Karin Ciano, The Daily Record Newswire
“So you’re the grammar police now?” I’m not sure why, but when you start writing about writing, people get nervous. Well-spoken, trusted friends worry that you’ll suddenly start correcting their sentences in public: “Pssst … you just split your infinitive.” Or, “Objection, Your Honor, counsel just dangled a participle.”
I just can’t afford to be that popular. So before we take this any further, everyone, please be assured, I am not going to play hall monitor with your sentences. What gets said at oral argument stays at oral argument, and I have no idea what gets said at happy hour.
But the concern does make me wonder: What is it about grammar that makes us nervous?
It could be flashbacks of elementary school (“grammar school,” anyone?). The memorization, the drill, the embarrassment, the performance anxiety, the getting-the-answer-but-not- quite-getting-why-it’s-right. It could be because, although we don’t always like to admit it, we often assess people’s intelligence and sophistication based on how they express themselves in words, and having to figure out exactly where each word in a sentence should go is about as relaxing as deciphering a place setting at “Downton Abbey.”
Or it could be the vocabulary.
I’m old enough to take the vocabulary of grammar for granted. Back in the day, we learned the parts of speech, diagrammed sentences on a blackboard (it’s like a whiteboard but with chalk), and wrote everything out with a pencil (like a stylus made of wood) in longhand cursive (never mind).
Yet a whole generation of lawyers may have missed out on this cultural orientation. In her excellent book “The Grammar and Writing Handbook for Lawyers,” Lenné Espenscheid reveals that in 1994, the National Council of Teachers of English decided that correct English usage was no longer an objective of teaching English. Apparently they believed if we’d only read enough fine writing, we’d figure it out.
Twenty years later, I am surrounded by smart people who can appreciate when a sentence works — or doesn’t — but may not always know why. They can fix an awkward sentence, and often write well, but if asked to diagnose what’s wrong, they lack the words. Take split infinitives. Grammar-trained lawyers take this vocabulary for granted, while to others, it might as well be Latin, and so I feel called to bridge the gap.
The good news: You know this stuff.
If you can form coherent sentences that other people understand, you are fluent in English grammar’s greatest hits. You know the basic parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb); their role in a sentence (subject, object); and basic verb tenses (past, present, future). Rusty on the parts of speech? Skip the rest of this column, click on over to YouTube, and watch a few episodes of “Schoolhouse Rock.”
Drilling down, we start to play with the basics. We meet widely traveled parts of speech married to vocabulary that doesn’t get out so much. Those would be articles (a, an, the), prepositions (between, among, in, by, and others), and two more of “Schoolhouse Rock’s” finest, conjunctions (and, but, or) and interjections (hey!).
Then, we have the “deep cuts”—the vocabulary that most of us never have occasion to use (at least since law school) except on solitary visits to the Grammar Nerd Café.
Today, allow me to introduce the infinitive. You’ve already met; in fact you probably use infinitives every day. To introduce, for example. To do, to have, to hold, to cherish, to be or not to be. An infinitive is a present-tense verb, plus the word “to.” Add “to,” and the verb suddenly can behave like a noun, adjective, or adverb, depending on the context.
If you’ve studied a language other than English, you may recognize “infinitive” as a verb tense. In Latin-based languages, infinitives are often a single word (in Italian, for example, “to eat” is “mangiare”). Way back in the era of “Downton Abbey,” when Latin was a staple of education, the grammarian H.W. Fowler decreed that the “to” must always stand beside its verb. If another word were to squeeze in between “to” and its verb — I’m looking at you, adverbs — the infinitive would “split” (to zealously represent, to boldly go). Fowler didn’t care for it, teachers listened, and lots of us learned to avoid splitting infinitives and other verbs besides. (Steven Pinker has suggested Chief Justice Roberts’ reluctance to let a split verb pass his lips may have prompted his difficulties with the presidential oath at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, where he couldn’t get out the words, “I will faithfully execute.”)
The controversy on whether to split or not to split remains with us. Modern grammarians acknowledge (sometimes with an audible sigh) that skillful authors can and do split infinitives with no loss of clarity, thus demoting the prohibition from a rule to a preference. But in the event you find yourself writing for the Hon. Gramm R. Geek, keep a close eye on your infinitives. (Search in Word for “to,” and watch what comes next; if it’s an adverb, consider moving it.)
There, that wasn’t so bad. Now you know what an infinitive is, what it means to split it, and why some people care.
Why learn grammar vocabulary? Especially if knowing the vocabulary doesn’t tell you how to build your sentence? Perhaps because in grammar, as in law, the acquisition of vocabulary is power. I don’t sit down to face my screen thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool to use a resumptive modifier in the next sentence?” But when I write a bad sentence, knowing what to call its pieces lets me get under the hood, consult the manual, and figure out what’s gone wrong. It’s no harder than learning the rules of evidence or the rules of civil procedure (and, like those rules, grammar vocabulary’s deep cuts don’t live in my head, but in a book near my desk — no memorization required).
Writing as much as lawyers do without learning a few words of grammar vocabulary is like working with people for years but never learning their names. C’mon, we can all do better, one nerdy word at a time.
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Karin Ciano is owner of Karin Ciano Law PLLC and director of Twin Cities Custom Counsel PLLC. Contact her at karincianolaw.com.
