Shannon Wheeler strikes a blow for freedom of expression or of thought or of not living your life in a constant clench.
Mostly, I suspect, the latter, which is good enough for me, though I suppose he could have just been being sarcastic. No, wait: That's impossible. Not him.
Anyway, it made me laff, and it also made me think of this old joke:
Visitor at door: "May I speak with your father?"
Little boy: "He ain't here."
Visitor at door: "Well, may I speak with your mother?"
Little boy: "She ain't here neither."
Visitor at door: "Heavens! Where is your grammar?"
Little boy: "She's feeding the cat."
That one really cracked us up at the age of six or seven, when we also got laffs out of saying, "'Ain't' ain't in the dictionary, so 'ain't' ain't a word."
And like most people who pridefully cite grammar rules, we were about half right and mostly wrong. "Ain't" most certainly is in my Shorter Oxford.
And, yes, I see that it is designated as now illiterate or dialect.
But it most certainly is a word, and comes from:
So it may be a bit old-fashioned, but it's not "wrong," and I ain't backing down from that.
The "illiterate or dialect" part is interesting, though, because it reminds me of another old joke, which is that an economist is like a man who knows 200 ways to make love but doesn't have a girlfriend, and which I would adapt to embrace grammar nazis.
Or perhaps we could riff on Mencken's equally familiar definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time."
Note: I'm in favor of clarity. I object, for instance, to the flagrant misuse of "may have" and "might have" because there is a difference between speculation and speculation contrary to fact. Specifically:
"The alarm system may have prevented further damage" means that the alarm system did go off, people responded to it and we think things would have been worse otherwise.
"The alarm system might have prevented further damage" means either it didn't go off at all, or it went off, but in a way that was ineffective, but whatever the case, it didn't work and it's too late now.
While most of the time, you can tell what someone means by the context in which they confuse these two usages, that's not good enough if you're trying to decide whether to invest more money in a better alarm system or to sue the manufacturers of the one you have or to agitate for a law requiring inspection of alarm systems.
That said, grammar nazis are not talking about "clarity." They're talking about "rules," and grammar rules are about 90 percent balloon juice.
I worked at a paper owned by a small chain that put out a quarterly newsletter praising good work, offering tips and critiquing headlines. One headline critique I remember was when the editor took a sports department to task for a hed that referred to something being "deja vu all over again."
That was redundant, she sniffed.
She was right about the usage, wrong about the appropriateness: It was referring to a very familiar Yogi Berra quote. Granted, had it appeared in the news section, the proper critique would have been that riffing on Yogi should be restricted to the sportswriters. But it was perfectly germane where it appeared.
She was an ex-nun, but I promise you, my aunts who were both nuns and teachers had a much better sense of perspective, of humor and of playfulness.
Yogi also said, "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be," and that's certainly true of language usage. God spare us from a world in which irony and playfulness are systematically drained from expression in the name of proper usage.
That term "dialect" in the definition of "ain't" says a lot about the classism and snobbery of grammar nazis. This attempt to standardize language through the imposition of rules is not simply "Victorian" in the sense of being uptight and humorless, but in the sense of believing that you are on a mission from God to lift the heathen from the mire.
And that those peasants who say things like "ain't" couldn't possibly have the wit to purposefully use a bit of irony by saying, "I could care less."
"If they were smart and educated and worthwhile like we are, it would be wit," the grammar nazis sniff, "but this is just the ignorance of the gutter."
Grammar nazis don't even realize that Henry Higgins was a snob, a misogynist and a heartless boor, perhaps because Lerner and Loewe cleaned him up and made him darling, and the grammar nazis aren't cultured enough to have read Shaw's original.
Bloody peasants themselves, knowwhatimeanvern?
They also don't realize the absurd, futile history of the blue-nosed puritans who led this high-minded crusade to turn our gloriously disparate mongrel language into a proper gentleman.
Fighting fire with fire, here is one of my favorite sites on the web, a genuine piece of scholarship that defends Jane Austen against the snots who would destroy the playful language she wielded so delicately and so well.
And drill down when you go there, so you don't miss things like the list of failed pick-up lines from her work, or the quotable lines from her personal correspondence, which leads off with:
"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
Oh dear. I fear success has gone to her head entirely.
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