Grammar and Syntax . . . with Style!

Okay.  So this bothered me enough today that I thought I'd come here and put this post where everybody could see it.  While I was reading a semi-professional literary magazine (semi-pro meaning that it had pretty, glossy pages, looked nice and was published under the aegis of a major university) I noticed a glaring problem.  Now, sometimes I'm prone to hyperbole, but when I say glaring here, I mean that it literally leaped off the page, slapped me in the face and abused all my grammarian sensibilities.  Hopefully, you all could tell that I was being hyperbolic there, and will understand that a word did not actually leap off the page and slap me.  That would just be weird.  Regardless, it was a pretty offensive error, and I thought I'd take some time to explain what it was, why it was wrong, and demonstrate how it could have been avoided.

The passage in question was from a short story and I won't go into any detail about who wrote it and where it was published.  That might be embarrassing for the author, as well as for the editors and publishers of said journal.  The line went something like this: "The Lewis' will be coming over for dinner tonight."

If you immediately see the problem there, good for you; keep reading, anyway.  If you don't see it, keep reading and I'll let you know what's going on.

The problem is "Lewis'."  From context, we know that this word is plural.  It refers to multiple members of the family Lewis.  In English, anytime you want to make a word plural, you add "s" or "es."  Are there exceptions?  You bet your ass there are.  But we'll get to that later.  In this instance, to make "Lewis" plural all you have to do is add "es" to the end.  It doesn't get any harder than that.  "The Lewises will be coming over for dinner tonight."

Two things quickly become apparent when you spell it out that way, though.  If you're on a computer with any sort of spell-check, it'll probably flag the word as misspelled.  You might be tempted to replace the plural of "Lewis" with something that the spell-check program insists is the proper spelling: "Lewis'"  But now you have another problem, because in English, that little apostrophe means one of two things.  Either you've contracted a word ("it is because" becomes "it's because") or you want to say that something belongs to something (or someone) else.  For example "That's Lewis's dog."

Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're saying.  "Lewis" ends in an "s."  I didn't think you could do that.  Not only can you do that, you darned better be doing that.  If you want to make it possessive, stick an "'s" at the end.  Now, if there were two of Lewis, and the dog belongs to both of them, or if we are referring to multiple members of the Lewis family, that's when the apostrophe goes on the end.  But in that case, the first rule still applies.  "The Lewises' dog."  But then you start to think that that just looks weird.  In which case, go ahead and change the sentence.

The one exception that I want to highlight is the difference between "its" and "it's" because this is a mistake that everyone makes.  And it makes you look like an idiot.  These two words do not follow the rule, that's what makes them exceptions.  "Its" is possessive.  "It's" is the contraction of "it is."  If you're having a hard time remembering, just think if you're trying to say "it is" in a slightly faster way.  If you are, then "it's" works.  If you're trying to say that the "it" belongs to the someone, then it's "its."

This brings me, in quite the roundabout way, to the point of this whole post: The difference between grammar, syntax and style.  You are going to hear a lot of people tell you throughout your life that your grammar sucks.  These people are usually older than you, more pretentious than you (notice the name of my blog?), or just plain wrong.  Your grammar probably does not suck.  That's because grammar is something other than what they think it is.  Grammar is the way in which sentences are constructed so that someone (probably you, but whoever) can express their thoughts.  According to Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, you're born with a grammar instinct; it's ( <--- see what I did there?) in your brain and there's really nothing you can do about it.  If you are a native speaker, speaking to another native speaker, and your sentence makes sense, then you are using proper grammar.  HOWEVER!

Sometime in the distant past, we decided to write stuff down.  This has numerous advantages.  It allows you to express yourself to people who aren't in the room with you, be they in another country or ten years hence.  But when something is written down, the nonverbal cues that a speaker uses to communicate meaning are lost.  This meant that people had to contrive and agree to certain rules describing how certain arrangements of symbols could be used.  Yeah, I said it: The whole thing is arbitrary.  That doesn't mean you get to ignore it.  Because following those arbitrary rules means that what was written five hundred years ago still makes sense today.  Baseball's rules are arbitrary, too, and you don't hear people grousing about them.  (Well, you do, but probably not as much as a ninth-grader learning about gerunds.)

All of this arbitrariness is basically what syntax is.  These are the rules that ensure language makes sense beyond the ten seconds it took you to say something.

Now, here's where style comes in.  You can't mess with syntax and grammar much.  They simply are and they're better left alone.  But they're a lot more flexible than most people think.  I'm sure you've noticed at least several grammatical or syntactic errors in this post (if you're of the mind to notice such things).  But you understood what I was trying to say, didn't you?  So really, what were you noticing?  It turns out you were noticing issues of style.  These are inordinately and innumerably variable.  Why can't I begin a sentence with a conjunction?  Why shouldn't I use all those parentheses?  And what the heck is going on with all those idioms, colloquialisms, and contractions?

In the ninth grade this blog would be so smeared with red it might be unreadable.  And that's fine, because what my teacher was trying to teach me was a certain, sophisticated style.  It's the way that professionals write, the way that adults right, and it marks the literate from the illiterate; the snobs from the boors; the careful from the lazy.  That's really all that style is about.  It's a way of identifying who you are as an author; like most things cultural, it defines a sense of in-group status.  Remember that a "barbarian" was anyone who didn't speak Greek, and we've carried that definition into our writing.  Let's face it, though.  These sorts of classifications matter.  You should care about your style because people like your boss care about the way in which you communicate.  It is a reflection of yourself; ultimately, it could be a reflection of your company to others who care about style--people with money. 

So, when I started this rant, I was talking about something that is not a matter of style.  It is, in fact, a syntax error.  Even worse, because the error changes the meaning of the sentence, and fails to communicate the author's intent, it even went so far as to become . . . a grammatical error.  (GASP!)  Try to keep those distinctions in mind, and remember, that they do matter.

Also, it's "its."

*P.S: Words that don't follow the rules.

These are the things that mark you out as either lazy, unlearned, or both.  Maybe there was a particular reason for why they are the way they are.  I don't know those reasons.  If anyone asked you, you'd just tell them that's how it is.  (Also, people sometimes just make mistakes, so cut 'em some slack.)

In no particular order and for no good reason, here are some exceptions to the "s" and "es" rule:

Mouse: Mice
Goose: Geese
Moose: Moose
Fish: Fish: Fishes (What the hell, you say.  Turns out, if you have two fish in your boat, then you've just got two fish.  But if one is a rainbow trout and the other is a salmon, then you've got two fishes.  "Fishes" refers to different types of fish.  Why?  Who knows.*)
Beef: Beeves
Roof: Roofs (This isn't really an exception, but people like to say "rooves.")
Die: Dice (Which makes it "cast the die," if there's only one.)

What else you got?

*P.P.S: "Who knows" is formally a question and should be punctuated as such, i.e. "Who know?"  By tacking on a period instead, however, I have inserted a level of resignation that the question mark fails to provide.  See how that works?