One of the problems that I and other linguistically trained, open-minded writers run up against in building an audience is that people really seem to want someone to just tell them “Do this and don’t do that.” And they want nice, simple explanations. So they turn to people like Strunk and White, Lynne Truss, and Mignon Fogarty – the Grammar Girl – who give them nice, reasonably simple answers and guidelines to live by.
Folks, if you want nice and simple, speak Esperanto. English is fun precisely because it’s, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy. English is not like one of those old ’70s video games with one level of play. English has more variations and levels of play, more nuances and negotiations, more little subtleties and twists and turns, than any computer game anyone’s ever devised. By orders of magnitude.
Yes, there is a version of English that is standard. (Actually, within that standard, there are quite a lot of variations.) Yes, that standard is generally susceptible to description – though, in fact, some of its structures are still subject to argument and further research even at the highest levels of linguistic enquiry. No, that standard does not involve nothing but simple, clear, consistent, one-way-for-all-times rules. Some rules are consistent. Some are not. There is no great merit in imposing rules that add complications without benefit or that restrict the expressive potential without adding some other virtue (other than defining an in-group of self-appointed cognoscenti).
I write this because I was just looking at Grammar Girl’s site because someone had sent me a link to an article of hers. Among her top 5 tips is one on ending a sentence with a preposition. To her credit, she starts off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, there is no firm rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. This is true: the supposed proscription on sentence-ending prepositions is nothing but a grammatical superstition, a mumpsimus, an invention that adds nothing to the expressive potential of the language.
She also says that you should not add a preposition on the end of a sentence when you could leave it off and it wouldn’t change the meaning. “Really,” she says, “I can’t believe anyone would make such a silly mistake!” Oh, indeed. Why use any more words than you absolutely have to? Other than for reasons of flow, sound, expression, emphasis, you know…
Then she notes that someone has called her out for saying “That’s where it’s at” on one of her episodes. She immediately goes into mea culpa mode. Does she say, “Oh, actually, there’s more to the expressive value of a sentence than just the denotative value of the words?” Nope. She completely disregards or forgets any motivation she might have had for saying it that way and declares, “But if I did say, ‘That’s where it’s at.’ I’m so sorry—the horror—because that is one of the instances where it’s not OK to end a sentence with a preposition! . . . The problem is that the sentence That’s where it’s at doesn’t need the preposition. If you open the contraction ‘it-apostrophe-s’ and say ‘That’s where it is,’ it means the same thing as That’s where it’s at. So the at is unnecessary.”
Nope. Folks, paraphrase is paraphrase. Two ways of saying something are not interchangeable, and there is much more to language than denotation. Anyone who objects to vulgarities but accepts clinical terms for the same acts demonstrates that fact, obviously. When, in one of the Harry Potter movies, Lucius Malfoy says to his son Draco “Touch nothing,” that may mean the same in that context as “Don’t touch anything,” but the tone and register are different – it’s more curt but also more elevated. And there’s a reason that the Grammar Girl said “That’s where it’s at” when she said it, rather than “That’s where it is.”
Try it yourself. In what context would you say “That’s where it’s at”? Would you really say “That’s where it is” to express exactly the same tone and attitude? Let’s try a few:
A: Hey, B, m’man, where’s the action around here?
B: Come with me to the pool hall. That’s where it’s at.
versus
A: Hey, B, m’man, where’s the action around here?
B: Come with me to the pool hall. That’s where it is.
Do you see a different level of speech and a different connotation? In a context like that, it makes specific reference to a set colloquial phrase. Let’s try another.
A: How are things coming along with the project?
B: We managed to get through the first two segments, but then regulatory stepped in and told us to suspend it pending their latest decisions, so that’s where it’s at.
versus
A: How are things coming along with the project?
B: We managed to get through the first two segments, but then regulatory stepped in and told us to suspend it pending their latest decisions, so that’s where it is.
In this sort of context, “That’s where it’s at” tends to localize as on a scale or a map, indicating the point that has been reached, whereas “That’s where it is” is more static and perhaps more literal.
In fact, generally, adding at in this context is like sticking a pin in a map, a marker on a scale, or your finger on a table. It adds a different flavour and type of emphasis. It can also lower the level of formality.
That’s not to say people don’t use words unnecessarily. Padding your expressions certainly can be a bad writerly habit. But there’s a difference between bad writing – or careless expression – and bad grammar. Bad writing can be entirely consistent with the grammar of standard English, and good writing sometimes breaks a “rule” here or there for effect.
The Grammar Girl has thus made the following errors: presenting a guideline for composition as a rule of grammar; failing to address aspects of linguistic expression beyond the denotative; and second-guessing herself. Second-guessing herself is an error? Oh, yes – any highly literate, proficient speaker of the language should always assume that there’s a reason something sounds or “feels” right to him or her, and if his or her grammatical analysis seems to exclude it, it’s probably the analysis that’s wrong.
So that, Grammar Girl, among others, is where it’s at.
You are so right, James, not to mention so right on!
Will you be sending this to Grammar Girl?
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I stopped listening to Grammar Girl years ago, after hearing her repeatedly giving out advice with this pattern: “the rule says this, but here are some exceptions”.
It is not her fault. Grammar is not real. It is artificially created in attempting to explain language patterns and preserve uniformity.
More to the point, grammar is equivocal. As linguists use the term, it’s the set of patterns every user of the language implicitly knows, and linguistics attempts to describe it but (one hopes) always with the awareness that the finger is not the moon, so to speak. Many people through history, intuiting that such a thing exists and aiming to discern it, came up with rule sets that became prescriptions and that are, as you say, artificial creations.
An added factor is that deviation from the way people of a given set in a given context usually speak is discernible and is subject to judgments, so there is value in knowing just how and why people of that set in that context speak. Ah, but a little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring! Much of the attempts at such “knowing” are too shallow and lead to error.
It looks as if you are lumping Lynne Truss in with the hidebound grammar-bigots. I find her relatively open-minded. For example, she generally disapproves of, but allows in some circumstances, something which you recently railed at, the “serial comma” (she calls it the “Oxford comma”, which is OK: I went to Cambridge). She has an example on page 87 where this kind of comma makes a lot of sense. I do not know the “Grammar Girl”, on the other hand, and it appears as tho’ ignorance is in this case pure bliss.
I recently railed at the serial comma? I use the serial comma preferentially most of the time (including in all of my blog postings), but in some documents don’t use it if I judge it not appropriate to the feel of the document. Do tell me what I wrote that came across as railing at it!
My issue with Lynne Truss is mainly her effect of enfranchising grammar cranks. A “zero-tolerance” approach is not something I can agree with, and I have heard of people who have read her book taking marker in hand and altering grocery store signs, which is simply rude. I don’t mean to say that she’s wrong on everything; I simply think that the approach that she enfranchises can be brain candy for cranks.
And maybe I’m a little resentful that people who write simplistic things or brain candy can get big audiences while people who write detailed, nuanced, more open-minded assessments tend to be Cassandras.
In defense of Grammar Girl, her audience is people who are trying to write and who want to know what is socially acceptable. She generally seems to appreciate the flexibility of rules more than this particular example would imply. That said, I don’t blame you at all for crusading against arbitrary rules.
True, for the most part her advice is reasonable and sound. I may have been a little on the harsh side on her here. (And I do follow her on Twitter. She seems nice.) But she would do well to step back when she gets to something like this and ask herself whether she really wants to run at all with the superstitions or whether it wouldn’t be better to break clean.
I agree completely.