Grammar Nazis

Every day it seems I bear witness to some new de-evolution of our language. But there is a bigger problem than the increasingly poor grammar creeping into common usage and this problem actually promotes poor grammar. Criticizing a person using poor grammar or thinking less of that person for using poor grammar is a bad idea. People make it personal. It doesn't matter from which side you view it, there is always at least a tendency to make the criticism personal or take the criticism personally. This is what must stop. This is what puts the "nazi" in "grammar nazi." There's an adage that is often repeated in management training seminars that would seem appropriate to share here: "focus on the issue, situation, or behavior, not on the person." (That seems especially good advice as we go about the business of interacting with our fellow humans no matter the endeavor.) If our intention in criticizing grammar is to see it improved, then we would be wise to keep our criticisms pure and free from such distractions.

I recall a statistic from glottochronologists stating that a living language such as ours changes about 50% every thousand years. I recognize, accept, and enjoy that our language is alive and evolving. It's been said that "the written word is the mechanism by which we know what we know." We therefore don't come to know new things either as individuals, cultures, nations, or even as a species, without changing the way we speak and write.

The universe tells us that in a closed system there is an innate tendency toward disorder in all processes. The human mind should never be considered a closed system and entropy therefore should not rule in linguistics. Rather than accept the decay of our language, we should be moving toward refinement and perfection in our communications, both written and oral, all the while realizing that perfection in language is unattainable so long as the environment in which it is written and spoken remains in flux.

So while I accept and encourage the evolution of our language by necessity, I can not accept or even tolerate our language changing due to ignorance. Ignorance is our enemy. It's been said that we live too late to explore the world, too early to explore the universe, and therefore our present frontier is the capability and capacity of the mind. So I will continue to speak out against poor grammar rooted in ignorance and I will continue to encourage critique of my own communications for all the reasons I've cited. But I will not make it personal and so long as a critique is delivered in that spirit, I will not take it personally either. I will not be a "nazi" and I will discourage that behavior in others. I will continue my attempts to advance our abilities to communicate, not diminish them, and therefore will never accept poor grammar.