Something important needs to be said about today's endless online disputes over grammatical correctness, and it looks like I'm the man to finally say it.
I've been a professional proofreader for the past eight years, and I'm also the author of two novels and a book of short stories. I'm not saying I know everything about grammar/usage, but I know enough to know what I'm talking about. (For instance, I know that these days it's perfectly acceptable that I finished the previous sentence with a preposition, and anyone who insists otherwise is merely clinging to his or her own outdated pedantry.) And I'm writing this now because I know the core reason of why arguments over grammar/usage on the internet turn out to be such a massive waste of time and life.
Beware the false dichotomy.
I'll use an example from one of my favorite episodes ("I'm a Little Bit Country"). In the episode, the boys are tasked with writing what they think the Founding Fathers would say about America's second war in Iraq. In the show, the conservative townspeople approve the war, and the liberal townspeople protest it, and in the end Benjamin Franklin tells Cartman that the beauty of America is that it is a country that can at the same time fight a war it is also simultaneously protesting.
Instead of giving in to the false dichotomy, America shattered it and became a much more politically savvy country.
There are other examples from the show, but I think that illustrates the idea of a false/forced dichotomy rather well.
It is with that in mind that I'd like to introduce you to the two prevailing combatants in the war over English usage.
In the first corner, we have former New York Times columnist William Safire, who represents an approach to grammar known as prescriptivism, which believes that proper communication requires rigid rules and precise definitions to facilitate ever more communicative precision. William Safire and other prescriptivists, in online comment threads, are the people who consider a grammatical mistake to immediately equate to an invalid argument, and they point this out with abandon (to quote a former snooty professor, "Muddled writing is indicative of muddled thinking.")
In the other corner, we have Pootie Tang, who represents an approach to grammar known as descriptivism, which believes that language is constantly evolving and that rigid rules only get in the way of the real translation of ideas in this dynamic life. These are the people who are making all of the mistakes and not giving a shit about what the prescriptivists have to say (to once again quote my old roommate Aaron 'Smern' Smigelski, "Dan, I don't read books; I do shit people write books about!")
Internet comment threads are a powder keg between these two fiery camps, but the problem is that both sides are inherently incorrect by virtue of the fact that prescriptivist arguments never work against descriptivist thinking, and vice versa.
Blow up the false dichotomy!
Ben Franklin might say that prescriptivists need to understand that an uninhibited descriptivist flow sometimes quite effectively catalyzes the evolution of the language that consequently results in said prescriptivists' love of an increase in communicative precision, and descriptivists need to understand that nobody watched the movie Pootie Tang because it was absolute nonsense.
Ultimately, I believe grammatical enlightenment can be found in the compromise provided by American prosemaster David Foster Wallace, whose writings directly and indirectly introduced me to these ideas. The Wallace compromise represents the understanding that if we are going to take communication seriously we should endeavor to learn all of the prescriptivists' rules, and we should then begin testing them for weaknesses, and bending them, and hardening them, and discarding them if our own homespun descriptivist innovations prove more effective.
The Intended Morals Here:
-Beware the false or forced dichotomy: instead of either/or, it might actually be neither/both.
-If you lean more towards descriptivism, endeavor to precisely learn the rules you're horrendously breaking, in order to be able to better share your message with a wider audience, and if you lean more towards prescriptivism, chill your grill and let your goose loose just a little, in order to let your audience know that you don't have a splintered spindle up your tightest hole.
