A day that shall live in infamy: March 7, 2014.
First, I found this in the Washington Post: “she’s just terribly board with nothing to do…”[i]
Next, in the New York Times: “The Commission has principle responsibility…”[ii]
Now, the Post is actually just quoting someone, but the Times’ blooper is in a signed article! Say it ain’t so, Grey Lady!
The “board” made me laugh until I realized the gubernatorial aide who wrote it is almost certainly a college graduate.
But the “principle” hit me right in the pit of the stomach, the kind of feeling you get when combining ice cream and beer. (Usually, the beer comes first.)
It’s not just spelling that’s a lost cause. Read the “comments” section on web pages and…oh my God, the grammar!
This grammer and speling thing is hopless. Know wot I mean?
Yes, you do. And that makes me wonder: am I wrong to worry about this? If everyone easily comprehends everything, what’s the point of spelling and grammar? Hmmm.
Conventional wisdom views proper language in terms of a “canon.” Not a weapon, but laws handed down by wise and all-knowing ancestors. Think stern looking, grey-bearded men sitting at desks and holding quill pens in a menacing way.
A noted believer in the canon-wielding theory is the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which carries such venom about misplaced punctuation it was originally titled “Move That Comma or I’ll Kill You.”
But maybe the canon theory is wrong?
The roots of our English grammar go way, way back. Past Latin and Greek to the folks who spoke Indo-European or “IE.” Yes, everyone from Delhi to Derry got grammar from IE, a mean bastard of a language with three aspects, four moods, nine cases, and ten vowels.
To illustrate “cases,” in English we can say “John hit Sue” and “Sue hit John,” but not “John Sue hit.” In this last example, with the verb hanging out there at the end, we don’t know who is hitting whom. But German, evidently closer to IE since it’s just dripping with grammar, accomplishes this with case labels. So, “Sueus Johnem hit” has Sue in the nominative and John in the accusative, which means that Sue is accusing John of taking a hit. No, wait, it means Sue hit John. If we had “Suem Johnus hit,” we would know that John was hitting on Sue.
All this raises many questions, not least why John and Sue are flailing away at each other. But the point here is that using cases allows the crazy IE practice of putting the verb at the end of a sentence.
In German, you can say things like: “With haughty neighbors in her dress green the Baroness mirthfully belched.”
Didn’t see that last part coming, did you?
So German got its craziness from IE, but ditch that image of wise, grey-bearded guys with canons. The IE speakers lived 5,000 years ago somewhere near the Black Sea, perpetually smelling of horse tinkle and spending their time deciding what kind of bones to have for dinner.
If any of these people lived long enough to have a grey beard, no one would have been able to tell for all the dirt.
So the idea is we got grammar from filthy, illiterate nomads? Hmmm. Skepticism rises.
OK, I can see how even illiterate peasants could come up with ways to show that one thing possesses another, and of course verb tenses like past and future. I can even understand them developing what linguists call “mood,” as in “I could eat that woodchuck if you cooked it up good.”
It all appears to make sense. But now I can see that the game is given away by that evil queen of moods, the subjunctive. Really, could that have developed naturally?
Imagine that the IE people, somewhat pie-faced after much celebration around the campfire, are electing a leader and listening to the required speeches. The first candidate, known as “Ogz,” gets up and begins with “If I was King…”
A shocked silence fills the yurt. Could he be such a fool as to not know that the correct usage is “if I were king?”
Come on. No way.
So I see it now. The existence of the subjunctive confirms that grammar was imposed on us by visiting aliens. Probably to keep us too confused to discover their secrets.
As for spelling, there’s no controversy. It was definitely invented by schoolteachers.
[i] http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/staff-e-mails-portray-va-first-lady-as-insecure-and-erratic/2014/03/06/aa2a399c-a4df-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html?hpid=z1
[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/03/07/business/07reuters-eu-elections-candidate.html?hp
