In Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words, Anne Curzan tackles a pile of hard questions about grammar and usage. Her tone, however, is upbeat. A linguist, a language historian, and a writing professor, Curzan is the anti-vigilante of usage critics. For years, she has been writing and talking about prickly issues of language, without rancor or condescension, on public radio, in classrooms, and elsewhere. She excels in the minor genre of history-laden discussions of what is reasonable in our speech and writing and how that sometimes differs from what is called out by the know-it-alls and the peevers. Oh, you know the peevers, they are the ones who claim the authority of Strunk and White or Fowler's or their third-grade teacher to put you in your place over some trifling point of word choice or pronunciation or grammar. Anne Curzan is not one of them.
And in Says Who?, Curzan doesn't use the word peevers, which is a guilty-pleasure putdown among some of us interested in knowing which words and phrases are currently the most griped about. One who does the griping, a.k.a. a griper, is, of course, a peever, or what Curzan calls a grammando, a term she borrows from the writer Lizzie Skurnick, who some time back wrote an article in the New York Times offering grammando to the world. A portmanteau of grammar and commando, it was defined as "one who constantly corrects others' linguistic mistakes."
Language lovers, Curzan points out, may feel encouraged by their inner grammando to sit in haughty judgment over the blatant errors in other people's speech and writing—or, rather, what they take to be blatant errors but whose actual usage and history may call for a little more tolerance and a broader view of language on the whole. Curzan endorses a different model of language awareness, one inspired by curiosity and wonder at the marvel of language variation and change. She calls this type of person a wordie.
The wordie embodies a way of thinking less given to shaming the linguistic choices of others, which, by no means, precludes being ultra-selective in one's own language choices. You may still choose to never (never to, I mean) place an adverb between to and a verb, but possibly you will come away from this book chastened by the knowledge that the rule against split infinitives got its start as the eccentric crotchet of some long-dead grammar pedant who thought he was showing students a simple way to write more correctly.
Where this modeling of linguistic attitudes cannot but meet resistance, even among the open-minded, is in the details. Curzan defends irregardless, saying forthrightly that it may not be endorsed by usage guides or grammarians but is indeed a real word. She is right that irregardless is a real word whose meaning is well-understood by all fluent speakers of English. But is it logical?
Curzan writes, "Sure, we could argue that the word irregardless is illogical in its redundancy: The -ir prefix is unnecessary because of the suffix -less. But a word like debone is also redundant (the verb bone already means you are taking the bones out…), yet it is deemed standard. Why? Because language judgments are subjective and often inconsistent."
Once subjective judgments gain a wide enough following, however, the words involved may tell a different story. Educated speakers deploy words like irregardless or ain't ironically or to mimic uneducated speech. And such humorous, pseudo-quotative, code-switching usage helps keep these condemned words around. Indeed, the grammandos hating on irregardless are investing it with an extra meaning that expands its purpose and usefulness. Like a curse word or a choice bit of slang, irregardless enjoys greater currency because it allows users to violate polite rules of usage.
With a bracing confidence, Says Who? proceeds through a venerable circuit of quintessential usage and grammar dilemmas: double negatives and why other dialects and languages allow multiple negation; the debate over so-called absolute adjectives such as unique or perfect and whether it is okay to qualify them with very or more, as in the hardy old phrase "a more perfect union"; the transformation of nouns into verbs—Curzan cites the newish verbs trash, network, and friend; the increasingly flexible position of however in sentence word order and the controversial sentence-modifier hopefully. Later chapters delve into broader questions of writing style, with illuminating discussions of capitalization, punctuation, and dangling modifiers. As explainers go, Curzan's book is remarkably helpful to the reader trying to see through the haze of classroom grammar to get at the points that will help them better understand how words and sentences work.
My one criticism of this likable book concerns its stand on politically correct language. Curzan accepts what seem to me weak explanations for various language reforms of recent years. She applauds the workaround that has academics and many others calling people who have lived in bondage enslaved people instead of slaves because, she writes, the former "does not equate enslavement with the African peoples who were enslaved."
In the same paragraph, Curzan writes, "I also appreciate that many style guides now recommend against calling people aliens or illegal. People are not aliens and they are not illegal."
All this seems more like sloganeering than careful linguistic analysis. In a book that proudly cites centuries-old evidence to draw out some of the hidden figures and dynamics behind contemporary grammar disputes, surely more attention should be paid to the plain-as-day, longstanding record of usage supporting slave and many careful, accurate, even legalistic examples of aliens and illegal. These are, as Curzan said about the nonstandard irregardless, real words, as complex as any other and deserving of close examination.
In recent attempts to reconfigure the language of slavery and illegal immigration, we have more than a few poorly reasoned accusations by language reformers that people who continue to use certain words are reducing human beings, in all their complexity and all their humanness, to this one thing: the fact of their enslavement or their nonlegal status as immigrants. But, in speech and writing, we reduce people to one aspect of themselves all the time and we do so without apologies. We reduce people to their professions, to their hair color, to their gender, nationality, and in countless other ways, including their attitude toward language, without giving it a second thought.
Sophisticated observers, including many linguists, used to emphasize context over individual words so that we might be a little more tentative in drawing conclusions about other people's meaning. It was an approach that looked at all available evidence. It was open-minded to other people's sense of the language and wary of strained interpretations. It was an approach opposite to that of the grammando and deserving of a wordie.
Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words
by Anne Curzan
Crown, 319 pp., $29
David Skinner writes about language and culture. He is the author of The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.