All your grammars are belong to us
In high school, I was a budding grammar Nazi. I blame this on an ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who, despite her advanced years and Alzheimer’s, had an ear for the same violations that once gave Strunk&White the howling fantods: ungrammaticality. Dottie’s favorite game–one I adopted, to the chagrin of virtually everyone I knew–was to count incorrect usages of the word “like” in speaking. She would say nothing while doing this. Dottie would simply listen serenely to whatever you said to say, raising her fingers, one at a time, until the speaker realized the correlation. “They’re decorating it with, like, this like jungle theme with palm trees and like tigers everywhere.” Three silent digits extend.
This game generated one of two effects on speakers: either you slimmed your sentences and removed a great deal of your chaff (as the ex- and I both did, quicksharp), or the stress of avoiding “like” became so enormous that smooth sentence completion be impossible: pausing, backtracking, violent re-words and stuttering were the new modus operandi.
Of course, I went to public school, and in public school, they don’t teach you things like the nominative/accusative/dative/genitive/locative cases, what a preposition is, how polarity words work, and so forth. Thankfully, SOMEBODY learned all these things, and are willing and able to share them all with us. Without further delay, a few more language-oriented blogs to recommend you to:
Perhaps the biggest and brightest and best of the language blogs, this site is run by Mark Liberman, a professor in UPenn’s well-esteemed linguistics department. He get’s plenty of help from a number of other linguistic luminaries, and the blog covers plenty of ground from Dan Brown’s prose and Van Morrison’s swearing to Beatles gibberish and Google books critiques.
This charming piece of webspace is occupied by Gabe Doyle, a UCSD linguistics grad student. His sub-header and motto apparent is “Prescriptivism Must Die!”, which is funny in such an inside-baseball, grammar-nerds-only sense that the time it would take to explain the joke would render it unfunny. Timing, as they say, is everything. Perhaps his hallmark post thus far (for me, at any rate) is his thorough argument, with ample evidence, of why the singular “they” is perfectly grammatical.
Ben Zimmer spends a lot of time moonlighting at Language Log or filling in for William Safire. When he’s doing neither, he keeps his own site, tracing words and their usages back through history. Most notable in his recent work, perhaps, is his debunking of “Cronkiters”.
