Notebook: Up with Putting

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Recently dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster puzzled me a bit by making waves with a pronouncement about English grammar in an Instagram post. Press coverage duly responded to this “new guidance” from Merriam-Webster, and the deluge of outrage and celebration in its replies, with earnest attention. Linguist John McWhorter on NPR deferred to the mood by joining in the applause (“of all of the blackboard grammar rules, that one has always been one of the most utterly ridiculous”), though he acknowledged that he wasn’t sure “why that happens to have been proclaimed right now.” What sort of announcement is this, I wondered? Does Merriam-Webster have some ongoing deliberation about which rules of grammar to chuck, sending out occasional updates on Instagram? A second (!) NPR story linked to undated Merriam-Webster guidance that the rule was abandoned by grammar and usage experts in the early twentieth century. Writing in the LA Times, style guide June Casagrande sited concurrence with Merriam-Webster’s newsmaking Instagram post by most of the usual authorities: Fowler, Strunk and White, Garner. (Fowler was particularly eloquent, saying that absence of this supposed rule is “a remarkable freedom enjoyed by English” and “an important element in the flexibility of the language.”) Yet folks took great pleasure in stomping robustly on the non-rule’s grave. The oft-defeated rule the news of whose life was greatly exaggerated was the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition.

Before I opine, I must say clearly that I have no expertise in this area beyond the pragmatic. I am certainly not a trained linguist (though I am the rare person to have taken an entire year of “Introduction to Indo-European” in college, or was it a semester; it seemed like a year). I’m not even a trained copyeditor. I just have had quite a bit of on-the-job practice, at times quite strenuous. I have always yearned to devote a weekend to reading what we used to call “Fowler and Follett” cover to cover, but I never managed it; I haven’t read the many charming-looking popular books in this area (see our review of Dreyer’s English, by April Bernard, for one whose thoughts on this issue are unknown to me). I do though have a love of, and fealty to language (breaking already the rule I am about to stroke affectionately), a fealty that goes rather beyond the normal, as you can see from what I’m up to here.

So from the position of a very ardent, if not to say fanatical, practitioner of English, a few thoughts.

The summoning of “rules” of English grammar in order to pillory them is a sideshow on the margins of the “proscriptive” vs. “descriptive” debate in language supervision. Most people who make dictionaries or comment on grammar in public fall on the side of a “descriptive” approach. They want dictionaries and language commentary to treat of the language that is spoken and used and lived rather than some hypothetical policed ideal. There are several arguments in their favor. The language literature will obviously be richer and more comprehensive if it covers all the live uses, the proper ones and the often more vivacious and suggestive ones that work around the rules and customs and emerge from daily life in all their organic variety. This is especially true in a language like English, and a country like America, and a time like now, all of which are very porous and absorbing all sorts of different inputs—once conquest, more recently a multi-cultural society and ease of travel and communication across linguistic boundaries. Also one wants people to use the language joyously and expressively and not be bullied by top-down rules enforcing an inherited etiquette that is often class- and education-based, codified to mark off an elite from everyone else.

Understood. But those of us in the trenches of language use—editors, writers, translators, possibly teachers?—have a different set of considerations. When you are making language, and gathering it up, and passing it on, you want to avail yourself of all its resources, or as many of them as you can grasp. These resources include its history and its familial relationships with other languages and its whole breadth of use in intimate speech but also in poetry and literature and oral memory and so on. I believe to an almost mystical degree that language carries all that within it; all of language’s past is part of what we experience when use it. Some people intuit this history by loving attention to what they see before them; some people discover it—by studying, by imitating, and especially by learning other languages.

When people (usually students) ask me if it matters if they write grammatically, an example I use to illustrate my reply is architecture. Sure, a Quonset hut will do the job. When you walk into a room that someone has designed, though, you have an experience that has been shaped by an architect in ways you don’t know. You are not familiar with the classical orders, or the golden ratio, or other principles of architectural harmony and balance, but the architect’s observance of these traditions or subtle departures and transformations from them shapes your experience. A room can make you feel exalted, or comfortable, or lead you forward, or inward, outside your conscious awareness. Similarly with language. You take in its rhythms and proportions and internal relations unconsciously and they deeply shape what you hear, how much you trust in it, ascribe it authority, ease into it, move with it. Two examples. Someone recently called my attention to the order of adjectives in English. People who learn English learn that there is an expected order of adjectives—one says “the big pink polka-dotted bag,” not “the polka-dotted pink big bag.” A native speaker never says the latter, but is probably completely unaware that they are in the presence of a rule. I still can’t tell you exactly what the rule is. I also once saw taped over a photocopier a sentence that I should not have been able to read, it was completely jumbled, but I was able to read it because of an internal set of expectations and internalized practice at substituting likely outcomes. (Here it is: “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,” more here.) These rules are deeply embedded in us and part of how we experience language, something the pros have been arguing about forever.

You can be a good artist without being a good draftsperson. Similarly you can be a good writer and not know grammatical rules. But if you have awareness of grammatical organization and use it in harmony with what you are trying to say, it gives you that many more tools and capabilities, that much more conscious control over outcomes. A composer knows when to use disharmony and to what effects. A composer who is not aware of what combinations of notes are not understood as harmonious in a musical tradition has fewer tools to hand, in meeting and answering expectation, in creating ease and unease, in signalling fine distinctions and implications. Fowler (1926): “Follow no arbitrary rule, but remember that there are often two or more possible arrangements between which a choice should be consciously made; if the abnormal, or at least unorthodox, final preposition that has naturally presented itself sounds comfortable, keep it; if it does not sound comfortable, still keep it if it has a compensating vigor, or when among awkward possibilities it is the least awkward.” Compensating vigor, that’s good.

The present case, of keeping prepositions with their objects, resembles the case of splitting infinitives. Ancient languages in the Indo-European family (which includes most of the languages of Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia) are inflected. An inflected language is a language in which words have built-in features, usually endings, that indicate their grammatical role. (Some participants in the current fracas referred to the preposition issue as relic of Latin and romance languages but that is wrong; it pertains also to Germanic and Slavic and many other language families.) For example, an infinitive in ancient Greek ends with “-ein.” “To make” is, famously, “poiein.” When a noun is an indirect object, it has a special ending in an inflected language that says “indirect object.” These endings vary slightly depending on what sort of word it is, but if you say, “I walked down to Pireaus” in ancient Greek, “Pireaus” in that sentence is “Pireia.”

Ancient languages do have prepositions, to add specificity, but the relationship between the subject and an indirect object is embedded in the forms of the nouns. Many modern Indo-European languages have evolved away from visible differentiations of case: in English, and French, and Spanish, the form of a noun that is an indirect object is the same of the form of the noun that is the subject. It is the preposition that tells you its role: “I walked down to Piraeus.” “Piraeus is a port outside Athens.” When we keep the prepositions together with their nouns, it is an echo of this ancient connection: the fact that the preposition gives the noun its grammatical meaning in the sentence. French and Spanish, which like English have lost their case endings, do not allow you to end a sentence with a preposition. Actually no other language does except for Scandinavian ones, which have also lost their case endings.

Many modern languages are still inflected: German, the Slavic languages, the Semitic languages. When translating poetry into English from an inflected language you have to wrestle with all these extra words that English requires to identify relation, and with the fact that it is harder to move words around in a sentence in English because the words themselves don’t tell you what they are doing. Poetry in inflected languages—classical and modern—draws heavily on inflection, and understanding how inflection works is important for translation and for understanding the structure of a lot of the world’s literature. It is not true to say that honoring a connection between a preposition and a noun is some dead artifact or mannered imposition, it is a residual trace of a meaningful element of the nature of language itself.

The news reports taking jacobinical delight in the liberation of the preposition attribute the creation of the ostensible rule shackling it to the poet John Dryden, who chastised Ben Jonson in 1672 for allowing his prepositions to wander, or to an earlier grammarian named Joshua Poole. This lineage is spelled out by Merriam-Webster in a second undated post crediting linguist Nuria Yáñez-Bouza with the discovery that Joshua Poole was the first person known to articulate the position in a 1646 book (miscited by Merriam-Webster) The Youth’s Guide: English Accidence. Joshua Poole actually says, a propos of prepositions, “the sense must direct the man to place the words in their naturall order.” Joshua Poole is talking about the relationship of prepositions to case, and directs the student to look to Latin for guidance, not, as Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokoloski told Canada’s CBC, because Latin was considered "the highest standard" of language that it was necessary to emulate in the interests of “elegance,” or, as John McWhorter told NPR, because these “post-Renaissance people … have an idea of Latin and ancient Greek as the quintessence of language,” but because in Latin the underlying grammar is still visible in its case marker. (Merriam-Webster’s entry also misconstrues an objection by George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, to the use of “you” instead of “thee” as a second-person singular pronoun. George Fox rejected this usage not on grammatical grounds but because early Friends refused to use the singular “you” as an honorific, as was the custom at the time, believing that everyone should be addressed equally, hence the Quaker use of the then-informal “thee” into the twentieth century. Merriam-Webster mocks this position, but it has obviously been universally adopted in English and is consistent with living in a democratic society.) Merriam-Webster says “we may credit Poole for creating the rule, and Dryden for popularizing it,” without saying what led them to conclude that Poole was creating a rule rather than reporting on existing practice, apparently for students, like saying that verbs agree with their subjects.

Languages evolve and change and grow and that is normal and to be celebrated. The descriptivists are right that our catalogues of words and habits should recognize these new forms. But it also seems to me that those of us who are, shall we say, stewards of language, those building the rooms of words into which people step, might have something to contribute by remaining mindful of these ancient colorations, as Fowler recommends. It seems to me that language is now evolving very fast. Our extremely speedy and undernourished language-distribution vehicles no longer have time for the copyeditors and checkers who used to tend to usage in what you read. It becomes increasingly likely much of what we read in the near future will be put together for us by machines that follow the crowd rather than humanly deliberated practices. (Time was, the big sentence-distributors had their own carefully considered and meticulously followed “style manuals”—example—that were updated only after long consideration.)

So, yes, don’t use grammar to bully people or make them feel bad about themselves or to be a pedant and show off your education. But when you are editing, and translating, and perhaps sometimes when writing, what you know about grammar and the history of language and what it has done and what it can do becomes treasure on which you can draw. Whatever Merriam-Webster and NPR say I will still try generally to avoid splitting an infinitive or putting a preposition at the end of a sentence in Book Post, though I don’t slap anyone with a ruler. (Padgett Powell has admonished me both for dogmatism and for negligence with respect to commas.) I think it contributes to the reader’s sense of well-being, even if they don’t know it, for their language milieu to be well tended. I try to keep learning. Just this week I learned something from John Banville about “such as,” and a couple of weeks ago Michael Robbins opened my eyes to a subtlety involving semicolons and quotations marks that had never occurred to me. Adam Thirlwell in The Guardian kindly said Book Post was “carefully edited,” which for me was like winning an Academy Award (in gratitude for which I herewith call your attention to his new novel). For me grammar is a little like manners. One need not be doctrinaire about it, or judge others when they are found in the breach, but it is still an act of civility and solicitude, even grace, to show others and the dear language this care.

Thanks for timely linguistic guidance to University of Toronto linguist Dave Kush, who bears no responsibility for the outlandish claims herein.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

Please join us on Sunday for a virtual conversation with Chris Benfey, Ben Taylor, Book Post editor Ann Kjellberg, and other guests on the occasion of the conclusion of our winter reading group of Willa Cather’s My Àntonia! Those note deeply conversant with My Àntonia still welcome! More here.

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Image: Paolo Uccello, Adorazione del Bambino con i santi Girolamo, Maddalena ed Eustachio (detail) (ca 1436) Staatliche Kunsthall, Karlsruhe.