An earlier version of this post first appeared in The Green Pen on July 17, 2017.
Without rules, what’s a rebel to do?? Rules of grammar, in this case (but the question could apply in any context).
I love words. I get a kick out of playing with and on words. Yet, I’ve always felt strapped by my self-imposed compulsion to stick to and enforce the rules. It served me well in school, after all, where my English teachers always rewarded my good behavior with A’s. And in my technical career, where I expressed gratitude to the sharp-eyed editors when they’d call me to task on this slip or that.
Now, at last, an authoritative source has set me free! So, let freedom wring all the creativity it can muster out of those words!
But, why should my liberation depend on an authoritative source to begin with, you might ask? Well, that’s a whole nother story. Or maybe even two nother stories.
According to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer (of all things) at Merriam-Webster, there’s no logical basis for a law that says it’s wrong to wantonly split an infinitive. Even more startling, I can even pick any preposition I like to end a sentence with! And, as if that weren’t enough, its historically and grammatically consistent to drop the apostrophe from the “it-is” contraction and to put one in it’s possessive.
I first heard of Ms. Stamper and her book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries in 2017, when she was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. She closes one chapter of the book with the following, which, in my mind, pretty much sums up her thesis:
“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child…. Sometimes English goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.” p. 51
Just another sign that the world of order and certainty is crumbling into chaos. Definitely a good time to practice living in the not knowing.