A Word, Please: There’s a thin line between right and wrong
Like everyone who lives in Los Angeles County, I’ve spent the last several weeks picturing myself in a jury selection pool for the Robert Durst trial.
“Yes, sir. I gave the HBO series ‘The Jinx’ five-star ratings under eight different user names. Yes, I tried to form a mental image of Durst in a dress. A floral-print dress, if it please the court. Yes, I do have an opinion about the sanity of multimillionaire on-the-lam murder suspect shoplifting a chicken salad sandwich just to see if he could get away with it, but I believe I could put all that aside to be fair or, at the very least, smarter than a Galveston juror.”
But really, all certainty about Durst’s guilt aside, I do think I could be a good juror on this or any trial because I believe in innocent until proven guilty. And that I could prove just by pointing to my record of writing about grammar.
You see, in grammar, anyone can be brought up on charges at any minute. You never know what little thing you write or say will elicit allegations that you’re committing an atrocity against the language. The crime can be as minor as using “between” instead of “among” or as horrible as singlehandedly taking down Western civilization by failing to use “whom.”
But in language as in the judicial system, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
Take, for example, the woman who complained to me about other people’s crime of using “graduate” as a transitive verb.
A transitive verb is one that takes a direct object. An intransitive verb needs a preposition or some other intermediary to interact with objects. So if, as the lady insisted, it’s true that “graduate” is not a transitive verb, you couldn’t say “He graduated college.” You would instead have to say he graduated from college.
So to convict anyone who uses “He graduated college,” all you have to do is check the dictionary to see whether “graduate” can be a transitive verb. Spoiler alert: Yes, it can.
In English, rightness and wrongness rest on three basic concepts: syntax, dictionary definition and idiom. Syntax is basic sentence mechanics. “To store with go whom” is ungrammatical because it doesn’t follow the patterns we use for arranging subjects, verbs and other sentence elements.
Dictionary definition is self-explanatory. If you were to say, “Your new car is gravel, dude!” no dictionary would support your use of “gravel.” It is, quite simply, wrong.
Idiom is where the loopholes come in. Technically, it’s ungrammatical to say “Aren’t I?” because the rules of syntax would require you to say instead “Amn’t I?” But somehow, the second-person verb form became standard in this first-person situation. So “aren’t I” is idiomatic.
Most of the accusations I hear lobbed against English speakers have to do with word usage, which comes back to dictionary definition. Does it drive you nuts to hear people use the word “literally” as an intensifier, as in “The town was driven literally to its knees?”
Well, to hate that usage is justified. But before you start proceedings against the user, you’d better look it up. Dictionaries allow this.
Another common complaint is the use of “that” to refer to people, as in, “Tracy is the person that arranges all the birthday celebrations at the office.” People call that an error on the grounds that, because Tracy is a person, it should be “who” and not “that.”
In fact, that is preferred in professional writing because “who” is more specific in referring to people. But before you take action against someone who uses “that” this way, you should probably check a dictionary. “That” can be a synonym for “who.”
All these uses are questionable, some of them reprehensible. But their users, to a man, are innocent.
JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].