Mind Your Grammars

Okay, confession time. First, I have never been an early bird, nor have I ever managed to get any of the proverbial worms (and have often wondered what's so great about being early if all you get for dragging yourself out of bed is a pile of cold-blooded hermaphroditic invertebrates). Second, I am not, and never have been, a grammar guru. I do, however, have a four hundred page book with the auspicious title "English Grammar," which I bought at a garage sale once for fifty cents because I thought, "Hey, I should probably know some of that stuff," and which is now sitting on the bookshelf in the basement next to the cat carrier, gathering dust (and probably cat hair).

Like Alex, it took being knocked off a pedestal to help me recognize my shortcomings in this area (which, as Hartwell suggested, should possibly be relegated to the desks of linguistic freaks along with glottal stops and bilabial fricatives). When I was growing up, my dad constantly corrected our grammar (and forbade the use of such redundancies as "tuna fish" and "these ones"), so I thought I had a pretty good command of it if only because I didn't say "we was" like the kid next door. In eighth grade, however, my teacher (you know the type--one of those junior high English teachers who reads Milton for fun and eats dangling modifiers for breakfast) found my Achilles heel, as she called it. She pointed out several places in my writing where I had used "they" instead of "he" or "she," and told me this was "Bad Grammar." Bad grammar?!? I was crushed. I never said "ain't," I pronounced "February" correctly, and I knew the difference between "your" and "you're"--I didn't use bad grammar. It was like someone suggesting that I had bad oral hygiene or didn't use deodorant. I was ashamed.

I probably should have rebelled and started some "Society for the Genderless Pronoun," fighting for the right to use they, them, their, and themselves as common-gender third person indefinite pronouns; instead, I succumbed to the almighty grammar rule and began wielding the cumbersome "he or she" in my writing (incidentally, it was this same teacher who told me to leave out the so-called "Oxford comma" when listing items--I didn't start using it again until college).

I was more careful--and insecure--about my writing after this. I tried to avoid the use of "whom," and didn't even dare ask what a split infinitive was. Luckily, I picked up some grammar rules in spite of my fervent wish that they would just go away. Studying Russian taught me about direct objects, and I learned to change the case of nouns (so that I could say "I love borscht" instead of "Borscht loves me"). This helped me translate the rule over to English and correctly use who and whom. The grammar checker in Word, so completely useless in nearly every other application, very politely pointed out to me with its friendly little green squiggly lines that there are some instances in which you use "that," and some that require "which." (If these rules still sometimes feel a bit fuzzy, as they do to me, you can build your "which/that" and "who/whom" muscle here)

I guess the great thing about grammar is that the rules are fluid, and constantly changing--just to give those linguists something to do with their spare time. In fact, Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, now says: "The use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts. This gives you the option of using the plural pronouns where you think they sound best, and of using the singular pronouns ... where you think they sound best." So there, Mrs. Dursteller.