Anger over grammar abusers
BY YVONNE FEIN. An English teacher walks into a dinner party and is seated next to a bloviating businessman. All night he bends her ear with tales of his five-star travels: this luxury hotel; that cordon bleu meal. The English teacher becomes terribly bored and is also irritated but, polite by nature, when he says he’s planning another trip, she asks him: “Where will you be going to?”With a sly grin he says: “I was told you were never supposed to end a sentence with a preposition.”“You’re right,” she says. “So where will you be going to, a—hole?”
I TELL this story, not just because it’s one of my favourite grammar jokes, but also because I wish to preface my rant against the grammar abusers of this world with a demonstration that I am not a grammar purist or pedant who would never end a sentence with a preposition. And if someone were to ask, “Who’s there?” I would never say, “It is I,” no matter how contrary to the laws of grammar “It’s me” might be.
But even though I am a reasonable person in the grammar arena, equally, there are certain linguistic missteps I simply cannot abide.
In order of increasing heinousness, first is the ignorant loon who says: “I’m in total agreeance with that.” Agreeance? Seriously? I know that some abstract nouns end in “ance” (parlance, variance, modern dance) but “agreeance” is not one of them.
Next is the sloppy user of the double adverb: “extremely simply” or “reasonably happily”. An adverb cannot modify another adverb. One either says, “extremely simple” or “reasonably happy”. An even more elegant solution to this challenge is to have an adjective qualify a noun, to wit: “extreme simplicity” or “reasonable happiness”. This is not rocket science; it is the science of grammar which deserves our respect.
I won’t insult you by spending too much time on “continue on” or “reverse backwards”. If you think about them for just a moment you’ll see the excruciating tautological issue at work. Closely related to the above examples is the depressingly common usage of “going to go”. All we need to say is “going”. For example, “I am going to Paris” rather than “I am going to go to Paris.” It makes my fingers ache just to type such a linguistic vulgarism.
But the worst of all transgressions is the use of the subjective case after a preposition in the misguided opinion that such use is inherently correct and refined. “You and I are going to the movies.” That is accurate. But, “Between you and I” has no place in civilised discourse. It is “Between you and me” – objective case after the preposition. Get it right!
I could carry on about the misuse of apostrophes and the use of singular verbs in the case of “either or; neither nor and none”, but time has run out. The reason that this rant is even necessary is that they no longer teach English grammar in the schools. Hebrew grammar, yes. French and Japanese grammar, also yes. But English grammar, no. If you can believe it, it’s a first-year university arts subject!
What a disgrace!
Yvonne Fein is a playwright, novelist, editor and lecturer. Her poetry, short stories, essays, book reviews and interviews have appeared in journals and newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States. She has edited The Melbourne Chronicle and Generation magazines, as well as award-winning Holocaust memoirs by survivors. Her play On Edge was performed at the 1988 Jewish Arts Festival and her crime novel, April Fool, was published in 2001. Her play, A Celebration of Women, starring Evelyn Krape, performed to a sell-out audience in 2003. In 2008, her second novel, The Torn Messiah, was published and she also completed her Masters degree in History at Monash University.
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