Proudly defending proper grammar

(U-WIRE) AMHERST, Mass. — I don’t really know where it came from, but I’ve always been a staunch defender of correct grammar. It seems to bother a lot of people, so I used to blame it on my father’s job as a newspaper copy editor, or on my mother’s job as a school principal. These sound like good excuses, but until earlier this year, I don’t think I’d ever had a conversation with either of them about syntax or punctuation. It can’t be their fault.

The only reasonable conclusion I’ve come to is that I was born a jerk. But I can’t change this. I’ve tried, but there is nothing I can do; I will always care about grammar. So, really, you guys have got to help me out. I’m miserable. I’m not even talking about the standard mistakes guys like me will complain about. Things like confusing “your” and “you’re” really are sad, but they happen so often as to be desensitizing. What really bothers me are other, less pervasive things.

First: never ever say, “hence why.” It seems like I can’t even last a day without hearing someone say, “I tripped over a dead squirrel, hence why I have this scrape.” “Hence” means “for this reason.”

Think about this example: “The Black Parade is a brilliant album; for this reason why My Chemical Romance is a fantastic band.” If anyone said this, they would sound like an idiot, and not just because of their terrible taste in music.

Once, I heard Celine Dion use the word “ironical” in a television commercial. I thought she was simply unfamiliar with English; she was, after all, raised to speak French. But I’ve since heard several native speakers use this word, and it’s awful. There is no reason ever to say “ironical.” We already have a word that means the same thing. It’s “ironic.” With people adding syllables onto words like this indiscriminately, we’re going to end up with a word like “ironicality,” and that would be tragical.

A couple weeks ago, I was doing a reading on poetic language, and I came across the longest sentence I had ever read. Now, I don’t really have a problem with run-on sentences. In fact, I actually love them. Really. But when a sentence lasts for three fourths of a page and contains phrases like “directionality toward the object” and “spectral dispersion of the ray word,” a line must be drawn.

I drew such a line, several times all over my copy of the text. The professor was not amused, but a scholar of the English language should realize such meaningless jargon as the masturbatory stroking of the author’s ego. I mean, what does an “autotelic word” have to do with light refraction? What did I even just say?

Perhaps the one thing that bothers me more than anything else in the world is the use of the word “random” to mean “unexpected.” When someone read my previous column, an attack on sandal wearers, they told me it was “so random.” It was like the person was telling me that it could have been written just by picking words out of a hat. I was furious; I put a lot of time and thought into that article.

When a stranger comes up to you and asks you what kind of car you drive, he’s not being “random.” He has caught you off guard, perhaps, with a question you did not expect. But that is not random. He didn’t flip a coin or roll a die to determine what to ask you. So next time you show me a YouTube.com video of a Japanese game show depicting a man getting his nose hairs plucked in a library, call it “absurd,” or “weird,” but don’t call it “so random.”

With so much of my time spent stewing over the way people speak, I should have realized that moving to Massachusetts was a terrible decision. Back in New York, my days were spent correcting grammar mistakes, and instructing people that “no” is a monosyllabic word. I just can’t let things like that go.

So why would I come to a state where people don’t even pronounce the letter “r?” It’s because I’m an imbecile. But now that I’m here, I have to make the best of it. So, I will only say, hopefully with palpable force and sincerity, that, in the English language, there is no such thing as a silent “r.” Please take note.

Some people think I’m unreasonable when it comes to speech. This is not true. I’m willing to let some things go, like calling water fountains “bubblers,” even though they don’t bubble. But how can you not be embarrassed when English is your native language, and you don’t even speak it? Please, remember that there are rules for the way we communicate, and they were not meant to be broken.

By David Murray

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Posted in Opinion