Self-appointed guardians of grammar, prissy prescriptivists and other fussy folk who risk having a coronary when they come across a split infinitive or like employed as an adjective probably will have celebrated the 50th anniversary of William Strunk & E.B. White’s The Elements of Style in April.
For those not born in the U.S., Elements is a highly esteemed tome there that has reportedly sold more than 10 million copies. It has also been used by English teachers to unintentionally destroy the writing confidence of generations of American students.

What’s so insidious about this vaunted work? Let’s begin with its premise. “The little book,” as it is fondly dubbed by the authors (now deceased) and fans, aims to “write the rules and principles” of English “on the head of a pin.” The result of such foolishness is that Elements is necessarily given to blanket prescriptions and proscriptions with little explanation as to why – other than the authors’ say-so – a certain word or grammar point should or should not be used in a certain way.

Even the book’s title is problematic, as much of the text is concerned with grammar, yet the advice the authors dish out on the subject is shaky at best, according to linguists. Not that the odd error here, there and everywhere would have fazed Strunk, of whom White wrote, “He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.” Given that admission, no surprise then that Geoffrey Pullum, head of linguistics at Edinburgh University and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 17, 2009) says, “What’s wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors’ own prose on the very same page.”

For instance, on split infinitives, Pullum debunks the following from the authors: “The construction should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb.” As Pullum notes: “Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like ‘The dean’s statement tends to completely polarize the faculty’ places stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, ‘The dean’s statements tend to polarize the faculty completely.’”

My biggest beef with the authors has to do with their section headed “Misused Words and Expressions,” “data” being a good example. “Like strata, phenomena and media, data is a plural and is best used with a plural verb.”

On the contrary, data is commonly used as a mass noun, much like the once-plural agenda.

While the singular forms stratum, phenomenon and medium have established themselves in English from Latin, the archaic datum has been mostly superseded by “data point” or “a piece of data,” which is why we say data-processing. Yes, datum may still be used by surveyors, in certain scientific/academic journals and artificially so by a few general publications. The latter, though, are afraid to use data as a mass noun, as are 99.999% of English speakers, out of fear of being labeled as “ignorant” by the 0.001% grammar fascists. It sounds funny to say, “The data are wrong.” If the pedant in you overrules your ear to the extent of favoring atavistic Latin, that’s your problem. But leave my English alone.

“Hopefully” is condemned when it is used to mean “I hope.” So “Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane,” according to the authors, “is to talk nonsense.” Honestly, I believe such a blanket prescription is nonsense because context makes the meaning clear in the vast number of cases the word is used in this way. Unfortunately, grammar grouches seek out the exceptions in order to niggle, yet will overlook my similar use of “honestly” and “unfortunately.”

“Avoid starting a sentence with ‘however’ when the meaning is ‘nevertheless,’” declare the authors. Such rigidity is without foundation in literature, common usage or common sense. So make full use of the flexibility of “however” by using it varyingly at the beginning or middle of a sentence, provided you know when to use a comma with it, so that it is not confused with its second meaning of “to whatever extent.” However, expect disapproval from the purveyors of poppycock.

Other daft proscriptions include damning “insightful” when used in place of perceptive; “nice” is not to be used as in “I had a nice time,” but rather to mean precise or delicate; and hosted, chaired and debuted used as verbs are condemned because they were originally nouns. Well, you could have verbified me!

The world is divided into prescriptivists like Strunk and White and the rest of us. While we merely irritate these clamorous elitists with writing that is perfectly acceptable to all but them, they cause untold harm by stigmatizing what they dislike as uneducated, ignorant, illiterate or ungrammatical, thereby creating doubt, uncertainty, confusion and even a fear of writing for millions of people. ❶