My Sunday School teacher frequently reminds us that you don't bring people to Jesus by beating them over the head with the Bible. You have to love them to Jesus.
It's the same thing with language. You don't get people to use correct grammar by berating them with righteous indignation for every dangling participle or split infinitive. They must be told gently of the error of their grammatical ways.
Unfortunately, many people just aren't concerned about whether so-and-so used the active or passive voice incorrectly, or if so-and-so used the nominative case or the objective case after a preposition.
When it comes to capitalization, anything goes these days. If you're in doubt about whether to capitalize a word, many people just capitalize everything. To some individuals, capitalization is a way to honor a person or thing i.e. “My Mother is a Graduate of Mississippi State University.” Or “Our Pastor is President of the Club.”
The most ground-shaking grammatical blunder is a trend that is growing by leaps and bounds: “I's,” which suddenly and inexplicably turns “I,” which is a noun, into a possessive, as in “Our friends gathered at the restaurant to celebrate Rick and I's 10th anniversary.”
Rick and I's? Now, what nincompoop do you suppose would be so nincompoop-ish?
Asked about the “I's” phenominon, Dr. Jonathon Randle, chairman of the English department at Mississippi College, said, “You've identified one of my own pet peeves, prevalent in contemporary song lyrics, sitcoms, greeting card inscriptions, and Facebook posts. Makes me cringe every time.”
Randle went on to say the best way to correct it would be to restructure it and write either “my and Rick's anniversary,” which is accurate but awkward, or better, to write, “We met our friends at the restaurant and Rick and I celebrated our 10th anniversary.”
While we're on the subject of grammar, what about the use of pronouns after prepositions?
As with capitalization, many of our friends are apparently under the impression that using the nominative “I,” “she,” “he,” “we” and “they” after a preposition is a way of showing respect or to honor an individual as in, “Just between you and he,” or in “Alice is a friend of “Bert and they.”
After a preposition (“by,” “like,” “for,” “between,” and about 150 more), the objective case is the proper usage, as in “Just between you and him,” which implies absolutely no disrespect to the individual, regardless of his age or position in life, or “Alice is a friend of Bert and them,” which should be used even if “them” refers to presidents, kings, queens or to other nobility.
My message to the preposition pronoun offenders is, in the words of the late, great Archie Bunker, “Now do it the correct way, and do it that way for the rest of your life!”
The same goes for pronoun agreement with the antecedent, as in “Each student is responsible for HIS own work;” not “Each student is responsible for THEIR own work.” The pronoun refers to “each student,” which is singular. Therefore, we should correctly use the masculine singular pronoun “his,” even if there are both males and females in the class. Many will bristle at this centuries-old rule, but the masculine pronoun always dominates in a mixed group. Were the pronoun to have referred to a classroom of females, one would have said, “Each student is responsible for HER own work.”
For those who disagree with the above information, just deal with it!
The time has come for us to send politically correct grammatical corruption like “he/she” and “him/her” off the pier and into the lake of never-should-have-happened-stupidity.
Unfortunately, we are a people easily led into sin of grammatical incorrectness by what we hear on television and what we hear when we communicate with other individuals. We are truly experiencing a grammatical correctness drought in our speech and in our writing when we praise incorrect grammar as a mark of individualism, and often look to less-than-desirable individuals to model our own communication.
Is there no concern for the preservation of the grandeur of the English language?
Judging from the above, I think not, which makes me want to take the offenders by the scruff of the neck … not to beat them over the head with my prized grammar textbook, but to lovingly give them lessons in the joys of grammatical correctness.
