As I often say, my interest in grammar isn’t merely a fondness for "correcting" others. It’s about clarity and efficiency, about saying what you mean, about making every word count. I like to think about the ways in which language works and sometimes the ways it changes. That being said, I am not a pure descriptivist. There is a difference between standard and non-standard constructions, and there are some things you can say (and those things differ with differing audiences) that will rob you of any credibility you may have. Writing students putting "your a great teacher" on a college course evaluation and, on the other hand, people like me running around talking about "bling" are both very, very wrong, but for completely different reasons.
The overwhelming prevalence of the (casual, technically incorrect) expression "hello, it’s me" does in no way render "hello, it is I" wrong, for example. "Hello, it is I" has the distinct benefit of being grammatically correct. (Linking verbs, predicate nominatives, oh my!) The reason I mention this particular case is that it seems to speak to some of the recent capricious (and inconsistent, contradictory) blather about "grammar" over here, which you may blame for my return to talking about this fantastically interesting subject.
I’ve been thinking about grammar again–specifically, those little verbal tics that just chap my ass. One I find particularly rampant in the world of blogging (or "journaling," as many of these writers spurn the word "blog" for reasons largely unknown) is what I will call "uptalking."
Uptalking? Is the thing? Where you represent rising tone? With a question mark. It’s a part of the ubiquitous fashion of writing "how you talk" that seems to infect a lot of online writing. ("Oh, me? I just write? Like? How I talk.") Don’t get me wrong; I am guilty of some of the same things. Sentence fragments, mainly. I’m awfully fond of them in casual writing, but don’t go thinking I’d pepper my dissertation with them in the same devil-may-care fashion. As far as uptalking goes, I may well have tried it here a couple times, too. If I hadn’t tried it myself, I wouldn’t bash it so readily.
Not only are these writers not asking a question (rather, they are merely using the question mark as a typographical representation of the bimboesque, Valley-girl-style employment of rising tone), they’re often doing nothing more than obscuring their meaning. When I encounter a paragraph in which this fashion has all but taken over, my first reaction is to filter the question marks out–like I would had I gotten an email somebody had copied and pasted from a Word document, making the punctuation go all screwy. Filtering them out merely renders the entire mess more confusing, though, and I have to go back and begin again. Eventually I got used to reading Bimbo Language, but my acclimation hasn’t really lessened my dislike.
I think there’s also a sort of assumption that this aping of (sub-) human speech is, in and of itself, funny. It isn’t. Airheadedness alone, even ironic "airheadedness," does not constitute a joke. See also: Dude, Where’s My Car.
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