Grammar Rant

The grammar rant that I found can be found here:
http://stow.patch.com/blog_posts/grammar-rant

It was written in 2012 by a former English teacher of 30+ years, Tom Stephen.

The author of this grammar rant thinks that there is one way to speak proper English.  Here is a list of the mistakes that Stephen thinks are “horrible.”

1.      "We seen that deer run through the yard."

2.      "Me and my brother will help you with that."

3.      "If my husband had went to Home Depot instead..." (spoken by an English teacher!)

4.      "Where you at?"  (not even "Where're you at?")

5.      "We was workin' on it all day."

6.      "People are like dead, and it was like scary, and I'm like no way..." (a recent Colorado shootings interview)

7.      Answering the phone: "Yeah, this is him. 'Sup?"

Stephen gives a quick run-down of the problems of each utterance.  (1) is missing an auxiliary “have;” in (2), the speaker confuses the “nominative and objective case pronouns” (even though English does not have cases); the speaker in (3) has forgotten to use the past participle; in (4), the speaker omits the verb; in (5), there is not subject verb agreement; (6) suffers from too many “likes” and generally imprecise vocabulary; in (7), the speaker does not know what should follow a linking verb.

These errors might be uttered in informal contexts, by speakers of lower socio-economic classes, by people of a different race than him, or by people from less prestigious geographic regions.  An interesting aspect of his rant is his description of his own background.  Stephen states that he comes from a “a very normal, we-speak-correctly-in-this-family, plain old family that had been here for many generations”  He seems to be viewing himself as having a kind of default background, which is often the case when a person is member of a more prestigious class (though he seems to be rather proud that his family has been here for a long time).  He also gives an inadvertent clue as to the socio-economic level of his family—he mentions that he went to a private Catholic elementary and middle school, where the nuns beat the grammar into him.  It all combines to paint a picture of a privileged childhood.

Stephen is careful to not mention the race, ethnicity or socio-economic status of any of the speakers, though he does mention that most of them are his peers. This is what shocks him the most, I think—that people he might respect in other ways could speak in such ways.  He makes a comment at the end of his rant that suggests that he does not have the highest regard for the intelligence of the above speakers: “I am often bewildered by what I read or hear from seemingly intelligent people.”  Here he implies that his English-challenged acquaintances seem intelligent, but actually their speech reveals their mental deficiencies.

Because the author does not acknowledge the fact that there are different varieties of English that might be spoken in different contexts, because the author takes his own privileged background for granted, and because he judges peoples’ intelligence by their speech, his arguments for “proper grammar” are invalidated.  He states that “this is not the way that English was used when [he] was growing up,” which makes him seem like someone who has been clueless about language variety his whole life, as well as a fuddy-duddy English teacher.

Interestingly, the first person to leave a comment to Stephen's blog brings up these socio-economic, racial analyses of his rant, and points out that he is holding all English speakers to a version of English that is the most "prestigious."  Stephen replies with,  "I'm sticking with the "prestigious," dialect, thank you --- always have and always will."