Don't Box Me In
Picking up from last week's theme – we love boxes just as much as cats do.
We love defining people and slotting them into preconceived definitions – almost like matching odd-shaped blocks to similarly shaped holes.
We do it to race, religion, sexuality and, thanks to this moronically defined generational tagging, age: What’s a Boomer? Why does Gen X behave so aloofly? Gen Y or Millennials – why the name change? And who changed it?
If, indeed, it is a study in sociology, why do all the attributes keep shifting? It used to coincide with major zeitgeist-altering events. The end of World War II kicked off the Boomers. The JFK assassination (Nov 1963) gave rise to Gen X. 1980s capitalism birthed Millennials, and so forth. But the years drift, for no apparent reason and by no elected authority. I do, however, concede that these boxes have shape and hard edges. They come loaded with preconceived definitions, and it is an affinity with these definitions that would do more to describe a person than whether you were born straddling the generational divide (e.g. 31 Dec 19xx or 1 Jan 19xx+1).
I always have, and always will, place myself firmly in the Gen X camp, no matter the shifting boundary line. My children sit right in the middle of Gen Z with no looming boundary to challenge their place in the world. It is the differences between the generations that seem to fascinate so many.
One such difference is language and its use – or, in my opinion, misuse.
Now, conversations in our household on the topic are robust, to say the most – not arguments as such, just positions worth defending. With a student of linguistics, a lyricist, an editor and a novelist, the four of us do not come up short where words are concerned.
One such divide is the role of grammar, not only in written form but in speech as well.
Language has rules. Having studied French, Farsi, Arabic, Spanish and Italian for many, many years, I have loved discovering how each applies grammar and the differences it adopts compared with English. By the way, I may have studied each of them for varying lengths of time, but I mangle them all in equal measure when attempting to put them to use, and I manage to insult at least a few when travelling abroad.
Returning to the mother tongue, what we accept as acceptable seems to divide my household.
My son, the linguistics student, believes language is fluid: do with it what you will, and if enough people adopt a usage, it becomes part of the vocabulary.
To me, this is linguistic blasphemy.
More scholarly academics and the guardians of words – aka the Oxford English Dictionary – have laid down the guidelines, the definitions and the correct way in which we should use the language. Deviation from these rules simply proves one’s ignorance. I do not claim to be an oracle of grammatical proficiency, but I value correct usage. I am not a paid-up member of ‘The Society for the Preservation of the Apostrophe’, but I appreciate their existence nonetheless.
I remember a YouTube video where someone said, ‘Let me do something real quick.’ I replied in the comments, ‘You cannot do that real quick, but you can do it really quickly. DON’T USE ADJECTIVES IN PLACE OF ADVERBS.’
I got a reply: ‘Not the f#*n grammar police again.’
No respect.
I’m sure he lumped me into the Boomer box (unfairly), waved his fist mockingly and yelled ‘Get off my exclamation mark’ while aiming a rifle.
In a way, I lament the demise of the adverb (thank you, Stephen King). It has often been regarded as a sign of poor writing. ‘Better to use a stronger verb than to prop up a weak one with an adverb’ is the common belief among the literati. True, to a point. Sometimes using an obscure verb draws attention to the text rather than the story (e.g. ‘He pontificated’ versus ‘He said piously’). And replacing ‘really’ with ‘real’ just makes me feel bilious. I am not an adverb advocate, but we have long been subject to the whims of gatekeepers who run tools like ProWritingAid that grade our work based on the number of ‘…ly’ words used, so much so that we have started lopping off the ‘ly’ irrespective of the consequences.
Another abuse, one I confess to being guilty of many a time, is the Verb Violator, turning nouns into verbs: ‘I’m tramming in’, ‘Are we gymming?’ If only there were Verbal Rehab Centres to wean us off these vocal faux pas.
The saying ‘rules are meant to be broken’ is true, but only if you know which rule you are breaking and why you are breaking it; otherwise we risk linguistic devolution, and fairly soon we will all be speaking emoji.
In an effort to stave off the putrefaction of the lexicon, I implore thee, watch these online Knights of the English Language: