National Grammar Day is March 4 because it’s the only day of the year that’s a complete sentence. It’s a command, March forth, right? Verb plus adverb, if you’re being pedantic.
Except that National Grammar Day is the Day of Purism, not to be confused with Purim, which is actually a week later. And purists believe—forgive me for stereotyping—that a noun can’t become a verb. March, the month, is a noun. March, the command, is a verb. So if a purist is to be consistent, their belovèd National Grammar Day is based on a lie.
But that’s OK, because the kinds of grammar rules that purists create and expect the rest of us to follow are all based, if not on lies, at least on misconceptions of how language works. Rules like “don’t start a sentence with a conjunction” and “don’t end one with a preposition.” Or “avoid the passive voice.” Or even “don’t use double negatives.” Or ain’t. Or “finna isn’t a word.” Or that a plural pronoun can’t also be singular.
But in fact sentences can and do end with prepositions (and they may start with conjunctions); the passive voice is often more effective; even people who don’t use double negatives understand that a double negative like no no is an intensifier, never a ‘yes.’ Ain’t is common and was once considered posh. Finna is indeed a word—because people use it as a word. Oh, and while I’m at it, nouns verb all the time. (See what I just did there?)
Another problem: on National Grammar Day purists perpetuate do’s and don’ts that are rules of etiquette, not rules of grammar. These rules reflect a class-based notion of language where your words stand in for where you fit on the social scale. They show who’s in and who’s out. Who’s clubbable and who’s the outcast. Who’s on track for high status jobs and who’s consigned to the service economy.
Sorry, purists, but unlike the rules of language etiquette, the rules of grammar are the ones we follow when we use language to create a message composed of sounds, or signs, or pixels on a screen. They may be elegant or inept, logical or irrational, refined or boorish. Those judgments have nothing to do with whether they are grammatical. If our utterances follow the rules of combining sounds and signs and units of meaning, then they are grammatical.
But Grammar Day focuses on the etiquette rules, the fine distinctions between that and which or shall and will that some English speakers follow, some of the time. Or the Oxford comma. Or the greengrocer’s’ apos’trophe. Purists insist there’s a difference between can and may, and they won’t give you a bathroom pass until you say it right.
The word etiquette itself evokes the world of Downton Abbey, where the silverware had to be one inch from the edge of the tablecloth. Nobody cares any more which fork you use for fish—and so there is no National Fork Day. But enough people care, or think they care, about the imaginary goal of “good grammar” that they dedicate a day to it. A day that depends for its effect on a noun becoming a verb. On that basis National Grammar Day should be self-annihilating.
Just as some people took Sir Philip Sidney seriously when he asked snarkily in the 1580s, “to Grammer, who sayes nay?”, people worry about good grammar because, to quote the old slogan for a vocabulary building program that used to advertise on AM radio, “People judge you by the words you use.” And National Grammar Day is their Day of Judgment.
In the past I have written of the myth of National Grammar Day, a day based on a complete sentence, whereas most what we say is not in complete sentences.
I have compared National Grammar Day to Passover, a day different from all others where we sit down to a special meal and eat our words.
And I have fielded the National Grammar Day Quiz, which you are welcome to try.
This year, if you must observe National Grammar Day, then my recommendations are to remember Baron’s Laws of English Usage:
- If someone complains about a word or phrase, there’s a good chance that word or phrase is so entrenched it’s probably too late to do anything about it.
- If someone insists they never say or write something, like they as a singular pronoun, there’s an even better chance that they use singular they, or whatever else they’re complaining about, when they’re not busy complaining. Or even when they are.
And finally, before you attack somebody on National Grammar Day for something you think is bad grammar, remember Baron’s first rule of National Grammar Day:
- Everybody wants to be correct, but nobody wants to be corrected.
Maybe this National Grammar Day would be better spent washing your hands than wringing them.
