In plain English

Do grammar rules really matter in the diverse and evolving landscape of languages or are grammar purists wrong in judging those with a limited command of the English language?

Language purists know no bounds: From US presidents and Indian prime ministers to more recently the Pakistan Army chief, prominent world figures have been the target of such zealots for the slightest of linguistic misdemeanours in their view.

While a month ago, Pakistani netizens mocked their Army Chief General Asim Munir for his “terrible” grasp of the English language after a clip from his China visit went viral, way back in 2009, Barack Obama had to take the oath of office twice as US president over split infinitives. US Chief Justice John Roberts, known as a stickler for grammar, made a modification to the original constitutional oath. Instead of “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States,” he changed it to “I do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of the president of the United States faithfully”. Why? Because Justice Roberts was apparently trying to avoid a split infinitive — “faithfully” was coming in between “will” and “execute”. This change in the oath stoked fears that the transfer of power was not legitimate, and later that day, Mr Obama repeated the original oath.

Imagine how irritating it would have been if Yann Martel, while listening to Pi Patel’s experiences when he was stranded in the Pacific Ocean following a shipwreck, had corrected him: “Not me and the tiger, but the tiger and I.”

Grammar purists are quick to point out the missing Oxford comma, which many stupidly or smartly add before “and”, or an “or”. Those who like the serial comma say it adds clarity and makes reading easier — it is widely used in the US, but is not recommended by The Associated Press Stylebook; the British population avoids it, but not the Oxford English Dictionary. The Oxford comma’s origins can be traced back to Herbert Spencer, British sociologist who popularised the phrase “survival of the fittest”, who thought the comma was key to “marking out the component elements of a thought”. But like his ideas, which lost out to Darwinism, Spencer disappeared from popular discourse and his comma, too, should be buried in the footnotes of linguistic history.

Against the backdrop of such irrelevant yet prickly issues in codified languages, does grammar even matter? Grammar is defined as “the rules in a language for changing the form of words and joining them into sentences (www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com)”. Grammar keeps any written or spoken expression of our complicated thoughts comprehensible, but different languages follow different patterns. For example, in English, the subject usually comes first, followed by a verb, and then the object. In Hindi, it is the subject, object, and verb — a sequence followed in many other languages, such as Japanese. Many scholars have tried to find a universal pattern among languages, but barring a few commonalities, (such as verbs and nouns), there is little that is common (Hindi neither uses articles nor has gender pronouns — “he” or “she”).

This lack of any universal pattern has given birth to two linguistic thought schools — prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism is “the belief that there are correct and wrong ways to use language and that books about language should give rules to follow, rather than describing how language is really used (Cambridge Dictionary)” aka the belief of language purists. Descriptivism, on the other hand, is “the belief that books about language should describe how language is really used, rather than giving rules to follow saying what is correct and not correct” aka the belief that variation and adaptation are necessary for the development of a language.

For a large part of human history, languages were spoken, until writing developed and linguistic patterns were codified for standardisation in a bid to allow widespread conversations among societies. However, this codified form was a pattern of language spoken by those in power (just as Khari-Boli, the dialect of Hindi spoken in Delhi and parts of western Uttar Pradesh, became the “standard” Hindi). Subsequently, speech patterns that deviated from the rules codified by those in positions of power were dubbed corrupt and looked down upon. 

In the current century, especially with the rise of social media and texting, the distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism has blurred. Grammarians and lexicographers are now more perceptive to the fact that speech follows its own uneven patterns, different from those in writing. In speech, mood, intonations, and expressions are crucial in conveying the meaning of a sentence.

Had there been no Vikings in England, language purists would still be calling hands “handa” and books “beek”, and struggling with the gender of their fork and spoon (gafol — female and laefel — male) before eating eggru (eggs). Leave language purists in charge, and we would be consulting dictionaries to find out the meaning of words like corpora and octopi.

Grammar is the steel pillar—both elastic and strong—on which a language stands. Any effort to freeze it would make it brittle.

(Shh! Oxford comma does help bring clarity to a sentence)