Steven Pinker of the New York Times explains HERE why Roberts flubbed while administering of the presidential Oath of Office. It's a grammar thing, folks. Steven Pinker of the New York Times explains HERE why Roberts flubbed while administering of the presidential Oath of Office. It's a grammar thing, folks.
4 comments:
i love this explanation!
Through all the glamour and seriousness of the event, Chief Justice, your slip is showing!
I think what this points to is that for us writers and teachers of English and gatekeepers of style, it's time to edit inappropriate Latinate rules out of the style books we foist on those who love rules too much for their own good. Rules other than the split infinitive-prohibition that need to go:
- The prohibition to end a sentence with a preposition (to quote Churchill, This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put).
- The awkwardness resulting from the insistence on singular pronouns for group nouns where linguistic intuition consistently causes users to do otherwise, e.g. "the class put ITS backpacks into ITS lockers" rather than the more natural "the class put THEIR backpacks..." that we actually use.
- Likewise, for supposedly singular pronouns that have become unenforceable in any coherent way because of the demise of the generic pronoun "he" and the never-going-to-happen p.c. middle way to alternate "he" or "she" and the anti-pragmatic idea to instead use the clumsy and inefficient "he or she": "Each student needs to register for his or her class by noon," when the natural and efficient usage has become "Each student needs to register for THEIR class by noon."
Any others you can think of?
I'm normally a purist in the prescriptive tradition, but if usage has changed to the point where even we teachers do not follow the rules we teach (as in the examples above, at least inadvertently), it's time to concede that a strict reliance on the Latin system causes more problems than it solves.
I agree, Jonathan. I've felt the ridiulousness of some of the rules as I tried to explain them to Comp I students whose papers I've marked all over in red. And you're right, too--I write and talk in academic situations in ways that would sound too pretentious in general company.
One stylistic "rule" that I would love to get rid of is "No 1st person in academic essays--at least at the lower level." I don't want a blog entry or something they'd write in their diary, but all those "one should this" and "one should that" just sound ridiculous.
The trouble with doing away with some of the stylistic things, like ending a sentence with a pronoun for instance, is that those of us who've spent our lives reading great writers and absorbing how language works know when to do it and when it's best to restructure the sentence. A lot of our students don't have a clue. They can't "hear" that it's sometimes inappropriate, at least for more formal situations.
Maybe a common-sense grammar/style book can be your next project? I'd buy it.
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