So far I've published 421 posts on "A Rolling Crone" since November of 2008. (Some have, I admit, been re-posts.) In the past few years a number of my posts have been published on The Huffington Post as well. If I get as many as 10 comments on a post, I'm surprised and pleased. But the post below, published on The Huffington Post on 04/04/2013, evoked 243 shares, 28 tweets and 728 comments! It even got me elected to some "save our language" internet group which sends me Facebook messages now and then. Evidently there are a lot more grouchy grammar nuts out there than I thought!
You know how, in World War
II, the Marines employed Navajo code talkers to transmit radio messages
because no one but another Navajo could understand the language? Now
there is fear that some of these obscure Native American languages will
disappear when the last of the elderly code speakers passes on.
Well
I'm 72 and I suspect that I'm the last person on earth who knows the
proper usage of "lie" and "lay." Not that I would dream of correcting
anyone, such as my fabulously flexible and toned Pilates teachers who
say about a dozen times an hour, "Now everyone lay down on your mat with
your head facing the mirror."
I've also given up on "its" and
"it's." And of course there's "two, to and too," all of which are texted
as "2." In fact, now that texting is ubiquitous, I suspect that all
language will soon be written phonetically using numbers, symbols,
emoticons and perhaps bar codes.
It's always an error in
The New York Times
that sends me off on a grammar rant -- and there was another one today
(Thursday, March 28). In the Style Section, in a large, bold pull-quote
from an article about photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith
taken in the 1960s, I read: "After laying dormant for decades, a second
life for photographs taken of a pair of artists on the cusp of fame."
Of course, it's supposed to be: "after lying dormant..."
This "laying" was the last straw after last week, when I saw in
The Times
a large headline about the economic troubles of Cypress(!) even though,
throughout the text of the piece, the economic troubles were ascribed
to the island of Cyprus, rather than a species of tree.
In the olden days, when I was being trained in
New York Times
style at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, these errors would
have been caught by people called copy editors, but I can only imagine
that, in this very difficult period for all print media,
The Times has been forced to fire all its copy editors for economic reasons.
That
thumping noise you hear is the late, lamented Times editor Ted
Bernstein spinning in his grave. Once upon a time, Theodore M. Bernstein
was the watchman of the venerable Great Gray Lady as well as a
professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979,
Time Magazine
noted, "Theodore M. Bernstein, 74... served as the paper's prose
polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven
popular texts on English usage and journalism... In a witty
Times house organ called 'Winners and Sinners,' the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act."
At
Columbia J School we often saw Bernstein's "Winners and Sinners"
newsletter. Somewhat like the judges on American Idol, Ted Bernstein
would periodically praise a brilliant headline or turn of phrase in the
NYT
and chide and make fun of grammatical and syntactical lapses. The
"Cypress" debacle would probably have sent him into overdrive.
Three years ago, on April 14, 2010, in a post called "
Michelle Obama, the Grammar Police and a Cranky Crone,"
I gently chided the First Lady for a lapse in grammar. Although I think
I did it in a friendly way, it almost got me expelled from a women's
group I belonged to, as one particularly vehement member insisted it was
heartless and morally wrong to criticize her for anything except her
political actions. (That blog post was also reprinted in a book called
"Grammar Rants" -- and they did
not mean that in a good way.)
The
funny thing is, I am a huge admirer of Michelle Obama. Her photograph
stands on the top of my desk. And the same day I published that post, I
emailed it to her office. Evidently no one there who read it was
offended, because ever since, nearly every week, I get an email from the
office of the First Lady, or from the President himself asking my
opinion of something, or sometimes it's just from "The White House." If
the White House had been as offended as my fellow club members by my
post, certainly they wouldn't have put me on their mailing list?
Anyway,
I'll reprint below some of what I said about the First Lady and grammar
and let you decide whether I was being "heartless." And thanks for
sticking with me through this current grammar rant. I feel a lot better
now.
Today [April 14, 2010] I read in all the news
media about Michelle Obama's surprise visit to Haiti during her first
official solo trip abroad.
I applaud her for her compassion and
for bringing public attention to the devastating needs that still have
to be met, especially for the Haitian children.
I'm a huge fan of
Michelle's and admire her more than any first lady since, say, Eleanor
Roosevelt. But I did wince when I read the statement that she made to
the press about her trip. Her insight was perfect but her grammar was
not.
"I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because
we're at the point where the relief efforts are under way but the
attention of the world starts to wane a bit, " she said.
What's
wrong with that? Take out Jill and you have "I think it's important for I
to come now." It's supposed to be: "It was important for Jill and ME."
....
...You don't expect perfect grammar from a baseball player
(or from Bob Dylan... writer of "Lay, Lady, Lay"), but maybe you do from
a First Lady who's a lawyer, educated at Princeton and Harvard.
Kids
acquire an ear for correct grammar by hearing it spoken by the adults
around them; their parents and their role models. But now that young
people mainly communicate by texting in a phonetic code, both spelling
and grammar are becoming as antiquated as the Model T.
It's great
that Michelle Obama is encouraging kids to eat smart and get out there
and exercise, but let's encourage them to mind their P's and Q's and
their prepositions, nouns, verbs and grammar as well.
