Do You Want Friends?

By Ellen Jovin

In my line of work, I meet a lot of people who yell at televisions. I know this because they tell me about it. There are numerous things one could yell at televisions about these days, but I am talking about the subset of yelling that is directed at (perceived) grammatical errors committed on air.

If you are a person who enjoys yelling at your television, please carry on. We all have our hobbies.

But what if the object of one’s ire is not an object but a person? What is the etiquette of correcting other people’s grammar in real life?

I personally don’t correct people. I regularly receive email in which correspondents tell me I am welcome to correct their grammar, and I never ever take them up on it. That’s simply not my idea of a good time.

If someone were a student in a class I was teaching or a direct report of mine at work, then I would feel a responsibility for that person’s training. Professional development is a responsibility of a manager. Education is the responsibility of teachers and parents.

But what if your corrections are, say, more recreational in nature? Here are some questions to consider before correcting someone’s language use:

1. Are you actually right?
2. Might you want to have a pleasant relationship with this person in the future?
3. Do you receive too many social invitations, and are you seeking an efficient way to reduce them?

The first point above may seem obvious, but the correlation between grammar confidence and grammar knowledge is poor, and there is room for debate on many language points. The things people complain about most bitterly in email to me are often not mistakes at all—while the complaints themselves often contain multiple unmistakable mistakes.

Please note that your obligation to be correct increases in proportion to how pedantically you make a particular correction.

In business contexts, I have encountered countless complaints about passive voice when there is no passive voice in sight. How many of these sentences include passive?

1. Ogden was riding a unicycle.
2. Ogden was tired.
3. Ogden was interrupted five times during his presentation on prepositions.

Since West Side Rag readers include a whole lot of grammar nerds, I’ll leave this discussion for the comments section.

If you read broadly across English dialects and eras, you will see variety. If language didn’t change, there’d be more people lying on the beach reading Chaucer right now. Beautiful, varied, evolving language swirls all around us. If your focus is pinning down tiny bug-sized details, you might squash some butterflies.

Grammar points are often oversimplified or misapplied. Many people were taught to use possessives in front of gerunds, which are ing forms operating as nouns. For example: “I appreciate your helping me with the snake diorama.” I would say that myself, even though I have sometimes found such constructions fussy, but ing forms don’t have to be nouns.

Is “doing” a noun in this next example? “He took a photo of   (me, my) doing a triple cartwheel.” What would you say there?

I’ve been informed many times that the use of “that” to refer to people is disrespectful and incorrect. But in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” I say Fitzgerald gets to pick his preferred relative pronoun.

What’s wrong in one dialect can be right in another. The Wikipedia entry for Queen begins with “Queen are a British rock band formed in London in 1970.” That plural verb sounds wrong to most Americans, but it is not an error in the UK, where the Who are also regularly conjugated with plural verbs. In this country, we overpolice conjugations with collective nouns, which are nouns that are singular in form but plural in concept. Would you go singular or plural in “A pack of dogs   (has, have) stolen my liverwurst sandwich”?

Like many adults, I was taught to conjugate my verb with the collective noun “pack” and make the verb singular: “has.” But I experience the liverwurst-stealing dogs plurally. Why can’t I go plural with “pack” if I like? That’s called notional agreement, and I am a fan.

If you insisted on a singular verb there, would you also pick “its” in “The couple couldn’t find   (its, their) car keys”?

The language world is complicated. Having a little humility about the limitations of one’s knowledge and experience is a good thing. And it might make watching TV grammar more relaxing.

Still, if all you really want is for people to stop inviting you to parties, correct them more, starting today! You’re welcome!

Ellen Jovin is the author of the national bestseller Rebel with a Clause and the subject of a new docu-comedy by Brandt Johnson, also called Rebel with a Clause, which is currently in residence at New Plaza Cinema on the Upper West Side and playing at theaters around the country. A complete collection of her columns for the WSR can be found on her author page — HERE.

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