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In the last year or so, I’ve discovered to my chagrin that the grammar rules I’ve been so hard-nosed about all these years are not actually rules at all.
They’re merely the usages that were standard when I was being taught English. I honestly can’t recall whether my teachers ever used the word rule, or the word usage, or the words standard English. They simply taught us the way to write and speak “properly.” It may be my own fault that the usages they taught me are so deeply implanted in my gizzard that I go through life automatically “correcting” things.
Take, for example, the who/that “rule.” In formal written English, I cannot see a phrase like “the contributors that helped” without changing it to “the contributors who helped.” It’s who for people, that for things. That’s always been cast in stone for me, perfectly clear-cut—and a rule I simply MUST make everyone else follow. But now I find out that the rule I learned is no rule at all, merely a usage that was commonly taught in the Fifties.
Here’s a comparable situation. I was working on a technical book recently that still contained the marginal notes between the editor and the author, so I took a minute to, as it were, read over their shoulders. The editor was pitching a hissy fit because the author frequently used “This” as the subject of his sentences (as in “This is not a problem in most datasets”) and by golly, said the editor, you can never, EVER, do that. The poor author (a native speaker of English) was quite taken aback, because, he said, he’d used that construction forever and had never heard that you couldn’t do it.
I agreed with him. My reaction to the editor’s hard-nosed position was, “What planet are you from, you doofus? There’s not a THING wrong with using ‘This’ as the subject of a sentence! Are you nuts???!” But since it was in no way part of my job to insert myself into that battle, I had to settle for just yelling at my computer screen.
But I am beginning to understand how the editor got to that place; somewhere along the line, she was taught by some teacher that that was a rule. And she now takes it as an unbreakable rule in formal written English, the same way I take the who/that thing as an unbreakable rule in formal written English.
Except she hasn’t gotten to the point where she can acknowledge that not all the rules we were taught ARE rules.
One professional copy editor recently had this to say about rules: “There are indeed rules of grammar and usage, but fewer of them than you are likely to have been taught. And many of you have been taught things that are just not so.”
This was in fact the case with one man who wrote on one of the Internet’s many language blogs: “In seventh grade, my teacher corrected a paper in which I wrote ‘all of a sudden.’ She said it should be ‘all of THE sudden.’ I started writing it (and saying it) this way for years—and argued with people about it, with my teacher’s admonishment as my ‘proof’ of its correctness. But after finally researching it, I realized that my teacher was (gulp) wrong!” As the blog host pointed out, the teacher wasn’t so much wrong as just a couple of centuries out of date.
In any case, it behooves us to be cautious about “correcting” other people’s rule-breaking to bring them into compliance with our own understanding of what the rules are. We might be...um...wrong.
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