The Importance of Good Grammar

Quite possibly the best newspaper in Colorado (I haven’t seen them all) is “The Denver Catholic Register.”

Published continuously for 109 years, the paper is the main source of printed current information for Catholics residing in the Archdiocese of Denver. It contains Catholic news.

It’s obvious a lot of care and effort goes into each week’s publication. The Register is one of the worldly benefits that came along with our entry into the Church.

We eagerly anticipate each issue; we especially look forward to the wisdom that comes from Archbishop Charles Chaput and the crisp descriptions of Catholic reality that come from columnist George Weigel.

We benefit from the brilliant mind of archdiocesan staff writer James Cavanaugh, who pens “Breaking Open the Word” and other scripturally connected intellectual pieces.

The paper often includes stories or photos of people we know and love. Photographer James Baca consistently provides creative and informative images of subjects that lesser camera artists would find stiff and boring.

Are you with me so far? (Listen for the other shoe dropping. Hear it?)

See page 10 of the Nov. 4 edition of the Register. Read the story under the headline “Sister Cuaron twice honored for service.” The author is John Gleason of the Register staff.

If you are sensitive about grammar and syntax and clarity in the written word, you may get stopped in paragraph three by this sentence:

“The award is presented to a person based on their community involvement, promotion of family values and personal achievements.” Astonishing. Makes the skin crawl, doesn’t it?

See, this goes back to the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970’s. Women (members of the Other Gender) could be described as the Muslims of the day.

They were and are touchy, touchy, touchy. Wouldn’t want to write anything that would offend a woman now, would we? (Or a Muslim for that matter.)

We would be especially constrained from committing this gaffe if in their warped minds a writing contained phrasing that might imply to certain of these “Libbers” that the male was superior to the female – even if it’s just grammar.

Pardon me, John Gleason, if I belabor the point, but it’s important. Your sentence should have read, “The award is presented to a person based on HIS or HER community involvement, promotion of family values and personal achievements.”

The Libbers even objected to the sequence of “his or her.” They thought it ought to read “hers or his.” Lord forbid we construct the sentence saying only “The award is presented to a person based on HIS community involvement, promotion of family values and personal achievements.”

Or even simpler, without hazard of offending anyone who has gender, would be “The award is based on an individual’s community involvement, promotion of family values and personal achievements.” See? Gender gone. No problem. Easy, easy, easy.

Actually, it would be quite easy to follow the proper rules of grammar in Catholic writing. You’d never have to use the muddying “their” personal pronoun in a story about priests or nuns: It would always be “she” or “he, ” and the person to whom it referred would either be male . . . or female! Bingo! But I’ve even seen Weigel fall into this trap. Really.

Grammatically, it’s absolutely correct although rare to use only the word “his,” which can mean in this structure either a male or a female. The usage comes from the Latin, which utilizes gender and number for precision and clarity.

It’s a fluke of the English language, not an insult to members of a gender. But the rabid Libbers couldn’t see that. So now poor John Gleason, so horribly intimidated by The Other Gender for 40 years, cops out.

John is not alone. He drops over to the plural pronoun, “their” instead of “his,” just to be safe. So does almost everyone else. You see this horror frequently, even in the Register. If it just happened once, I wouldn’t be going on about it.

It’s an epidemic of bad language, instituted way back there by a bunch of strident lesbians out to change the way we think, talk, behave.

They won. The language lost.

Here’s another one you’ll see and hear ubiquitously, including in the Register: “He and his wife raised a beautiful family.”

Sorry. We raise sugar beets and we even raise pigs. But we don’t “raise” children or families, we rear them. Yes. We rear children.

I think I can blame this on the Libbers too. They are sensitive about the word “rear.” It reminds them of buttocks. So they object to the entire word and all of its various meanings. And we dutifully subdued males go right along with it. Well, some of us.

In recent discussions about Latin in this space, it was pointed out by more than one knowledgeable source that Latin is precious because it doesn’t change.

For the same reason, English is precious because it does change; it actually thrives on change. There are hundreds of words in daily use that don’t appear at all in my 1960 Webster.

You won’t find Sputnik in there. Or astronaut, for that matter. Meanings change in older words, too. Mouse and icon are examples given in last week’s discussion.

This is good. This is fun. What, for example, is a “dually?” It is, for you uninformed, a pickup truck with dual rear wheels. I am fortunate enough to own a “dually,” and I like the word. It’s slang, for sure, and it tickles me to use it.

By the same token, we have to be careful not to warp the math of our language. Gleason’s sentence is simply wrong. Confusingly wrong. Confusion is not good. Especially these days.

Do you dare, John Gleason, to mend your mistaken ways, to swim upstream against a flood of politically correct but grammatically incorrect language usage?

If your editor hasn’t the courage to clean up your English before publication, perhaps you could have me do it. I can help. I would do it for free. It would be worth it to me.

Mike missed out

Our longtime friend Mike writes that he missed out on the benefits of Latin, which wasn’t offered in Detroit area schools. He says:

"I think now I understand why my ability with the English language is so poor. Our teachers where I went to school from seventh through twelfth grades seemed to feel they were successful if they kept us from killing each other.

"Latin was never on the agenda. Shop classes were, along with work release. It’s a different world when the students in auto shop are asked what they want to be when they grow up and the fourth one says ‘a pimp’ and means it.

"Feel free to write as much as you can about Latin; it may help and sure can't hurt.

"Knowledge may not set us free but it will sure help us understand why we are not or why some people don't want to be."

Thanks again for your contribution Mike. And incidentally, you seem to have compensated quite well for what lacked in your high school education.

-0-

Word of the Week: Paucity. It’s from the French OR Latin, paucité. It fits in my mind with last week’s word “plethora” because they are antonyms. It means fewness, scarcity, small number, dearth or insufficiency. It’s either plethora or paucity around here.

Next Week's Word: Viscosity

(Wish to comment? Do you disagree? To share your thoughts with other readers, look immediately below, click on “comments” and follow the instructions.)