Eulogy For an Unknown Grammarian

I am here to eulogize a decent man, one who moved upon the earth and has now passed from it. What can I say about him? Literally, what can I say? I did not know him, and you did not know him. Still, here he is, supine, before us, so I can say with some confidence that he was born, though whether or not it was in the usual way I cannot say, and he lived, if not among us, somewhere among somebody. He likely attended school, in all probability held a job, in all likelihood paid his taxes, maybe followed some professional sports team or other, possibly found The Three Stooges uproariously funny, could have hated shopping, could have been fortified by a steady diet of Red Bull and bite-size Snickers, could have thought “molecular gastronomy” the ugliest combination of words in the English language, could have considered Elvis’s hips a blasphemous affront to all that was holy, could have thought upright posture evolved so humans could dance the funky chicken, could have liked all movies starring Steven Seagal, could have even considered Steven Seagal the finest actor working in American cinema. But we do know that he was a human, a male and that he appeared on this planet, though I don’t know exactly when, that he lived, though I don’t know exactly where, and that he has shuffled off this mortal coil, though I don’t know exactly why. And though, to tweak King Lear a bit, I do not know who it is that can tell me who he is, or was, he was a decent man, and decency, I think we can all agree, deserves to be memorialized.

But possibly I know something else about the deceased. I have heard a rumor of a hearsay of a reputed report that he had a keen-edged passion for correct grammar. That correct grammar was his bliss station, his rapture and quickening, the fine-structure constant of his universe, the Higgs Boson imparting mass to his existence. That he was blushlessly and bottomlessly in love with correct grammar, considered it a choral exultation sung by a confederation of angels. In short, it seems he was a linguistic Puritan, the John Calvin of grammar, soldiering onward against the voguish Calvin Kleinification of language, with its dark, precipitous descent into degeneracy. For our unknown grammarian, good grammar was saving grace.

If this rumor of supposed exuberant affection is in fact true, we can safely infer that our grammarian’s hero would have been former New York magazine theater critic John Simon, and that his scripture would have been Simon’s 1988 book, Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. Simon was the Jeremiah of the backsliding grammar world, an aggressively elitist and acerbic prophet to a grammatical world he considered open beset by the “arrant solecisms of the ignoramus.” Our grammarian would have thrilled at Simon’s angry denunciation of language change; approved Simon’s identification of bad grammar with bad manners, like “someone picking his nose at a party;” and agreed that lovers of language should “educate the ignorant up to our level rather than stultify ourselves to theirs.” He would have answered affirmatively the subtitled question of Edwin Newman’s 1975 book Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English, where he would have found confirmed his dream-deep belief that the unwholesome American propensity for vaporous clichés, jargon, redundancy, and fashion-addled word coinage proved positively that, as Newman mournfully intoned, “language is in decline.” And William Follett’s 1966 Modern English Usage would have thrummed the chord of his soul by insisting that there is only one “right way to use words and construct sentences, and many wrong ways.” For our unknown grammarian, as for Simon, Newman, and Follett, good grammar prescribed the way people ought to speak and write, simply must speak and write, if they were to emerge from the dark forest of language barbarity onto the sunlit savannah of full-fledged literacy. Only the authoritative prescriptions of normative grammar could forestall the tragedy awaiting clarity and economy of expression. There would have been no "pluribus" in our grammarian’s linguistic "unum."

We can also infer that he would have shuddered, would have seethed, at the pronouncements of those advocating more liberal, democratic, and tolerant usage: Joseph Webbe’s 1662 An Approach to Truth, which argued that custom “is the Lady and Mistress of speaking” rather than “the poore and penurious prescriptions of Grammar rules;” Bill Bryson’s mild contention that “little basis” existed for the sanctified status of traditional grammatical rules; Steven Pinker’s provocative assertion that grammatical rules were “ridiculous” and that insisting upon them amounted to little more than ritualistic cultural sadism. But the brunt of our grammarian’s fury, the full frontal assault of his blisteringly rancorous rage, would have been reserved for Philip Gove, the apostate editor of the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, under whose guidance such labels as “colloquial,” “correct,” “incorrect,” proper,” and “improper” had been audaciously removed. And then the matter of Gove’s heretical effrontery, in the face of the Atlantic Monthly’s righteous description of Webster’s as a “scandal and disaster,” to announce he had “no truck with artificial notions of correctness or superiority,” that his interest was in describing, not prescribing, language. Undoubtedly, our unknown grammarian felt that the gate to the formerly closed fortress of language had swung open, and the mongering barbarians of confusion and corruption were pouring through. Undoubtedly, he felt the End of Days loomed. Perhaps he felt an Inquisition was in order.

Having pledged fealty to the army of Simon and Newman and Follett, he must have believed the distinction between “infer” and “imply,” “disinterested” and “uninterested,” “lie” and “lay,” “who” and “whom,” “fewer calories” and “less calories” mattered mightily. He must have found “between you and I” cringe-worthy, “Me and Julio down at the schoolyard” joint-ache-worthy, “hisself” and “theirself” and “refudiate” coronary-worthy. He would have fulminated most white hotly against “viral” being hijacked from its original meaning as an illness distinct from one of bacterial origin, and “epic” being shanghaied to mean anything big. He would have agreed with Benjamin Franklin that verbing—turning nouns into verbs—was “awkward and abominable.” If it were statemented to him that no less a literary luminary than William Shakespeare penned such phrases as “Thank me no thanks, nor proud me no prouds” and “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncles,” he would have likely accused the bard of contributing to the linguistic delinquency of minors. One can only wonder at his reaction to Jack Kerouac’s “Tennessee me no Tennessees.” Quoth our unknown grammarian, “Nevermore.”

Friends, I believe we can infer from the deceased’s rumored grammatical essentialism that he was a man of tradition, attempting in his own way to keep both the fiddler and good grammar on the roof, braiding golden threads from the rule-bound past to weave into what he saw as the yawping tapestry of current language use. Beyond that, our grammarian is an unlit mystery. Did he flourish in his tilting against the windmills of linguistic permissiveness? Was he bruised in the encounter? Did he grieve that the world was contingent, that its tefloned eventfulness prevented the caress of intimacy, and did that grief, repetitively experienced, embed itself in him so deeply that it emerged finally as a rage for the order and clarity that grammar provided? I don’t know. I do know that he lived and he had a passion born of the courage to be dissatisfied. For that, if for no other reason, he deserves a remembrance.