“I am silently correcting your grammar.”
The first time I saw this quote on a T-shirt, I laughed. I mean, correcting grammar is kind of what I do. I’m not only a writer; I’ve also made my living in various times as a copy editor, production editor, proofreader and research editor. I have literally made it my business to know how to use the English language properly. (Now that I’ve said that, you’ll no doubt find at least three errors in this column.)
But lately, the T-shirt isn’t as funny to me. It’s not that I no longer care about how to use words. If anything, the ability to express oneself clearly and convincingly has only become more crucial in this era of failing print magazines and struggling journalism (subscribe to your local paper!). It’s still my business to know how to use the English language. I’m just no longer convinced that that sentence should end with the word “properly” — and I’m not speaking editorially. I’m speaking morally.
I still remember my first day of kindergarten quite vividly. I remember learning the Pledge of Allegiance and The Star-Spangled Banner. I remember sitting between Casey Daniels and Mike Boivin during Circle Time. And I remember several of my classmates up there in the remote, poor region known as the Northeast Kingdom using a grammatical construction that was new to me. I went home and tried it out at dinner. “I ain’t going to eat these peas,” I said (or something to that effect).
“We don’t say ain’t,” replied my father, who was raised by native Yiddish speakers. Neither of his parents finished high school.
“That’s right,” agreed my mother, whose own first language was German. “Finish your peas.”
The house we lived in was shabby and my parents were constantly struggling financially, but my parents understood the concept of cultural capital, though they would never have used that phrase. They understood that the words we use broadcast certain things about us, intended or otherwise, and my parents were going to do everything they could to make sure no opportunities were closed to their kids. “Ain’t” did not fit in to the lifestyle they envisioned for me and my siblings.
But “ain’t” is a real word. It is in fact quite old, with first usages recorded in the 1600s. “Ain’t” is highly flexible and everyone knows exactly what it means, which is why any linguist worth her salt would consider the word to be perfectly grammatical.
So it’s not that I wasn’t speaking properly. “Ain’t” is proper. My family simply didn’t consider it to be proper for us. More to the point, they didn’t consider it to be proper for the kind of life we aspired to have. And with that quiet rebuke, I didn’t say “ain’t” in any serious way again.
This kind of social stratification is the real job of the grammar police. (An aside: I never use the term “grammar Nazis.” There are plenty of real Nazis in the world — we don’t have to create fake ones.) Every community has its own dialect; it’s not an accident that some are considered more legitimate than others. The more marginalized the community, the more “wrong” those expressive quirks are taken to be — until, of course, they are appropriated by the more powerful.
It’s not just the words we use — it’s also the way we speak them. Consider the speech patterns of teenage girls, many of whom are just beginning to understand the full burden of what patriarchy demands of them. The tendency to end every sentence on a questioning note — “upspeak” — is a classic teen-girl mode of speaking, and is roundly mocked by pretty much everyone. It continues into adulthood — women are criticized for saying “sorry” more often than men (many of whom could stand to say it a bit more) and for using too many exclamation points in their emails. Research that shows that no matter how women are speaking in public spaces, they’re being interrupted by men on a pretty consistent basis — and the women with the highest profiles, the ones running for offices, are critiqued for having voices that are too loud, too soft, too quavery, and too strident — all at once.
What I’m getting at is there’s no end to the way in which we use can use our words “wrong,” even when we’re using them right, and the wrongness isn’t usually grammatical. It’s political.
Am I silently judging your grammar? Maybe, but it doesn’t reflect well on me if I am — and it’s just as likely that you could judge mine, too, with equal validity.
Naomi Shulman’s work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Yankee Magazine, as well as on NEPR and WBUR. Follow her on Twitter:
@naomishulman.