Prescriptivism – Part 2

Here’s the other half of my brain (more like a tenth, the first post on this topic was my majority thinking) on prescriptivism, or in other words, pompous language elitists.

This is about my personal side of things, which is significantly less important than the social justice aspects, and so really barely qualifies as a gripe next to those.  Nevertheless, some people won’t hear something from one direction, but will from another.

This doesn’t happen frequently, but every so often I’ll get someone make some kind of complaint, or joke, or “observation” about the way I use language.

I find this… generally… annoying, sometimes both annoying and hilarious.

Here’s why.

First of all – if my message was clear, then shut the fuck up with your pompous superiority.

Second of all – generally when people make comments like this it is in the spirit of some sort of “gotcha.”  As if they need somehow the thrill of superiority in knowing something that I (they think) don’t know.

Here’s the problem, folks.  For as much as I am hard on myself, I am damn good with words.  Grammar was never as strong for me, but I have worked hard to teach myself and generally understand the rules of grammar and usage better than the average person with equivalent education to my own.  I have weak points, when I don’t edit I have comma errors up the ass, and I’m terrible with run-on sentences, I can get caught up and miss misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, and split infinitives.

And when I’m writing a formal paper – I fucking well edit for all of those things and can write at a professional level when I put in the effort and have the intention of doing so.

I don’t always have that intention.

Often my message is more important to me than my usage, and so I focus on that first.  Yes, I know HOW to write grammatically-pure formal English.  I don’t always CARE to write grammatically pure formal English.  Sometimes, I just don’t give a shit.  I make an effort to make the communication of my MESSAGE clear.  I do not, always, choose to do that in high register and with great attention to grammatical conventions.  If you don’t like that, do feel free to fuck right off.

Then, there is the art of writing.  While often I am focused more on the meaning than the modality and thus structural sloppiness can happen, other times, and more frequently than you might think, I intentionally break conventions of English for voice, for affect, for register, for a multitude of reasons.  I do it because I use words as an art form.  I do it because I KNOW the conventions of English… I put in the blood and sweat and tears to teach myself to write at a formal, professional level… and like any artist, I create art with an understanding of conventions, but not a blind attachment to them.  There are times when I choose to manipulate words, manipulate sentences, manipulate structures.  I do it to create rhythm, to create mood, to generate emotion, to hook, to entice, to engage, to repulse, to communicate more than sterile proficiency with my language.

I am a writer.  This is my art.  This is my talent.  And the work I put into the practice of it is my skill, forever expanding as I am forever learning.

Formal English and tight conventions have a place.  I have learned and continue to study them so that when I want those tools I have them at my disposal.  I, in fact, sometimes use spoken language that people consider “strange” because I habitually use certain formal conventions which are appropriate in writing, but which in a spoken conversation sound stilted because we don’t actually speak in formal English most of the time.

When I write in this blog, I generally, consciously, use conversational register – even though it is a written form.  I do this intentionally.  I do this to create a more intimate form of communication than I could by writing formally.  And, indeed, there are times when strict adherence to grammatical “rules” becomes ridiculous (to the point that new rules had to be made to accommodate the exceptions).  The quote famously attributed to Winston Churchill upon being corrected about ending a sentence in a preposition is, “This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.” Avoiding split infinitives is a valid rule only when doing so does not create ambiguity or reduce the effectiveness of the message.

Pedantic, holier-than-thou, serving no purpose but to elevate your own status “policing” of my language (or anyone else’s) doesn’t elevate you in anyone’s mind but your own.  To the rest of us, you just show yourself for what you are – insecure, incompletely educated, and myopic.

I’m sorry your life is so miserable that you need to seek this kind of validation.

But not sorry enough to put up with it.

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