[ExI] Grammar Gestapos
John K Clark
jonkc at bellsouth.net
Thu Jan 22 18:19:38 UTC 2009
January 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor New York Times
Oaf of Office
By STEVEN PINKER
IN 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an indefinite article as he
stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference
between "man" and "mankind." In 1980, Jimmy Carter, accepting his party's
nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he called Hubert Horatio
Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her
betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly
later joked, actually married his father.
On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when
he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes.
Instead of having Barack Obama "solemnly swear that I will faithfully
execute the office of president of the United States," Chief Justice Roberts
had him "solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the
United States faithfully." When Mr. Obama paused after "execute," the chief
justice prompted him to continue with "faithfully the office of president of
the United States." (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the
chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)
How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage,
among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and
connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious
retaliation for Senator Obama's vote against the chief justice's
confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb
in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts's habit of grammatical
niggling.
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis
in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and
that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they
refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by
insecure writers.
Among these fetishes is the prohibition against "split verbs," in which an
adverb comes between an infinitive marker like "to," or an auxiliary like
"will," and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition,
Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year
mission of the starship Enterprise was "to boldly go where no man has gone
before"; it should have been "to go boldly." Likewise, Dolly Parton should
not have declared that "I will always love you" but "I always will love you"
or "I will love you always."
Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense
that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing.
The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in
which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a
single word, like dicere, "to say." But in English, infinitives like "to go"
and future-tense forms like "will go" are two words, not one, and there is
not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between
them.
Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its
way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage
for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has
found that many lawyers have "internalized the bogus rule so that they
actually believe that a split verb should be avoided," adding, "The Invasion
of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer
distinguish alien speech from native speech."
In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to
conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the "ain't"
from Bob Dylan's line "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose."
On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict
constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the
adverb "faithfully" away from the verb.
President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and
writings, smiled at the chief justice's hypercorrection, then gamely
repeated it. Let's hope that during the next four years he will always
challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.
Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and the chairman of the
usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.
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