The term for what I was getting at is status, not class, wrote one reader (whose email I can’t seem to find). Someone DM’d me on Twitter to say that people today use cues other than pronoun usage to size each other up, “including accent (still), gesture, tone, correct use and complexity of vocabulary and a large variety of pseudo-speech acts.”
Jack Shea from Flatbush, in Brooklyn, wrote that the very notion of correct grammar is “an educated, moneyed class perspective.”Ĭonversely, lots of people with college and graduate degrees screw up pronouns every day: “My best friend of 25 years can do a 16-point check on people in emergency to make sure they’re still alive and then wheel them into the operating room and suture their insides, but, still, she calls me for feedback on grammar,” Genevieve Fontan of Portland, Ore., wrote. One reader, presumably from Canada, wrote, “I recall an expression my brother heard on the CBC: ‘Every time you criticize my grammar, I like you a little bit fewer.’” Touché. Having my grammar scrutinized was a good reminder that it’s hard not to take being corrected personally. But I get that not everyone is on board with that some of you said that those of us who speak or write professionally should set an example by employing proper grammar. I bend grammar rules to avoid sounding stuffy. But I admit that’s debatable (as is whether it’s OK to start a sentence with “but,” which I do with merry abandon). In response I’d say only that the order of pronouns seems a matter of etiquette, not grammar. I got dozens of emails scolding me for putting myself before the person sharing my pronoun phrase: I wrote “me and him” instead of “him and me.” “I was taught by my third-grade teacher, Bertella Mushrush Seacat, that it is correct to use others’ names or corresponding pronouns before one’s own,” wrote Linda Wood Astala of Spring, Texas.
0 kommentar(er)
