March 4th is National Grammar Day, a day that’s a complete sentence. Except it’s not. March 4th, or March fourth, if you must, is a noun phrase. It’s only a sentence if you don’t take it literally and instead respell fourth as forth. March forth, get it? But many grammar sticklers want you to take words literally. That’s how you celebrate good grammar, by using words like literally to refer only to the letters of the alphabet, and insisting that words like irregardless don’t exist, even though irregardless is at least 100 years old.
But I have a better idea: use National Grammar Day to stop grammar shaming.
Grammar shaming is as old as Babel and as new as the internet, and it’s usually a pretext to punish other nonlinguistic behavior that the shamer doesn’t like.
Take that incident at Babel. According to Genesis 11, the first humans all spoke one language. At some point the residents of Babel decided to build a tower reaching to the heavens. But God wasn’t happy about this, though the reason isn’t explicit:
And the LORD said: ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.
Anyway, God destroyed the tower, scattering the people of Babel across the globe and creating a multitude of languages to prevent them from understanding one another and, presumably, from cooperating on another massive building project. People have been trying without success to get back that one, universal language ever since, but in the meantime they built Stonehenge, the pyramids, and the Empire State Building.
The internet has a problem with language as well. Take this example. Early one morning. three weeks after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s then personal attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted, “Biden opposes AMERICA FIRST. So whose first?” A Trump-won-the-election-by-a-lot fanatic seconded that sentiment: “The law is coming.” But the next reply shot back, “so are the grammar police.” Because if you’re America’s mayor peddling a whack conspiracy theory, you better not write whose for who’s or the grammar police will be coming for you.
Giuliani’s not the only well-known figure to be grammar shamed. A tweet storm erupted after a troll posted a list of typos from Dr. Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation. Women are grammar shamed much more frequently than men, and not just prominent women like Eve, whose speech is often blamed for the expulsion from Eden, or Dr. Jill Biden, whose crime was speaking while a Democrat. Like most doctoral dissertations, including my own, Dr. Biden’s went largely unnoticed. In my case, that was certainly for the best.
But then Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, and Dr. Biden’s thesis suddenly drew the attention of the Trump-won-the-election-by-a-lot crowd. Joseph Epstein lampooned Biden’s work along with her right to the title Doctor in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Epstein seemed unaware that before physicians highjacked it, the word doctor originally meant ‘teacher,’ which is exactly what Dr. Biden is.
Then Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson joined the attack on the First Lady, trivializing Dr. Biden’s doctorate as “the same degree as Dr. Pepper” and grammar shaming her as “borderline illiterate” and “not very bright.” Carlson added, “Parts of the dissertation seems to be written in a foreign language using English words” (emphasis added).
Highlighting Carlson’s lack of subject-verb agreement may seem like retaliatory grammar shaming on my part, shaming the shamer, if you will. But it illustrates another point about grammar shamers: deriding other people’s language, as Carlson did, can backfire. Everybody makes mistakes, and some of these “mistakes” are simply common variants, typos, or autocorrects rather than errors attributable to “borderline illiteracy.” Plus people with doctorates are by definition not illiterate.
It might have been appropriate to @ Carlson with the message, “physician heal thyself.” That phrase was popularized by the 1611 King James Version of the New Testament (Luke 4:23), translating the Vulgate’s medice cura te ipsum, where the Latin word is medico, not doctor. And the Greek original has the vocative of iatros, ‘physician.’ But language facts mean little to the grammar police, who function as a law unto themselves.
Then there’s Missouri senator and believer that Trump-won-the-election-by-a-lot Josh Hawley, who got grammar shamed for using the word irregardless, which the Oxford English Dictionary records as early as 1912, but which the grammar shamers insisted is not a word. A graduate of Stanford and Yale should know better, said the shamers. But grammar shaming Hawley misses the point that he was trying to overturn the election results, not the English language.
You don’t need a social media account to grammar shame. When it comes to grammar shaming, some teachers have set a very high bar. Bel Kaufman illustrates an extreme example of classroom language policing in Up the Down Staircase (1964). In the novel, Alice Blake, a student at the fictional Calvin Coolidge High School, develops a one-sided crush on her English teacher, Paul Barringer, eventually working up the courage to give Barringer a 150-word declaration of her feelings. Barringer, portrayed as an insensitive pedant, treats the love note like any student essay, circling errors in red, underlining misused words and trite phrases, and returning it with the terse comment, “Thank you for your note. Watch spelling and punctuation.” This prompts Blake to go to Barringer’s empty English classroom at the start of the next school day and jump out of the window. She is severely injured, but she survives.
It’s a fictional portrayal of a stereotypical English teacher who is constantly watching everyone’s grammar, but even though many of us have had a teacher intent on red-penciling our language, the vast majority of teachers don’t fit the Barringer stereotype.
So here’s my advice for National Grammar Day. If you want to criticize America’s ex-mayor or Missouri’s senator-with-a-degree-from-Yale-Law-School-but-doesn’t-believe-in-free-and-fair-elections, attack their ideas, not their language. And if you don’t think Dr. Jill Biden is a doctor, then Dr. Grammar says, shame on you, you know nothing about language, and if you @ me I’ll block you.
