Grammar Day may be over, but the grammar gripes just keep on coming. This week, articles appeared in two major dailies, the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Telegraph, criticizing the grammar gaffes of the rich, the famous, and the reprehensible.
Let’s start with the reprehensible. Both papers attack Jeffrey Epstein, not for years of pedophilia, not even for financial chicanery, or for his appointment as a teacher at the prestigious Dalton School, despite the fact that he dropped out of college. No, the Journal and the Telegraph go after Epstein’s crimes against spelling and punctuation, which pale in comparison to decades of actual criminal behavior, for which he wound up in jail. Twice. Whether Epstein killed himself in jail or someone offed him, it wasn’t because he didn’t punctuate his emails.
Then there’s (Lord) Peter Mandelson, former MP, cabinet minister, and recently-sacked UK ambassador to the United States, who lost his reputation and his peerage for his mishandling of state secrets and his too-close association with Epstein (though he was no [Prince] Andrew). But what the Journal and the Telegraph find fault with are the Oxford graduate’s uncorrected spelling and punctuation in his text messages.
As for the rich and famous, there’s Jack Dorsey, the co-creator of Twitter, ridiculed by both papers for his poor spelling and careless grammar, though his major offense was selling Twitter to Elon Musk, who renamed it X, whereupon it became the sandbox of the far right. At least X is easy to spell.
And David Ellison, head of Paramount Skydance, taken to task by the Journal for “address[ing] Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav as ‘Daivd’ over text last year while trying to strike a deal.” Instead of picking on Ellison’s typo, why not address his more important “error”: monopolizing news and entertainment on the far-right model of Rupert Murdoch.
According to the Journal, all these grievous crimes against English trump Donald Trump’s “covfefe” gaffe in 2017.
The Old Days were better
Speaking of political crimes against literacy, the Journal fondly remembers a golden age when spelling counted, an age that began in the 1950s, reached its height in England during the Thatcher years, and apparently took a final bow in the U.S. in 1992, when Vice President Dan Quayle’s term in office was permanently tainted by his spelling of potato as “potatoe.” After that it’s been covfefe all the way down.
Both papers claim that, in the old days, the heads of government and industry made sure their staff proofed and corrected everything from informal notes to letters, memos, reports, and white papers. Every bit of writing had to be perfect before it was released. As the Journal authors put it, “any sort of sloppy grammar or spelling errors were seized upon with a red pen.” They cite one unnamed British politico who returned a draft to an underling with the comment, “This may be a good policy, but it is not yet English.”
According to the Telegraph’s grammar-shamer-in-chief, “Standards only erode if someone lets them. Nobody would have dared send Mrs Thatcher a missive containing so much as a misplaced semi-colon. As a former barrister, her meticulous – aka terrifying – attention to detail set the tone among her staff.”
But grammar shamers also make mistakes. The Telegraph writer initially claimed that the Wall Street Journal article had appeared in the Washington Post. A later edition silently corrected that sloppy mistake.
Both papers acknowledge that today’s digital devices facilitate a style that jettisons traditional capitals and punctuation. And they blame all those unpredictable autocorrects for many of the mistakes they abhor.
But both papers insist that the real problem isn’t technology, it’s that those at the top simply don’t care. According to the Journal, “There’s an inverse correlation between power and proper punctuation.” And today’s bosses don’t require their subordinates to check their work because, according to the Telegraph, “hurt feelings matter considerably more than abuse of the English language.” As if Donald Trump or Elon Musk care about hurting anyone’s feelings.
Literacy and its discontents
What’s wrong with articles like these is that attacking grammar distracts us from real problems. Today’s crimes against humanity are so much greater than any so-called crimes against language. The most monstrous of ideas may be expressed in faultless standard English.
As for returning to the good old days when spelling and punctuation really mattered, don’t hold your breath: that golden age of grammar never existed.
In any age, the people in charge, be they royals, ministers of state, or captains of industry, were judged for their ability to seize and hold power, not for their proofreading skill. If they were literate as well, that was the bonus feature after the main show. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I wrote some poetry, to be sure. But we remember them for their off-with-their-heads management style.
Writing was invented multiple times in multiple places in human history, anywhere from 5,000 to 45,000 years ago. And from the start, the rich and powerful in every society bought or commandeered what literacy they required, hiring or suborning scribes, secretaries, and speechwriters to correct their words, or even to write those words for them.
And when literacy first came on the scene in each society, it was the property of a committed few who seldom made it to the top of the food chain. Those who were literate were both revered and feared, sought after for the practical help they offered and resented for the mysterious powers they seemed to control.
That’s still true today, as we continue to depend on experts and at the same time deeply distrust their expertise. Remember what I said in my Grammar Day post:
Everybody wants to be correct, but nobody wants to be corrected.
But back to the Journal and the Telegraph. Today a politician or a CEO might fire off their own uncorrected texts or upload their own slapdash posts to the socials (sometimes they task subordinates with writing these less-formal communications as well). But they’re not drafting their own legislation or their own contracts. They still pay people to write the words that make their worlds go round, and they still expect those laws and contracts to be written in precise, standard English. If there are any mistakes in such important docs, or any AI hallucinations, then be assured that heads will still roll.
