When I was growing up in Paris, the French launched a campaign to keep their country’s language pure. As a 13-year-old who spoke Frenglish or Franglais (a mix of English and French) with her bilingual friends, I couldn’t imagine anything sillier.
Now, I find myself launching the same campaign for English, with a twist. I’m not concerned with purity. I like inventing words, my personal favorite being the verb to consistentize, which a colleague and I coined while working on a messy manuscript that desperately needed consistentizing. (See how useful that is?)
While I clearly have no problem with expanding the language, I am raising the banner against the public slaughter of its grammatical rules. My weapon of choice will be my blog on my www.lindengross.com website. A regular segment called Grammar Outs will out some very visible figures and broadcasters with national podiums who routinely butcher the English language by making grammar mistakes on TV.
The rest of you, who shall remain nameless, may not come away unscathed either. For your information, it is incorrect to say: My friend had tea with my husband and I. Just get rid of the husband. Would you say my friend had tea with I? Or course not. So why change the pronoun just because your mate went to tea as well?
Sports commentators may be the most frequent violators when it comes to making grammar mistakes on TV simply because they seem to have forgotten the existence of the adverb. “He’s got to stop playing so conservative,” Brad Gilbert said of Roddick’s 2010 Australian Open play. Now Gilbert, who graduated from Pepperdine University in 1982, knows about adverbs. Less than a minute after his adverb faux pas, he announced that Roddick was “playing too conservatively.” So what up, Brad?
Don’t get me wrong, I think Gilbert is a wonderfully colorful commentator. But over the next couple of days of the Australian Open, he would continue to decimate the English language. “Me and Patrick were talking today,” he said, a mistake that many others routinely make. Would you say, “Me was talking?” Of course not. So why does I turn to me just because Patrick showed up? Gilbert could have said, “Patrick was talking to me.” But as long as he and Patrick were both talking, then both were subjects of the verb to talk. Bottom line: when referring to yourself, always say “I” when you’re performing the action, no matter how many other people are also involved.
I won’t dwell on Gilbert’s talking about a player’s “unpositive” body language (the word he wanted was negative). But when he said that “Roddick might have saw” instead of “might have seen” I had to pause. Ditto when he noted, “That’s the first time he’s done that tonight where he’s ran [try run] around the backhand.”
Things improved grammatically when I switched the channel to watch figure skating, but even then one of the commentators discussed “the crowd leaping collectively to their feet.” At least this mistake—which I hear all the time—is understandable. Yes, a crowd is comprised of many people. But the crowd itself is a single entity. So it leaps to its (not their) feet. The same goes when talking about everyone making grammar mistakes or doing anything else. Though I’m referring to all humans, everyone could improve his or her (rather than their) language skills.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for perfection. I can’t seem to figure out when to use whoever as opposed to whomever no matter how many times I read the rules. But I’m working on it.
Join me?
Thanks you so much. I’d appreciate being quoted on your blog, as long as you credit me and provide a link to my site. In the meantime, happy writing!
Wow, great article!
Thanks, Han. I plan to out the home shows next for their grammatical offenses. Stay tuned.