Grammar or Not, Here I Come

An unexpected consequence of writing a daily blog is how much I have been stymied by basic grammatical dilemmas.  After all, I have former teachers, classmates, colleagues, bosses, clients—all of them, thankfully, now friends—following my journey.  By some standards I am woefully over-educated.  This adds an element of stress to my task, as I am aware of you mischief makers out there who are racking up a score sheet of errant commas, mixed metaphors, and misuse of the passive voice simply for the joy of rubbing my nose in it.  While I do care what you all think—and I dearly hope that these little epistles provoke discussion and promote happiness—I confess that grammatical perfection is far from the top of my agenda.

There are, however, three notable exceptions.  It’s funny that I have become fixated on just three, as no doubt the grammar police would cite me for other crimes and misdemeanors to the English language.  For example, I have particular difficulty choosing a natural sequence for my prepositional phrases; I have wished longingly for a foolproof English companion to arithmetic's “order of operations”.  I have made a concerted effort to go “freestyle”—that is, writing in a conversational narrative that is more akin to the way I speak than the way William Safire (or William Shakespeare) would have me write.  Nonetheless, I have sworn vigilance in the prevention of these three common errors of grammar and usage: split infinitives, misused gerunds, and using ‘data’ as a singular noun.

Splitting an infinitive means to sloppily insert an adverb between a verb and its preceding ‘to’—as I have demonstrated in this sentence.  In Latin, infinitives are a single word, which led English scholars originally to insist on keeping the two words together.   This has raised controversy more recently; the late, venerable Mr. Safire himself ruled it a breakable rule “when it helps the reader to better understand my point.”  Most people do not notice when infinitives are split, as it is common in America to stress our adverbs.  If you think about it, however, the verb is the power broker in our language.  An improperly inserted adverb steals the power from the verb and derails the sentence, thus turning it into the equivalent of a teenage drama queen: inactive yet superfluously modified.  I have discovered that split infinitives are commonly solved by eliminating the adverb entirely rather than moving it elsewhere in the sentence.  This is a game I have taught my kids.  When you remove the extraneous word and restore authority to the verb, often you find that the sentence is improved without it.

An even more abused verb form is the gerund.  A gerund is when a verb is turned into a noun by adding “ing” to it.  As such, a personal pronoun that precedes it must take the possessive form: my, his, her, their, our, its.  Nearly every author and every television character seems oblivious to this rule.  For example, the other night on television a teenager asked, “Are you bothered by me going to college?”  This sounds fine to some people's ears.  I taught my children a simple trick to use gerunds correctly.  Since a gerund is a noun, try substituting the word ‘hat’ to determine the correct pronoun to use.  This example would be: “Are you bothered by my hat?”  It becomes easier to understand why the pronoun in the original example must be the possessive ‘my’ rather than ‘me’.  My children have become so adept at pronoun-busting gerunds in print that they use a special colored highlighter when they read just to count gerund abuses.  They also developed the practice of bringing home notices and letters from school only after circling and mocking the frequent gerund errors of their teachers.  It sounds like I have created pedantic monsters, but it is surprising how empowering this one trick has been to them.

The final of my pet peeves is the use of ‘data’ as a singular noun.  Let us not beat around the bush here.  ‘Data’ is plural.  The only time it is acceptable to say ‘data is’ is when you are talking about the word itself, as I have done in the previous sentence.  This starts to sound a little bit like Forrest Gump (data is as data are!), but it is nonetheless an absolute, unbreakable rule.  At one point in my career, I stirred the ire of a particular marketing director who claimed editorial control over something I had written for publication that made liberal use of the phrase ‘data are’.  She changed each use to 'data is', then I re-edited it to change them all back to plural.  She cited an article saying that through common usage (misusage, I protested!) it had become acceptable in modern vernacular to use data as singular.  I argued that although misuse may have made it acceptable to use ‘data’ incorrectly, that it did not render the correct plural usage unacceptable.  She was incapable of following this logic; she only insisted it was not wrong to say ‘data is’ and that my plural usage was archaic.  Well, this is my blog and she is still wrong.  If that isn’t enough, the entire scientific community will back me up.

In the greater scheme of things, considering war and politics and the economy, grammar and usage seem like trivial details upon which to fixate.  I lump these into a category with hand-written letters and thank-you notes; they are no longer essential but they certainly are lovely when you get them.  I started this rant admitting that I am not particularly attentive to grammatical perfection.  When I consider, however, that the development of language is a hallmark of civilization, it pains me to see us destroy and subvert it as much as we do.  It is like watching the desecration a holy relic or the toppling of an enduring monument.  Today, I am sometimes amused by the slang and text strings my kids throw around.  I am not above using them myself—particularly for the amusement or horror of my kids while LMFAO.  There is comfort in preserving a certain standard in our language, however ethereal it may be.  Perhaps I am just an old fart refusing to be made obsolete by a few tweets.  Perhaps I am nostalgic for a simpler time.  Or perhaps our language, with all its quirks, is worth holding on to simply because it reflects something basic to our humanity.

Tomorrow's blog:  My Worst Day as a Mother