because the latter are more important-sounding, not because, rightly used, they register a key difference of intensity and focus. (You purposely miss that meeting, but you purposefully set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. You are the right owner of a sweater found in the cloakroom, but the rightful owner of a Corvette in a bitterly contested divorce.) 

When they want to sound judicious, they say pretty incredible or rather amazing or most iconic or highly unique. To appear profound they describe something as deep-seeded, then stick in i.e. (“that is”) where e.g. (“for example”) is needed. They use concerning to mean “worrisome” or “ominous,” not “related to.” They nod wisely and predict the judge will squash the warrant.

They use surveil, a neologistic back-formationfrom surveillance, in place of watch or spy on. “We got a wildlife camera on sale so we can surveil the neighbors.” They misunderstand flash in the pan as a metaphor from gold mining rather than munitions. They use caveat and surface transitively. “Let me caveat something here. The special counsel should not surface details of the president’s personal affairs.”

They say orientate.

They think calling Medicare and Social Security “entitlements” is a slur. They describe nice people as relatable.They praise the U.S. Senate as “the world’s greatest deliberate body” and take a deliberative approach in flossing their teeth. They use as such with no referent, simply as an all-purpose connector between two sentences that seem to need gluing. They think disinterested observers are bored observers, not impartial ones. They believe begging the question means raising it.They fetishize words like mediate, prioritize, gender, bandwidth, engagement, ongoing, disrupt, process, fetishize, and above all, in context after context, culture. “IBM is noted for its culture of computer utilization.” “Coach Bobo wants to build a culture of winning.” “In our culture, Kyle, women are less able to become serial killers.” 

Elsewhere in the sports news, the word athleticism oppresses the virtuous with its smirky pseudo-precision and the way color commentators have taken to using it in every other sentence, too often adding the filler phrase in this league. “Jones knows it takes athleticism to succeed in this league.” The same people will remark, “Lebron James is just not a scorer,” expecting you to have the app that switches “just” and “not” back into their logical places. (In fact, proper logical placement of just and only is a significant minor art, now sharply in decline.) They say answers back instead of just answers. They say instead of going to the rim, he should raise up and shoot a runner, not more forgivably because rise, somehow, would be equally bad there. 

And while we are denouncing basketball (mostly), will someone tell me, please, why I should not kidnap and torture the guy who came up with score the ball? “One thing for sure, Steph Curry can score the ball.” Possibly he can, with an oversized clamp and a routing knife, but he is more likely to puncture it. A senseless idiom, worse even than gave up his body, with its weird martyrological overtones, to describe a player who takes a charge. On the other hand, getting NBA refs to start calling offensive fouls and traveling violations (now politely called “Eurostepping”) probably would require something like an old-style religious revival. Or a death at the border of the restricted zone, with Lebron’s shoulder as the murder weapon, the goal allowed with an and-one. 

Meanwhile it was the sports announcers who killed off the subjunctive tense for good in 1995, in an act of mass incomprehension as organized in its way as the Montgomery boycotts. “If Swanson goes for the two there, then we have a win not a tie last week, and this week the Assassins are looking at a whole new playoff picture.” My ears! My aching brain! 

To whom does one report the plague, to what tribunal does one appeal? The authorities all seem to have abdicated, the elite are as corrupt as the hoi polloi. Hillary Clinton, running for something or other a while back, roundly declared, “The last thing we need, my friends, are leaders who incite more fear,” a verb-agreement heresy that Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize notwithstanding, implicitly endorsed when he wrote (!) “But what really matters are their policy decisions.” 

When a colleague of mine — a college English instructor, for crying out loud! — says “to he and I” and “gave it to I and Catherine” and (warming to the habit, sure he is on to something now) “persuaded Robert and she” and “for he and the others” — my fists clench under the table, and my teeth creak with the strain. (Indeed, for about five decades now, we English teachers have written more stupidly than anyone, fending off stiff competition from psychologists, sociologists, self-help authors, Fifty Shades of Gray, and schools of education. If you don’t believe it, try queering the essentialist hegemonism of the cis-gendered metatext.)

But there is always guilt to go around, and tons to spare. Lately the New York Times, no less, has been indulging good paying jobs and giving its blessing to sentences like this one:

This is the first time in at least 70 years that any commander in chief recorded such a low approval rating by March of their first term.

— if not, not quite yet, the following, which was committed not by the Gray Lady but by an Oklahoma congressman (no surprise there, ey?) in a TV interview:

         Sometimes you save the president from themselves.

But probably worse, because more arbitrary, unprompted by PC quandaries or linguistic drift, the Times has lately been casting headlines in the past tense, to jarring and nonsensical effect: not “Trump Eats Bowl of Live Roaches,” but “Trump Ate A Bowl,” etc., on the weirdly punctilious theory, it would seem, that by the time you’ve written something down it is already in the past. (Or as students endearingly write, in the passed.) 

Surveying the ground, we see, one sees, you see that Mrs. Malaprop is alive and well, haunting the chat rooms and TV studios with her minimal pairs and false ID’s. A tantrum and a tangent are two different things, or at least two different ways of looking at the same thing, and when some rube says she took off on a tantrum, I don’t know whether the charge is irrelevance or bad temper. When a solemn official says that she will disperse the funds, I wonder whether cops, in a spirit of symmetry, will now take to disbursing the crowd, or even dispensing it. Distracts and detracts, likewise, are distinguished by a nifty nuance that enriches the understanding of the observant, a dwindling cadre these days. Attention itself can be distracted, or something else that satisfies the verb’s craving for a direct object; the thing attended to can be detracted from, as can other things. But distracted from her argument will drive me to distraction, every time, no matter what my detractors say. People who flaunt their ignorance of such things make me want to flout civility by clapping them into stocks for public shaming — not, as a recent witless commercial has it, into stockades. 

But don’t get me started on such binary philistinism. On second thought, don’t try to stop me. Reticent and reluctant are two different words, fool, and you should quit using them interchangeably. Ditto for participate and partake. If you said “I will not partake in the parade,” ever, go to your cell and flog yourself, even if, as seems likely, you were reaching for take part in. Quit saying perpetuate a crime because you really mean perpetrate. Bite your tongue sooner than say unchartered territory, a Bozo malapropism easy to avoid if you consider for half a second what a chart is, and what a charter. And it’s no good arguing that your tongue merely slipped. We are talking English grammar, here, and English diction. If you don’t like it, you can go shinny up a tree, not shimmy, unless you are also looking for work as an exotic (not erotic, oddly, though that would make more sense) dancer. 

Now, write this down. A thing that happens is an incident, and two or more things that happen are incidents. But incidence, despite your ear’s false assurance of identity, means something else, viz., frequency of occurrence. If you are the online commenter who posted an otherwise sensible note beginning “Incidences such as these,” drop and give me fifty. But you are less culpable than the law professor who told the New York Times (11/2/2015), “This amounts to the whole-scale privatization of the justice system.” Granted, the problem might originate with the reporter, frantically trying to scribble down the quote while the witness natters away (how do they ever do this, really?). The court, nonetheless, finds that among (not between!) the professor, the reporter, and the editor, some idiot or other should know that whole-scale is not a word, but wholesale is. And someone should tell the Breitbart commenter who accused food stamp recipients of freeloafing that James Joyce had to say this kind of thing for decades before people finally realized he was doing it on purpose. Regrettably (not regretfully!), few people today will even get the reference.

But some of these are a little tricky, I admit it. Anyone who wears shoes will avoid barbarizing “nuclear” to nuke-ya-lur, but how many of us faithfully execute, in order, every syllable of comfortably? Complacent and complaisant are a treacherous muddle, as are compliment and complement.“I just love the way that dress complements your knees, Gladys.” If you happen to know it, the gossamer distinction between historic and historical is a lovely bit of semantic engineering, but what if you don’t? Hanged vs. hung can also be a problem, as Blazing Saddles proved conclusively.

Judging by my informal poll of several million street signs, .001% of the population understands that “every day” with a space means — well, every day, literally — while “everyday” all jammed together means “quotidian” and should only ever be used as an adjective. Anyone who really understands the difference between tortuous and torturous should be screened for OCD. If you have learned to split the hare that nibbles the grassy border between precipitous and precipitate, bravo, but you are likely leading a parade of just one or two. And will anyone ever join my lonely crusade against metathesis in athletes’ last names? Robert Jeffires (“jeff-rees”) and Brett Favre (not “fav-rah”), I’m looking at you.

Listen carefully to this one: a horse does not chomp on the bit, as you might on a slice of pizza. Instead he, it, champs, a precise and technical word that flourished in better times, back when people knew a checkrein from a hackamore. Likewise, stanch is a specialized, limited-use word, not to be confused with its cousin staunch if you have any concern for my blood pressure. Stanch the bleeding, doctor, like the staunch fellow you are, but don’t confuse the one with the other, or I will staunchly maintain that you are a quack. Remember that cohort does not mean “buddy” or “crony,” and as to what it really does mean, no one knows.

While we are at it, don’t write, as Gail Collins, wonderful though she is, did in the Times a while ago,

she wasn’t sure whether Norway was a predominately white country

Collins is, of course, reaching for predominantly, but, falling short by one measly n, lands in Bozo country with those who cannot grasp that predominate is a verb, which when affixed with -ly yields (to the discerning ear) a nonword that makes no more sense than talkly, runly, refusely, speakly, decontaminately, etc. Never mind that certain limp-wristed dictionaries allow the usage; the true and manly ones all take my side. The correlation (not the corollary, which is something else) is very high between such mistakes and habitual confusion of inkling and inclination. “I have an inkling to take a Tai Chi class.” “I have an inclination you are a damned fool.”

Extra credit for this one: “Try to avoid an accident”; But “Put a traffic sign there to avert an accident.” Get it? Of course you don’t. Go back to your cell, meditate, read the classics from sunrise to sunset. It will come to you all at once, in a blinding flash, with some collateral insight into evade. While you are at it, quit saying involve so much; learn to distinguish the cases where entail is the better word.

And then there are all the crusades and false rules, which dismally, perpetually, fail to repair the general calamity. No one ever really says rear your children, though supposedly raise, which we do say, is incorrect there. The rule about imply and infer only encourages people to confuse them who otherwise might not. Is comprised of makes no sense syntactically, just as the experts claim, but you knew what I meant when I said it. A preposition is perfectly all right to end a clause with. Sentence fragments, oh please. Pleonastic like and you know both have their uses, if not done to death. Split infinitives are awkward to extensively rely on, but the remedies seem often to be worse.

Admit it, friends! We fussbudgets sometimes invent these little rules mainly for the mean fun of tripping people up. Hopefully as a sentence adverb and enormity in the sense of “enormousness” never were problems until misguided pedants made them so, succeeding by fiat, in the distressing way of such things. If you ever told someone, “Yes, this is I” — sue your sixth-grade teacher for malpractice. Ignore that checkout lane with the sign that says “Ten Items or Fewer.” “Generic he” was admittedly always a problem, but it was not half the problem feminist scholars made of it, in the mere act of pointing it out, like physicists changing the position of a particle by trying to measure it. Under the new dispensation, sentences that use generic he must be tortured until they quit. 

American schools’ longstanding crusade against ain’t belies its acceptability in certain nooks of upper-crust British usage and, more to the point, the wonderful, reductive, Swiss-Army-Knife ingenuity with which it substitutes for a host of alternatives, am not, are not, is not, was not, have not, has not, and did not. And this is to say nothing of the word’s ornery demotic charm, an indispensable resource. Would anyone’s life be improved if Bob Dylan, our latest Nobellist, chanted, “It isn’t me, Babe / No no no, it isn’t me?”

Fowler was dead wrong to argue that that, as a relative, should be reserved for restrictive usage, while which is for nonrestrictive modifiers only. In fact you can bring in which all you like, in restrictive clauses, just to relieve the monotony of House-That-Jack-Built constructions, and dragooning that for nonrestrictive use every so often will not give anyone a hernia. Note, however, that only that can be demonstrative, while only which can be interrogative, except in Upspeak, wherein a teenager may acceptably begin a conversation, “That car that was parked in your driveway?”

Explicit rules exist only because there are disagreements and problems, but the rules never fix the problems. Never ever. In fact the only certain effect of taking to heart my litany of complaints, above, will be to grow hopelessly tongue-tied and self-conscious the next time you try to speak or write. Count on it and deal with it. Class dismissed.

2

So why is language — whatever language you speak, whenever you go to speak it — always such a cosmic disaster, and why are the reactions to particular bits of wreckage so dogmatic, irascible, disproportionate, histrionic, and (in spite of everything) ineffectual? These are related phenomena, implicit in the basic nature of language. Sit back, I will explain it all.

Start by noticing something pretty obvious, yet chronically overlooked: languages do not arrive on earth as complete systems, with lexicons already stocked and grammars agreed upon. Instead, like everything else, they just evolve, building up gradually over the eons — and breaking down, which turns out to be the same thing — through the choices of millions of speakers performing what is basically an eternal improv act. People use whatever words they have, in whatever ways they can manage, to get their meanings across, and language in the simplest sense is just the sum of all this speaking. 

But of course it is something else as well. The great Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure urged the fundamental distinction between parole— speech, people talking in the moment, the improv act — and langue, the system they have in mind as they speak, the set of rules and definitions whereby they hope to make sense and be understood. Each of these springs from and transforms the other: the eternal chitchat of parole leaves in the mind and the culture a sort of precis, a distillation of best practices that is langue. This then serves as the map or model, the set of rough norms we have in our heads as we go to speak again, hoping our neighbors will understand our words as we intend them. Parole is particular, inventive, eccentric, elastic, always at least slightly novel. Langue is idealized, aloof, rigid, retrograde, abstract. Neither can exist without the other.

But there is never a master plan, standing apart from this chicken-egg cycle, nor ever a really successful program to impose logical order after the fact. In The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher compares linguistic evolution to the growth of ocean reefs, with individual speech acts, like tiny coral animals, adding themselves to the body of precedent that is English or Mandarin or Hebrew. Everything proceeds ad hoc, with speakers generally most interested in their message (“Look out for the tiger!”), and only secondarily in preserving form and following precedent. To make matters still dicier, no one really has access to langue: we all must work from sharply limited personal glimpses, building existential lexicons and grammars as we go. And on top of everything, every language changes continually, as new speech alters the rolling average of what words have meant till now.

It all sounds like a recipe for chaos, but that is only half true. Much as biological evolution brings about intricate and seemingly intentional structures of every kind, from cells to skeletons to termite mounds, so language evolution arrives at impressive order through simple trial and error. Imitation plays much the same role as reproduction in the biological realm: the speech act that gets its point across, that offers an advantage or helpful model to the next speaker, gets endlessly repeated and adapted, while the inexpressive one gets forgotten, and presto!, there is your language: a vast body of loose precedent, here waiting to be followed (mostly), but also defied, freely riffed upon, and above all adapted to new experience. Reciprocal consistency works, while meaningless variation does not. Let’s get this settled becomes the Prime Directive, the central maxim to which all particular points of grammar are corollaries.

So shared lexicons and grammars emerge inexorably even though they are no one’s idea. In every language under the sun, the protocols are almost unbelievably extensive and strict. There are rules to govern how sounds are produced and heard, how words are formed from the sounds, how the words can be joined into phrases and sentences, and on and on. Every word in the lexicon effectively has its own accompanying rulebook, which you can read in condensed form under its entry in a good unabridged dictionary. For a species known to be fractious, we do an amazing job of thrashing out a huge body of conventions and then following them, getting everyone with the program by age six or so. We take arbitrary norms, self-conscious and non-intuitive in principle, and internalize them till they are reliable automatic reflexes. 

(Of course, I am talking about the real rules, the ones no one has to explain because they are inferred automatically and subconsciously. The “grammatical rules” put forward in the classroom are something else: norms that require conscious reinforcement precisely because they are contested or failing and many people would not follow them otherwise. At best these can become reflexive and functional; at worst they remain on the stormy surface of the language, mere shibboleths that no one follows except when trying to make an impression.) 

Yet for all their Apollonian virtues — order, symmetry, exquisite discernment — languages are always works in progress, rational only up to a point. Seeming intention and bits of system are everywhere, but there is no overarching blueprint. Anyone can make a list of her language’s charming eccentricities and barely manageable perversities, the strange corners into which it has painted itself. 

In English, the main rule for forming the past tense does not work for sing, sneak, dive, or catch, nor for be, the most common verb of all. The rule for forming plurals does not work for tooth or deer or sheep and is questionable with fish and buffalo. Speakers all over the world are discomfited by unsolved quandaries like “I feel bad” vs. “I feel badly” or “healthy diet” vs. “healthful diet.” Everywhere you look, rival paradigms compete to control their segments of the improv act. Many of the discrepancies can be traced to specific historical causes, such as invasions by the Vikings, Normans, and (in the case of our current pronoun mess) Liberal Feminists. Waves of prescription have certainly played a part now and then, especially the invisible ones launched by scribes and editors. But there is also a general, ineluctable cause for the heterogeneity of English or any language: the whole thing is accidental and makeshift, the work of countless speakers repeating and slightly changing things they have heard.

How is it that we learn to wield such a gloriously inefficient cultural creation? As everyone notices at some point, this happens via a sort of miracle of nature, in early childhood. It is not just languages that have evolved, it seems; we ourselves have evolved to make best use of them, a dual adaptation that does much to account for our planetary dominance. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker argues brilliantly that speech may be mainly a hard-wired behavior, something we do the way birds migrate and spiders weave webs. We are not born knowing our native languages, of course, but (far better) with an incredible aptitude and drive to acquire at least one. 

Children are proficient as mynah birds at pure mimicry, but that is the least of it; they are also natural scholars, receptive as sponges, keenly interested in the how of vocabulary and grammar as well as the what of particular messages. You can occasionally observe a four-year-old correcting a three-year-old: “Not runned, stupid, ran!” —  or just the opposite, for what matters is not the particular conclusion but the fascination with principle, the drive to get conventions hammered out and settled. Kids more than anyone are spontaneous formalists, always sure there has to be a right way, always hot to find it even as the mirage of a systematic and logical language flees before them.

Yet they and all speakers are doomed to rebellion in spite of themselves, for the nuances are endless, doubtful, and always in play. Parents keep lists of their kids’ charming coinages: “My arms are taking a nap.” “The TV is scribbling, make it do a picture!” “She’s our same-door neighbor.” In such misadventures and small triumphs (they are both), the urge to communicate is paramount, but a close second is the urge to test the language, seeing just how far a given principle can be taken. Breaking the rules is one way of internalizing them, and trying to follow them, through the trackless wild of new experience, is a sure way to end up breaking them.

It seems that Nature, as she often does, has placed us in stormy conflict with ourselves: on the one hand, the inevitability that language can exist only as a ramshackle heap of ad hoc conventions, converging toward more comprehensive order but never getting there; on the other, a mad formalism that insists the system can be, should be, will be perfectly consistent and regular. Not a truth but a necessary fiction, the idea of correctness is the enabling hypothesis that makes language work and the heuristic assumption that makes it learnable. But it is also what afflicts one with that maddening sensation that other people are making a mess of things every time they speak.
  

If all this sounds like heresy or fallacy, the blame goes partly to dictionaries and grammar books, those late-arriving cultural accessories to our natural fluency. Both dictionaries and grammars are splendid, necessary sorts of books. They slow down  linguistic change and promote consistency and mutual intelligibility on a scale not otherwise possible. They are a big part of why languages can function not just at the village level, but at the state level, the national level, even the world level. They open up the riches of the larger language to those who have not directly experienced them (i.e.,everyone) and make it possible to teach languages on the fly to foreign speakers who cannot spare fourteen hours a day for language study, which is what children invest if you think about it. 

But such books entail a Platonic bias that needs careful watching and occasional repudiation. Beginning as a modest descriptive enterprise, the formal study of language soon becomes, in school and elsewhere, starkly prescriptive: “This is the way people seem to be talking, so far,” becomes “This is the way you must talk, now and forever.” Language starts looking like an immutable regimen in which “the rules” and the lexicon come first, period, rather than coexisting in easy perpetual give and take with actual performance. A sentence is no longer an inspired improvisation, making clever use of existing materials to address the needs of the instant; it’s a piece of Ikea furniture, to be assembled precisely according to the instructions. This way of looking at language, as a set of fixed rules, a machine that reliably cranks out meaning so long as it is run according to factory specs, is for some purposes a cardinal truth, but for many others it is a fallacy that must be denounced. On the upside, the mechanistic approach promotes stability and uniformity within a linguistic community. On the downside, it obscures the existential chanciness of actual usage, threatening to purge all creativity from speech and writing.

None of this means that the carpers should stop carping, or that they even can. If there really is a language instinct, as Pinker believes, it surely incorporates what I call the curmudgeon reflex: anxious fussing over the usage of others, cranky to be sure, but ultimately aimed at nothing more sinister than keeping the tribal tongue consistent and wieldy. We all have our bitch lists, our overdone reactions to tics that affect us like fingernails on a blackboard. Kind people can be shocked by their own intolerance in such matters: why did that can’t hardly or between you and I  bother me so? But there are good reasons that the curmudgeon reflex has to be peremptory and unforgiving. Speech is a largely unconscious process of stunning complexity in which countless decisions must be made automatically, at warp speed. There is just not much room for doubt or variation; you make choices dogmatically so you can make them instantly. And from speaking to correcting is the smallest of steps. The question, really, is how you could not fuss over your friend’s words, when you are continually fussing over your own, simply in order to speak them. The flip side of fluency is a certain inescapable bitchiness. 

And when your inner curmudgeon gets out, when it takes the podium, when it writes an essay like this one, its natural idiom is ranting, fierce, histrionic. One further reason for this is the deep-down arbitrariness of language, the way every feature ultimately depends on fragile custom rather than obvious reasonableness. Anyone who wants to prescribe usage — and everyone does, sooner or later — has few better options than to thunder ex cathedra. There is no a priori reason to prefer undoubtedly to undoubtably, or to make a face over arguedly, but that is more reason to insist, not less, and more reason to care. Complex machines require standardization; they do not tolerate needless difference for its own sake. (Tell it to the pronoun connoisseurs now haunting the universities.)

Then, too, curmudgeons are mostly paper tigers. When they lose the argument over a point of usage, they change sides with dizzying speed, eager to preserve the Prime Directive above all, entirely forgetting their former opinions. 

Even so, the grammar grouch is shadowed by a morbid fear: that the mistake he just heard is no isolated misdemeanor, but the start of a trend: the loose thread that, once pulled, unravels the language paradigm by paradigm, till we are all babbling infants again. The stakes are always higher than they seem, and no one ever cares enough. 

In fact, by all the evidence, languages are much sturdier than that. They “break down” into other languages, but never into sheer incoherence. Change is constant, yes, but mostly minute, and often followed by change back in the direction of historical norms. Slang, cliché, and fad usage all come and go (please God, let woke vanish overnight), leaving the good bones of the language visible once again after decades, generations, centuries. This, though, may be partly a case of self-preventing prophesy: the disaster never happens because we always think it will. The culture probably needs the grouch to do his grouching. 

But of course everyone has a personal stake as well. Your native language is like a huge, prestigious club to which you contentedly belong; but the club keeps changing its by-laws and sending you notices that your membership is under review. Since vocabulary is acquired in the first place through observation and guesswork, with a tiny supplement of dictionary work and formal study, the fear that your own will not quite do, that your words will not mean to others what you think they should, is chronic. That is one reason that the encounter with supposedly trivial errors or differences can be so threatening. When someone says, “I’m reticent to do that,” you understand perfectly well of course, but the way you mutter “reluctant” is basically involuntary, and are you really so wrong to speak? Aren’t you, at a minimum, helping her avoid a mistake that might cause trouble in the future? Or at a maximum, sticking up for the language itself, keeping that first domino from falling, protecting vital infrastructure? You could argue that the point of usage on which you want to advise her is really more important than whether she buys the Lhaso-Apso. She ought to thank you for the small, swift correction, and so should all her friends.

Don’t count on it, though, because of course your intervention stirs up several sudden anxieties at her end. How long has she been getting this one wrong, and how foolish has she looked? What other mistakes have accompanied this one? And now is she going to adopt your rule, against the grain of lifelong habits, or persist in what she has been doing, risking embarrassment either way? And that anxiety is mirrored on your side. What if she, not you, is on her way to winning the cultural argument on this one? Then it is you who will have to change, somehow overruling deep habits reinforced by what turns out to be antiquated doctrine. The whole issue grows unexpectedly fraught. 

The worst of it is that no calm appeal to reason can resolve such disputes. Any solecism that is not a mere stumble always — always! — has its own rationale and constituency. The problem is never with missteps that the speakers themselves would cheerfully retract, but with rival doctrine that persists and insists. The menace from ain’t or can’t never is not that it fails to make sense, but that it makes perfect sense. 

Small wonder, then, that an unstated but emphatic rule of etiquette (not of grammar per se) proscribes “picking on” the usage of others. (Not prescribes, which is just the opposite.) You are to accept that Bronxers say youse while Southerners say y’all and leave it at that. Slovenly regionalisms and academic pomposities may both grate on your nerves, but both get a pass. Even in English class, the time when the prof could comfortably correct a student’s spoken language, with a breezy gruffness that was really affection in disguise, has long passed; now, such hectoring is apt to be seen as an attack on the student’s cultural identity.

It comes down to this: we can no more help being language sticklers than we can help being speakers, but we have to watch ourselves, erring on the side of tolerance. Such civility, though, is like the sunny deck of a luxury liner, just a few yards above the measured mayhem that goes on in the engine room. Down there in the furnaces, Dionysian creativity eternally confronts “the blessed rage for order,” in a fierce battle that makes and unmakes language at the same time. Poet and critic, parole and langue, hippie and cop, cheeky improv artist and nervous grammarian, trade blow after blow, each gradually transforming into his opposite. And that is what makes the ship go.