My peeve is bigger than your peeve

Since it’s a fairly big Yankee holiday here in the states, I figured I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on a usage thing this week. It’s usually pretty quiet round these here parts. Instead, I thought I’d focus on something that tends to add to the overall confusion about usage and writing/betaing, but that’s more thematic than grammatical — the difference between pet peeves (or hot button issues, or misunderstandings and misinformation, however you want to view it) and real correct or incorrect usage.

A long time ago on one of my lists, sherrold compiled the biggest fanfic pet peeves of listmembers, most of whom are really into language and usage and grammar. And they’re great peeves, wonderful peeves (although clearly written before Spike became a huge BSO in the market, because of course he’s the exception to the “no media fans” rule), but they are, for the most part, not about right or wrong grammar beyond the most basic things like the punctuation peeves. We all have peeves. I myself have lots of them, peeves I nurture and treasure and won’t let go of, and most of my peeves aren’t even pets, but fairly large barnyard animals. But I also recognize that many of them are writing or word use peeves and not necessarily based in a correct grammar for English, or about syntax, or structure, or anything else. Some of them are — such as the possessive apostrophe I mentioned a couple weeks ago — but for the most part, my peeves were developed at an early age and nurtured over the years.

Most of us actually develop language and usage peeves from someone else. The vast majority of what drives us nuts is stuff we were taught was “right” or “wrong” in school, and if the information that was given us isn’t actually correct itself, then we’re hanging on to, essentially, someone else’s personal dislikes and being driven crazy by them over time. The biggest lesson I learned as I became a more experienced copy editor was finding out just how damn much I didn’t know. I had all these notions — about apostrophes, about words like impact as a verb and hopefully to mean “it is to be hoped” and stuff — and over and over, I kept finding out I was wrong. Wronger than wrong. But these things had been taught to me in school -- never end a sentence with a preposition (utter bullshit, since that rule is based on Latin grammar and has nothing to do with how English is structured); never begin a sentence with and or but (again, there’s just no real reason); don’t split infinitives (truly one of the more bogus rules of all time — if it aids clarity, don’t split the infinitive, if it doesn’t matter, boldly go where no man has gone before and feel good about it!), and so on and so on. All stuff I had to abandon by the wayside and now my peeves sit there like war orphans, all wrapped up in their shabby clothing, sitting by the side of the road.

I cherished my notions of ‘til being correct because, by gum, that’s what my teachers told me. Only, come to find out just recently, till has a much longer history, and until came long after till. I look back on my fanfic and go “arg!” because of course I have all those ‘tils in there. The history of my belief in peeves is all, sadly, in print. Like me, most of you are probably carrying around years of peeve indoctrination by teachers and other adults in our lives, from writing books we read, from other fans who told us how to do it, etc. Some of them are probably based on basic rules of real English grammar, but a shocking number are not. It’s one reason I’m reluctant to write anything that tells people what to do, because every time I’m certain that someone can’t do that, I check out the OED (I hate them! They always have some citation of just what I said couldn’t be done) and sure enough, it’s been done that way for hundreds of years. Remember how you were told over and over that ain’t ain’t in the dictionary? Well, not only is it in every dictionary, but for years, relatively educated people said it all the time. They also, especially in British English, used subjects and verbs that didn’t quite agree in the modern sense we expect them to. There’s this whole big history for English usage, but much of it isn’t accurately reported to us in school, so we’re carrying around the misonceptions as we were taught them, petting and stroking them, and passing them on to others.

Which isn’t to say that what our guts tell us, or what we do know for certain, can’t be applied, and that we should throw out peeves altogether, especially in the fanfic world, because so much of what fans “write” is sheer crap. Most people need help, and there’s no harm in telling them that it’s okay or right to say Wes’, if it means we can concentrate on getting them to write better sentences all the way around, or not write idiotic stories. You pick your battles, you know? But it’s important, I think, to recognize that not all of what we’re really adamant or Cranky McCrankpants about is really right or wrong. There are all kinds of possibilities (not least of which is how language is taught regionally), which makes it a) hard to learn what’s really right or wrong, and b) kind of fun, because the language is changing.

We’re not speaking Latin or ancient Greek or whatever — we’re speaking and writing an evolving language where things are constantly in flux. It’s harder to learn what’s right or wrong, but it also means the language keeps up with us. I have peers in editing who despise neologisms and slang phrases and speech patterns that reflect current usage. In the past two days on my copyediting list, I’ve watched what seems to be a relatively intelligent bunch despair over how most people say “and he’s like, all pissed off, and then I’m going, ‘hey, asshat,’ and then he goes, ‘whoa.’” They kept talking about today’s stupid kids replacing said/says with like and going, and I wanted to say, “Um... I’m like, whoa, dudes, because I’m in my forties and I talk that way when I’m with friends.” And I often just love new words and phrases — where would Buffy have been without that wonderful wordplay, for instance, like “could you vague that up for me?” and “I can’t believe you of all people are trying to Scully me.” Not being able to coin words like asshat or fuckwit would impoverish our language. Stuff like that is just fun. It’s what makes English exciting, that we can come up with phrases like “friend me” to describe the process of adding to your LJ friends list, rather than say “add me to your friends list.” So I don’t think I can ever join the fusty brigade and sit there with a pointy hat and decry the misuse of English or the horror of verbing nouns (or nominalizing verbs—hee!), because frankly, it often serves me well. A lot of times I despair over misuse and stupidity and especially wretched jargony bizness talk, but I’m kind of shocked at how quick to judge most people are when they’re not even going on real information.

Yeah, when I read fanfic my peeve buttons get tripped up the wazoo. I think at times if I see one more Buffy story with the word crepuscular every other page, or another Mag 7 story written in craptastic dialect with yer for your and everyone's readin' and ponderin', or see entire stories where there are simply no commas, I might actually explode. Overall I preach tolerance. But mostly I preach it so that we can first figure out whether it’s really right or wrong, and then once we know that, go after the person committing errors with a big sharp pointy stick and hurt them. I think it’s important to know the diff between what are peeves — for me, there is no worse sin than homonym and homophone abuse, and at times I fantasize about actually killing people who refuse to remember that led is the past tense of to lead — and what is really correct or incorrect grammar/usage. The more we know, the wider our understanding, the easier the distinction is made. And then, once we know, we can kill the people who don’t do it right.