Our PR team likes to sit around debating the finer points of grammar. At least some of us do. OK, maybe three of us do, but I’m one of them. I could debate commas and capitalization all day long, and that’s because I believe that good grammar is what sets us apart as educated experts. You could be making a brilliant point, but if you don’t know the difference between “except” and “accept,” then your credibility suffers.
There seems to be a recent trend of letting grammar slide. Some “authorities” have started to take an “oh-what-the-hell-people-are-going-to-do-it-anyway” approach to grammar, and I don’t like it. This is why “impact” is widely acknowledged as a verb. But I say the integrity of grammar is a battle worth fighting, and I refuse to accede to the masses on certain grammatical points. You have to know grammar rules before you’re allowed to break them, and even then it must be done artfully.
Grammar is not all black and white. Plenty of it is, but there’s a heck of a lot of gray, and that’s the fun part. At least it is for those of us who enjoy a healthy debate. I was recently in a discussion about how the English language has a lexical gap when it comes to a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Some felt that because such a word doesn’t exist, we should be free to use “they” or “their” instead. For example, some thought it would be OK to say, “A crane operator should always wear their hard hat.” You can’t say “his” because it implies all crane operators are men. “His or her” is often cumbersome. Therefore, we should be able to say “their” because it is already widely used in colloquial speech, and there’s no acceptable substitute. I totally disagree. Let’s strive to do it right. It’s not difficult to rewrite the vast majority of these sentences so that there isn’t a subject/pronoun disagreement. A good writer is willing to make such an effort. Especially when the effort required isn’t exactly superhuman.
There are multiple ways to make the above example grammatically correct:
• A crane operator should always wear a hard hat.
• Crane operators should always wear their hard hats.
• Crane operators should always wear hard hats.
It’s always possible to rewrite. We don’t have to give in to common speech on this one.
But back to the gray areas of grammar. The same discussion also touched on referring to a company as a “they.” I’m on board with that. A company, a band, a group — any collective noun can be a “they.” You would never say “IMT is a great client. I love to work with it.” I love to work with “them” because it’s the people I love to work with. That’s totally different. Here we’re not talking about a subject that is irrefutably singular.
Sometimes I feel like a lonely grammar curmudgeon when so many others adopt a “go-with-the-flow” attitude. But you won’t catch me budging anytime soon.
Tags: public relations
