by Kory Stamper
This occasionally presents problems, because English is not Latin or Greek. In Latin, for instance, there are no indefinite or definite articles, no “a,” “an,” or “the.” Articles are generally implicitly understood from the context. The main literary dialect of ancient Greek, just to keep things spicy, has a definite article but no indefinite article. This seems as foreign as outer space to native English speakers—you’re able to say “the lexicographer” but not “a lexicographer”? In Attic Greek, no, that’s not possible. The indefinite article, as in Latin, was implied by context. However, if we go a little further back to Homeric Greek, then there are no articles at all, like in Latin. This is not particularly helpful for English grammarians, because our language is lousy with articles.
Given that our parts of speech are modeled on Latin and Greek, and neither Latin nor Greek has the articles that English has, what part of speech should a lexicographer give “a”?
Gil’s “Quirky Little Grammar” provides a cheat sheet with quick paradigms to help clarify common uses. These paradigms are often dotted liberally with warnings about the many pitfalls awaiting lexicographers as they begin pulling this sticky mess of a language apart to peer at its entrails. Here is the paragraph on articles in the “Quirky Little Grammar”:
4.2 Article. There are three: the indefinite articles a and an and the definite article the. Not much room for confusion here, right? All three are also prepositions (six cents a mile; 35 miles an hour; $10 the bottle), and the is an adverb (the sooner the better). In more sophisticated grammars, articles are one kind of determiner.
The entirety of Gil’s grammar is like this: here is a part of speech, and here are all the ways that this particular part of speech will drive you crazy as you attempt to parse its uses. The main sections explain the basic attributes of one part of speech, and the subsections list all the possible deviations from those basic attributes.
The reality is that your high-school English teachers lied to you about what words can do because doing so makes English much, much simpler. Yes, conjunctions connect two clauses (“this is stupid and I’m not listening anymore”), but certain types of conjunctions show a subordinate relationship between the clauses, and those conjunctions look a lot like adverbs (“she acts as if I care”). Prepositions, you learned, always introduce a noun or a noun phrase (“he let the cat inside the house”). But your teacher didn’t tell you that sometimes prepositions don’t introduce a noun or a noun phrase, because that noun or noun phrase is understood (“he let the cat inside”). Everyone knows that adverbs answer the questions “who?” “what?” “when?” “where?” “why?” and “how?” but few people realize that conjunctions and prepositions can do the same thing. Gil notes that no one has bothered to provide a compendious description of what a noun is because everyone is supposed to know what a noun is. “Person, place, thing” is wholly inadequate: “hope” is a noun, as is “murder.” Are those people, places, or things?
The hardest words to sort grammatically are the ones that no one ever notices—the small ubiquities of English. Ask any lexicographer who has been at this gig for a while what word had them hunched over their cubicle at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, hands clutched to their temples, the office copy of Quirk open on their desk while the night janitor loudly scrummed with the big recycling bin, and the answer will not be a polysyllabic hummer like “sesquipedalian.” The answer will be “but,” “like,” “as.” They are sly shape-shifters that often live between parts of speech; they are the ones you will keep coming back to throughout your career to parse and re-parse, the ones that will give you a handful of uses that you stare at for days and days before muttering “to hell with it” and labeling them as adverbs. And because English is so flexible, two lexicographers with the same training can look at the same sentence, refer to the same grammars, tear out the same amount of hair, and yet place the target word in two different parts of speech. What can they do but try?
That damned “but.” What is it? As I read that sentence, Quirk to hand, this “but” must be a conjunction. Admittedly, I’ve backed into this decision: in order to know what “but” is, I first have to figure out what “try” is. I do all manner of nerd pyrotechnics to figure this out: I diagram the sentence, I substitute other verbs after “but” to see if they substantially change the grammatical feel of the word, I stare into the middle distance and give my sprachgefühl time to rattle the bones of “but try.” In the end, I decide that this “try” is the verb of a clause (“they try”) which has an implied subject. If this “try” is a clause, then “but” is a conjunction, because in function that “but” is joining two clauses—even if that second clause is just one stated word and one implied word. This is not an easy determination. It comes after another cup of coffee and thirty minutes of flipping through all 1,779 pages of Quirk, muttering curses.
I e-mail my colleague Emily Brewster and ask her to weigh in. Emily is one of our current grammar mavens; after Gil’s retirement in 2009, Emily was tapped to help write the usage notes and paragraphs for our dictionaries. She has a degree in linguistics and is whip smart, the sort of woman who can give you an offhand, spot-on grammatical analysis of just about anything and do it in plain English. If anyone could confirm this “but” was a conjunction, it’d be Emily.
She wrote back fairly quickly. She called “but” a preposition.
But, but, but, I responded, look at that “try,” doesn’t it make sense if you read it as a clause with an implied subject? (This was less a challenge and more a cri du coeur: I spent thirty minutes in Quirk, isn’t that worth something?) If that “but” is a preposition, then explain why “try,” a verb—one of the parts of speech that isn’t supposed to be the object of a preposition—is there?
Emily was happy to give me a fuller answer; she needed a break from her current defining batch anyway, as she’d been staring at citations for “ball gag” since lunch.
After doing some of her own nerd pyrotechnics on that sentence, Emily decided that there’s not so much an implied subject in that stupid “try” as there is a hidden infinitive: “What can they do but [to] try?” Emily and I both knew how that shakes out: infinitives don’t need the “to” to be an infinitive; infinitives can be taken as noun substitutes, which are one of the things that can be the object of a preposition; that means the “but” here is a preposition if you tilt your head and squint a bit.
There’s a lot of squinting going on, I complain. Is there anything in that sentence that hints that “try” is a noun substitute except for its appearing at the ass end of “but”?
It took Emily a bit of time to respond. Her verdict: “Ack.”
We were both sure of our decisions until we began talking to each other, and now we’re dabbling with grammatical agnosticism, not sure of anything anymore. Now you know why we like to shorten “part of speech” to “POS.” The abbreviation also stands for “piece of shit,” and we find it a fitting, oddly comforting double entendre.
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If lexicographers and linguists had their way, English would have twenty-eight parts of speech, enough that we could shoehorn most of those grammatical outliers into some tidier containers. (Linguists have proposed even more complicated systems, and they tend to use them within their publications.) But there’s enough grammatical variation in English that it’s unlikely that twenty-eight parts of speech would be enough. There are roughly a dozen different types of pronouns in English alone. The harmless drudges can talk fluently about them, because that sort of esoteric knowledge is always the province of the eccentric. But I am unconvinced that the vast majority of English readers and speakers need to know the difference between them or would care if they did. Even lexicographers can only delve so deep.
“My feeling is,” says Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of The American Heritage Dictionary, “it really doesn’t matter what you call it. If you’re defining how it’s used, and you’re showing what frame it’s used in, whether you call it a conjuncti
on or a preposition or an adverb—that’s just a category. The parts of speech exist for categorization purposes, to make it easier to find. When it doesn’t fit exactly, or when it bleeds—as long as the definition is there, you’re well served.”
A few years after my training, I was proofreading in the letter T and saw we listed “the” as an adjective. I thought it might be a mistake, so I checked the entry in our unabridged dictionary, Webster’s Third: adjective. Setting aside the proofs, I saw Gil leave his office and cornered him at the coffeemaker to ask about it. I knew our options for parts of speech were limited, I explained, but “adjective” seemed a little random. Not entirely random, he said—“the” did modify nouns, like adjectives, and we had tradition on our side in case of complaints: “the” had been entered in dictionaries as an adjective since the nineteenth century. But, I said, it seemed like an imperfect fix. The point is to accurately describe how a word is used, and that includes its part of speech. If we can’t get that right…Gil sighed. He had just come out of his office for coffee, and now someone who thought they were Webster’s gift to grammar was accosting him about the English articles. “Well,” he harrumphed, “given that your options are limited, where else are you going to put the damn things?”
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Lexicographers and linguists claim to be peeveless—we are, after all, objective scholars of language—but that is disingenuous. Emily Brewster confesses to caring about the distinction between “lay” and “lie,” and even after all these years stumbling across “impactful” in prose makes me blanch, and this is after I have had to goddamn define “impactful.” But there’s one ur-peeve, one particular and incredibly minor complaint, that lexicographers and linguists indulge in with all the zeal of a convert defending the one true faith: everyone but them uses the word “grammar” wrong.
To linguists and lexicographers, the word “grammar” has generally referred to the way that words interact with each other in a sentence or the systematic rules that govern the way those words interact. Grammar, to the lexicographer, tells us why we say “He and I went to the store” and not “Him and I went to the store,” or why we stick the verb between the subject and the object (usually) and not at the end like German does (as in, “why we the verb between the subject and the object stick,” which is perfectly grammatical and normal in German). Lexicographers are pretty decent with this sort of grammar, which is (ostensibly) objective and factual.
But when people who aren’t linguists and lexicographers talk about “grammar,” that’s not what they mean. They’re not talking about the systematic rules that govern where the verb goes in a standard English sentence; they’re talking about a much broader view of language. To them, “grammar” is a loose conglomeration of stylistic word choices that get codified into right and wrong, misspellings that every English speaker has made at some point in their life and yet are branded as “bad grammar,” half-remembered “rules” about usage shamed into them by their middle-school English teachers, and personal, sometimes irrational, dislikes. This is the grammar that shows up on Internet memes about “your” and “you’re,” the sort of grammar that people are referring to when they claim you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, the grammar that is invoked when people complain that the “10 items or less” sign at the grocery store is “bad grammar.”
This sort of grammar is likely something you, dear reader, value highly, because it takes work to master and you’ve likely devoted a measurable chunk of your waking hours to mastering it (as have we all). Think of this sort of grammar like building blocks. The earliest stuff we learn is laid unconsciously and underground: when there’s more than one of a noun, we generally mark that by adding an -s to the end of the word; verbs go in the middle of a sentence, between a subject and an object; verbs can change their form when they refer to different speakers; and so on. This becomes the foundation that we start with.
As we go through life (and particularly through school), we collect more blocks to stack on our foundation: don’t end sentences with prepositions; don’t use the passive voice; use “were” for “was” in conditional clauses (though not always, and the exceptions are more blocks to collect later). The blocks become smaller, able to be wedged into any noticeable gaps in our walls. “Lay” is used with a stated object (“lay the book on the table”) and “lie” is used without a stated object (“I’m going to lie down on the sofa”); “who” is only used in reference to people and “that” only in reference to things; definitely do not ever, under any circumstances, use “ain’t.” We scrabble at these and mortar them into place, building our towers higher and higher and always comparing ourselves with people who have found fewer bricks or have built their towers sloppily. It’s all reckoned as “grammar” to us, by which we inevitably mean “good grammar” and by which we measure ourselves against others.
This is also the sort of grammar that young lexicographers are steeped in, and so when Steve Perrault asks if we have a “good grasp of English grammar” in the interview, we puff and preen a bit. Of course, we say, we have a great grasp of grammar; we have spent an entire life fortifying this tower with as many bricks as we could find.
Alas for us. One of the first things every lexicographer must do in their Style and Defining class is face their own linguistic prejudices and be willing to suspend or revise them in light of evidence to the contrary.
For me, this came down to the word “good.” In one of our early Style and Defining classes, Gil bellowed the word at us. “Adjective or adverb?” he asked.
There was a pause—everyone knows the answer to this, I thought; is this a trick question?—and I stepped into the breach. “It’s an adjective,” I said, memories of some language arts teacher from years past barking “Well! Well!” at me every time I said, “I don’t feel good.” You feel well, because “well” is an adverb; you don’t feel good, despite what James Brown proclaims, because “good” is an adjective.
“What about ‘I’m doing good’?” he asked. “Isn’t that adverbial?”
I felt not so good: that was adverbial. “But,” I reasoned, “you’re not supposed to say that. You should say ‘I’m doing well.’ ”
He smacked his lips. “And do you say ‘I’m doing well,’ or do you say ‘I’m doing good’?” He looked pointedly at me. We both knew that I had—just five minutes earlier!—answered his question about how I was doing with the grammar practice with “I’m doing good.” I was fairly certain he was about to fire me, or perhaps unhinge his jaw and swallow me whole, and so I tried my level best to melt into the floor. He ignored my discomfort and went on. “Good” has been used for almost a thousand years as an adverb, even though usage commentators and peevers have condemned this use. Dictionaries, he explained, were records of the language as it is used, and so we must set aside our disdain for the adverb “good” (and here he looked over his glasses at me) and record its long use in our dictionaries in spite of the rather pointless foofaraw around its existence.
Then Gil sat back and smiled broadly. And my tower—bricks began falling all over the goddamned place.
Gil made his speech in part because the whole notion that the dictionary merely records the language as people use it grates against what we generally think dictionaries do. Many people—and many people who think they’d be good at this lexicography gig—believe that the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that its job is to set boundaries of decorum around this profligate language like a great linguistic housemother setting curfew. Words that have made it into the dictionary are Official with a capital O, sanctioned, part of Real and Proper English. The corollary is that if certain words are bad, uncouth, unlovely, or distasteful, then folks think that the dictionary will make sure they are never entered into its hallowed pages, and thus are such words banished from Real, Official, Proper English. The language is thus protected, kept right, pure, good. This is commonly called “prescriptivism,” and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work
at all. We don’t just enter the good stuff; we enter the bad and the ugly stuff, too. We are just observers, and the goal is to describe, as accurately as possible, as much of the language as we can. This approach is “descriptivism,” and it is the philosophical basis for almost all modern dictionaries. All a word needs to merit entry into most professionally written dictionaries is widespread and sustained use in written English prose. You’d be surprised how many “bad” and “unlovely” words make it into written English prose on a consistent basis.
You’ll notice all the scare quotes I’m throwing around, but I throw them around advisedly: uses that fall outside what we think of as Standard English are given a moral charge. Well-meaning parents tell kids that “ain’t” is bad English; people sneer at those who use “irregardless”; we’ve each survived that one high-school teacher who has, throughout your paper, circled every preposition that appears at the end of a sentence and commented at the top of your essay “an A+ idea corrupted by C- grammar.”*3 There are tons (literal imperial tons) of books about improving yourself through better grammar, books with titles like When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People and the honest-to-a-fault I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar (and note the use of “poor” here instead of the slightly more informal but more common “bad.” The idea that “poor” marks quality whereas “bad” marks morality is truly a peeve beyond all other peeves—a real peever’s peeve. Well done). This attitude goes to extremes: an acquaintance recently shared with me his belief that when words gain new meanings, it is not just linguistic and educational degradation but an active work of Evil (with a capital E) in our world.