New York Times on the PSAT Glitch

[Baker, John]

        Here is Geoffrey Nunberg in today's New York Times Week in Review section.  First there was Stephen Pickering's piece saying, well, I'm not sure what Pickering was trying to say - something about clarity, I believe.  Now Nunberg sees the grammar dispute in political terms.  This is forwarded without the permission of the New York Times, but I notice that the New York Times didn't bother getting the permission of the American Dialect Society or its members to use their contributions on ADS-L.

John Baker


  The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

s there a grammatical error in the following sentence? "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured."

The answer is no, according to the Educational Testing Service, which included the item on the preliminary College Board exams given on Oct. 15 of last year. But Kevin Keegan, a high-school journalism teacher from Silver Spring, Md., protested that a number of grammar books assert that it is incorrect to use a pronoun with a possessive antecedent like "Tony Morrison's" - that is, unless the pronoun is itself a possessive, as in "Toni Morrison's fans adore her books."

After months of exchanges with the tenacious Mr. Keegan, the College Board finally agreed to adjust the scores of students who had marked the underlined pronoun "her" as incorrect.

That's only fair. When you're asking students to pick out errors of grammar, you ought to make sure you haven't included anything that might bring the grammarati out of the woodwork.

But some read the test item as the token of a wider malaise. "Talk about standards," wrote David Skinner, a columnist at the conservative Weekly Standard. Not only had the example sentence been "proven to contain an error of grammar," but the sentence's celebration of Ms. Morrison, a "mediocre contemporary author," betrayed the "faddish, racialist, wishful thinking that our educational institutions should be guarding against."

It was revealing how easily Mr. Skinner's indignation encompassed both the grammatical and cultural implications of the sentence. In recent decades, the defense of usage standards has become a flagship issue for the cultural right: the people who are most vociferous about grammatical correctness tend to be those most dismissive of the political variety. Along the way, though, grammatical correctness itself is becoming a strangely arbitrary notion.

Take the rule about pronouns and possessives that Mr. Keegan cited in his challenge to the testing service. Unlike the hoary shibboleths about the split infinitive or beginning sentences with "but," this one is a relative newcomer, which seems to have surfaced in grammar books only in the 1960's. Wilson Follett endorsed it in his 1966 Modern American Usage, and it was then picked up by a number of other usage writers, including Jacques Barzun and John Simon.

The assumption behind the rule is that a pronoun has to be of the same part of speech as its antecedent. Since possessives are adjectives, the reasoning goes, they can't be followed by pronouns, even if the resulting sentence is perfectly clear.

If you accept that logic, you'll eschew sentences like "Napoleon's fame preceded him" (rewrite as "His fame preceded Napoleon"). In fact you'll have to take a red pencil to just about all of the great works of English literature, starting with Shakespeare and the King James Bible ("And Joseph's master took him, and put him into the prison"). The construction shows up in Dickens and Thackeray, not to mention H. W. Fowler's "Modern English Usage" and Strunk and White's "Elements of Style." ("The writer's colleagues . . . have greatly helped him in the preparation of his manuscript.") And it's pervasive not just in The New York Times and The New Yorker, but in the pages of The Weekly Standard, not excluding Mr. Skinner's own column. ("It may be Bush's utter lack of self-doubt that his detractors hate most about him.")

The ubiquity of those examples ought to put us on our guard - maybe the English language knows something that the usage writers don't. In fact the rule in question is a perfect example of muddy grammatical thinking. For one thing, possessives like "Mary's" aren't adjectives; they're what linguists call determiner phrases. (If you doubt that, try substituting "Mary's" for the adjective "happy" in sentences like "The child looks happy" or "We saw only healthy and happy children.")

And if a nonpossessive pronoun can't have a possessive antecedent, logic should dictate that things can't work the other way around, either - if you're going to throw out "Hamlet's mother loved him," then why accept "Hamlet loved his mother"? That's an awful lot to throw over the side in the name of consistency.

But that's what "correct grammar" often comes down to nowadays. It has been taken over by cultists who learned everything they needed to know about grammar in ninth grade, and who have turned the enterprise into an insider's game of gotcha! For those purposes, the more obscure and unintuitive the rule, the better.

Pity the poor writer who comes at grammar armed only with common sense and a knowledge of what English writers have done in the past - they're liable to be busted for violating ordinances they couldn't possibly have been aware of.

Not all modern usage writers take doctrinaire views of grammar, whatever their politics. But the politicization of usage contributes to its trivialization, and tends to vitiate it as an exercise in intellectual discrimination. The more vehemently people insist on upholding standards in general, the less need there is to justify them in the particular. For many, usage standards boil down to the unquestioned truths of "traditional grammar," even if some of the traditions turn out to be only a few decades old.

Take the way Mr. Skinner asserted that the College Board examination sentence was "proven to contain an error of grammar" in the way you might talk about a document being proven to be a forgery - it's as if the rules of grammar were mysterious dicta handed down from long-forgotten sages.

The English conservative writer Roger Scruton has described the controversies over usage as merely a special case of the debate between conservative and liberal views of politics. But until 50 years ago, nobody talked about "conservative" and "liberal" positions on usage, and usage writers were drawn from both sides of the aisle.

Even today, it would be silly to claim that conservatives actually care more deeply about usage standards than liberals do, much less that they write more clearly or correctly. In language as elsewhere, it isn't as if vices are less prevalent among the people who denounce them most energetically.

But people who have reservations about the program of the cultural right often find themselves in an uneasy position when the discussion turns to usage. How do you defend the distinction between "disinterested" and "uninterested" without suggesting that its disappearance is a harbinger of the decline of the West?

Not that the cultural left is blameless in this. Some of the usage reforms they championed have been widely adopted, and society is the better for it. There aren't a lot of male executives around who still refer to their secretaries as "my girl."

But many of the locutions and usage rules that have recently been proposed in the name of social justice are as much insider codes as the arcane strictures of the grammar cultists. They're exercises in moral fastidiousness that no one really expects will catch on generally.

To younger writers, today's discussions of usage often may seem to be less about winning consensus than about winning, or scoring, points. It's no wonder they tend to regard the whole business with a weary indifference. What-ever - will this be on the test?


Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard regularly on NPR's "Fresh Air" and is the author of "The Way We Talk Now."