Getting Out of Date

At our Father's Day celebration yesterday, I learned from my grandsons (and son) that kids don't use email anymore—or text messages. Instead it's Instagram (or one of those platforms I don't use or know much about).  And that, I realize, is why they seldom reply to those out-of-date ways I send messages to them. I might as well have written a letter—or sent a telegram—or sent smoke signals.

There are lots of other ways I'm sort of expired in this world, but one of them struck me again this morning when I was reading a 2004 memoir by a celebrated writer. (I'll mention nothing specific about the book—or the author's name.)

In the first 100 pages I've read a few things in her agile, eloquent prose that were definitely no-no's Back in the Day. She made a who-whom error; twice she has said one another in situations where I was taught one should use each other; she wrote “feel badly.”

Now, I realize that grammar/usage rules are continually changing. I know that we made up our "rules" before we even knew what grammar and usage were. They evolved gradually before they were ever codified.

(I just broke one I'd been taught, a particularly silly one: Don't use the passive voice.)

I learned many/most of those rules because of the home I grew up in. My mother was an English teacher, and she was constantly teaching us—if sometimes in a less-than-genial manner.

When one of brothers or I would make a mistake, her custom was to repeat a version of what we’d just said, with an emphasis on the correct way.

Danny: Me and Jim are going down to the park.

Mom: Jim and I are going down to the park.

I would never follow with You are? That’s why I’m still alive today.

Other rules I learned in later classes—and many I learned when I was teaching—some I’ve learned recently.

I’ve also lived long enough to watch them fade away. When I was a kid, the teachers tried to show us the differences between may and might, between will and shall, between may and can, between like and as.

Now, many of those are gone—or going.

Here’s one I’ve seen professional writers use: He’s a wiser man than me.

I would still write wiser man than I because I learned long ago that this is what’s called an elliptical construction: wiser than I [am]. So when you drop the am, you do not drop the I.

The differences between who and whom, I know, are heading south. Some people incorrectly use whom (this is called a hypercorrection) because they think whom sounds more correct than who in some constructions—even though it ain’t.

Accelerating these changes, I’m sure, are social media, which, I believe, diminish the importance to the writer (and the reader) of “correct” English.

Sometimes, for stylistic or humorous reasons we make mistakes on purpose—like the ain’t I plopped into the previous paragraph.

For the same reason many writers do something I often do: write intentional sentence fragments. Like this one.

But I confess I’m still surprised to see formations that I’d learned were errors in the otherwise flawless prose of professional writers—not in dialogue, of course, where anything goes.

When I was reviewing books, I saw such things more and more frequently.

And my response, generally, is not the grammar-Nazi sniff of disgust and disdain and superiority. But instead the Dylan (Bob) line “The times, they are a-changin’.”

As they ever will ...