As a copyeditor, I'm regularly the downer at the grammar-police party. The first questions most people ask me when they find out I'm a copyeditor usually are some variation of "What's your pet peeve?" or "What's the worst thing that authors do that you have to correct?"
I can't just sigh and say "Misuses of the em dash" and move on. Because I'm a professional corrector, that's why. No, I feel impelled to say something like this: "Well, what's 'wrong' to you might not be 'wrong' according to the AP Style Guide, and what's wrong according to one style guide is right to another, so I don't really get morally outraged about anything related to grammar. It's all like bugs displayed on a wall to me. I feel nothing about them, but they're interesting to study."
And normally the reply I get is something like: "Yeah, I really hate it when the kids these days don't spell out the whole word!"
Normally, I just go about my business, but I'm not just a professional copyeditor. I'm also a former professor of rhetoric and composition, and my dissertation director is a well-known linguist/dialectologist. I know better than to think that grammar is a set of right-or-wrong rules handed down by the Almighty. I know that -- as with all rhetoric and writing -- context dictates everything. So sometimes I get to use this blog to do my part to combat stupid notions about grammar, especially when I think an especially insipid idea is being used to be unduly mean.
So, not long ago, I was doing my morning routine, listening to the BBC's World Update, which played an interview with the owners of an "online dating concierge" business (I shall not name them because I wish to give them no further press than they've already got). The business helps their clients to formulate "grammatically correct" online dating profiles, and it helps them weed out the "good" matches from the "bad" ones based in part on whether the match uses "good" grammar or not. One of the business owners says that the business hopes to "promote meaningful conversations where people are held accountable for their grammar."
Hold the phone. Because the number of flawed premises upon which this entire business concept is based is staggering, and we need to talk about it.
First, they've misunderstood what "grammar" refers to. What they're really talking about is "usage" and rules, which describe what's "acceptable" (often thought of as "correct") and "unacceptable" ("wrong") in any given context. Grammar, properly speaking, has to do with whether the language being used follows the semantic formula allowed for within the language system. Grammar is what's used to explain why *I the books to class take sounds strange to native English speakers. It's much closer to math than it is to art, really, and it involves a pretty specialized jargon, just like higher-level math does (I dare anyone at said "online dating concierge" to explain the differences between cognitive and functional grammar, for example).
Second, they've failed to realize that grammar and usage are both dictated by context. When is "Y'all" grammatically correct? When you're in my grandmother's house in the Ozarks. When is it acceptable not to spell out words? In text messages. It's not written in the Bible that comma splices are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord; neither are the chosen people marked by their proper use of the subjunctive or their abjuration of the overuse of gerunds. When we start equating language use with correctness, we're really just playing as pawns in a power game that's been going on since people who weren't part of the aristocracy became literate. All the sudden, the unwashed masses were using the written word, and just doing whatever they pleased with it! Rules became a way of imposing the thin green line between the classes (e.g., if you had formal education and were possessed of a refined mind, you would know and be able to use the subjunctive conjugation of "to be" and the proper use of "whom"). But the problem with this approach is that someone has to set the standards, and there are simply too many users of language in too many specific contexts for there to be just one right way of using the language. We are Babel, and that's ok.
So, that diversity of perfectly-legitimate-albeit-not-"approved" way of using language should be something we're all kind of ok with if we don't want that same standard applied to us. The young man quoted above, who's one of the execs at this "online dating concierge," misuses "where," for example (he should have said "in which," because a conversation isn't a place). The young woman who was interviewed alongside the young man, as another exec in the company, talks with an upspeak inflection (e.g., this is when everything sounds like a question? and the end the sentence goes up in pitch? you know?) so unpleasant that I nearly turned off the radio.
But here's the point: I don't judge either of them, as people, based on their use of language. I wouldn't automatically set them aside as potential dating partners because of my perceptions of their language "correctness," nor would I go around encouraging others to condemn them, and I especially would not be profiting off of others' stereotyping and condemnations. I'd rather encourage the clients of an "online dating concierge" to ask themselves what they think "correct" language usage is a marker of, whether it's really a marker of that, why they care about that (whatever it is; I'm guessing education, which is really a way of saying "money and socio-economic background, and maybe also race") so much, and whether that's what really matters when it comes to finding someone you want to trust your life and heart to.
Call me old-fashioned, I guess. But my advice is not to bring anyone home to your mother if that person is going to judge you for misusing "whom."