F**k The Rules (Writing Well in the 21st Century)

December 7th, 2011

Many people assume I am a guardian of grammar. The typical plane-ride conversation goes like this: “What do you do?”” “I am an English professor” “Oh! I better watch my grammar.”

Their worries are unfounded. I wouldn’t flinch if they were to split an infinitive, use the singular “they,” or dangle modifiers. I don’t get huffy when I read grammatical mistakes in blogs—and I certainly don’t care when I see them on Twitter.

Many do. GrammarCop, corrects people’s tweets, but a common error GrammarCop likes to correct is the misspelling of grammar as “grammer,” which is not a grammatical mistake but a spelling one.

Language is a means to communication. Grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation have developed over time to ensure intelligibility. Rules change as cultures and people do. Why can’t we split infinitives? The rule against split infinitives was invented in 1834, when a writer for New-England Magazine noted that people were beginning to split infinitives, and told them not to: “To, which comes before the verb in the infinitive mode, must not be separated from it by the intervention of an adverb.”  The author of that rule supplied no reason why splitting infinitives was wrong. It may be because he was imposing Latin rules onto English (in Latin verbs in the infinitive are only one word, not two), or it may have been a way to mark social class and separate oneself from the infinitive-splitting rabble. Truth is, there was, and remains, no good reason why splitting infinitives is wrong.

All grammatical rules are like the one against split infinitives: They are all manmade. So too are conventions of punctuation and formatting.  It used to be there were no spaces between words.

What is interesting about grammatical and other common online “mistakes” is what they signal about our changing culture. John Cusack spelled “breakfast” as “breakfasy” in a tweet. Why this error? Look at your nearest keyboard: The two letters are next to each other on the keyboard, and Cusack clearly mis-hit the keys. QWERTY keyboards were developed in order to prevent exactly these sorts of mistakes on the typewriter—the letters are spaced so to avoid common letter pairs hitting the carriage at the same time. When we hit the digital age, we kept the typewriter-based keyboard. So now we make new errors.

Cusack’s misspelling indicates an out-moded keyboard layout, not a reigning illiteracy. The loss of apostrophes and “e”s—your for you’re—is another smartphone-created change. I have myself sometimes sent a text message using “your” when I knew it was wrong because I was too impatient to figure out how to get my iPhone to do an apostrophe—and I knew the messagee would get my message.

Who knows? One morning in America, we might all awake to breakfasy.