When an irate reader wrote the editors of Writer’s Digest Magazine because of “incorrect” grammar I used in a poem, I was concerned.  I had written “my sister and I” after a verb:  “the ones my father gave my sister and I.”  The reader, a retired English teacher, said the magazine had certainly scraped the bottom of the barrel in finding me to write for them!

I was an English major and often teach Freshman Composition at colleges and universities. How could I have made such a mistake and missed it when proofing galleys? I knew it was supposed to be “my sister and me” because pronouns are in the objective case when they are the direct or indirect objects of verbs. 

Since my daughter Emily M. Bender is a linguistics professor with an undergraduate degree in the subject from University of California Berkeley and a Ph.D. in the subject from Stanford University, I told her how badly I felt about my mistake. She wrote to me explaining why she thought that I wrote “my sister and I” in my poem and she set forth the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar.  She reminded me that English teachers are usually interested in keeping the grammar prescriptive and unchanging by enforcing rules while linguists are interested in studying descriptive grammar, i.e., what it is that people are actually doing with their language that changes the grammar. Linguists even think language is alive because it changes over time.

Emily believed that when I was writing the poem it might have been as if I were talking to a friendly listener, one that was not expecting formality and one with whom I was building intimacy.  Therefore, I might fall back on the way people were currently talking.  This view certainly helped me climb out from the bottom of that barrel the reader had put me in!  The information my daughter shared helped me realize that in writing poetry, my ear is tuned to the way people speak, including myself in my own thoughts.  In prose, though, I more often resort to my formal English grammar training.

I am not advocating that we abandon our grammar lessons, just that we also use our ear and listen for the music of language as it is actually spoken.

I know that the following information on prescriptive grammar will give you lots to consider and enjoy about our language and the way we hear it.

Emily M. Bender’s Letter on Linguists’ Understanding of Grammar:

First, here are some things that linguists have found out about language.  All varieties of language are systematic, including languages without written traditions, stigmatized dialects of English (e.g., African American Vernacular English, or Ebonics), and slang.  For instance, at Stanford University, Ivan Sag opens his intro to syntax class with this set of examples:

(1) Screw you!
(2) Go screw yourself!
(3) Screw yourself!
(4) Go screw you!

The native speakers in the class always agree that the first two sound perfectly natural, the third one sounds pretty good, and the last one sounds odd or wrong.  Then he asks what grade they learned that rule in, and everyone laughs!  This example shows that when people are speaking informally, they’re still following rules — rules that they don’t think about and certainly never studied.

The next thing about language is that all languages are always changing.  Many people know that French and Spanish and Italian are all descended from Latin, but most don’t think about it long enough to realize that the change happened slowly.  It’s not like Latin speakers went to bed and woke up the next day speaking Italian or Spanish.  Rather, in all of the places that Latin was spoken, it slowly changed.  And since the people in those different places didn’t have such regular contact with each other, the changes from one place (say, Rome) weren’t the same as the changes from another (say, Barcelona).  Early on in the process, people from Rome probably thought that the folks in Barcelona spoke Latin with a funny accent (similar to how Americans view British speakers of English).  But eventually, enough changes piled up in both places that Rome speakers and Barcelona speakers couldn’t understand each other anymore.

But it’s actually even messier than you might think.  It’s not like all of the people inside the borders of Italy shared one set of changes.  Rather, there was a smooth dialect continuum so that people in neighboring villages could always understand each other, but if you took people from villages that were far enough apart (say, Rome and Barcelona), they couldn’t understand each other.  At some point, the dialect of the capital was declared a standard, and everyone within the boarders of Italy was pressured to speak that standard.  I don’t know the details for Italy, but this story usually involves the establishment of a national educational system through which people are taught the standard.  (The story is a bit more complicated in Spain — there’s actually still two competing standards there, Spanish and Catalan.)

Linguists distinguish between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, and aim to write descriptive grammars.  Descriptive grammars describe the rules that people use unconsciously, like the screw you rule above.  Prescriptive rules are rules about how people are supposed to speak or about what is considered the correct way of speaking. Another way to put that is descriptive grammar describes language as it is.  Prescriptive grammar is about what people think the language should be.

There’s three basic sources for prescriptive rules:

I. As a reaction to language change, some prescriptive rules try to preserve the language the way it used to be.  This is where we see the first part of the “and I” story.  English used to have a full-fledged case system like German or Latin, so that nouns appeared in different cases depending on where they were in the sentence.  (Nominative case for subjects, accusative case for direct objects, dative case for indirect objects, etc.)  [Side note: Languages range in the number of cases they have from 0 (Chinese) to 17 (Finnish).  German and Latin have fairly simple case systems on that scale.]  The English case markers appeared at the end of words.  Over time, changes in pronunciation wore away at the case markers, so that now we only have case distinctions on pronouns:

(5) I see him.
(6) He sees me.

(7) Kim and me went to the store.
(8) Me and Kim went to the store.

When kids come to school saying things like (7) and (8), they are taught to say (9) instead:

(9) Kim and I went to the store.

This is a case of a prescriptive rule that is trying to resist language change.  However, even though school teachers are pretty thorough about this one, the change is still taking place.  I think most people would agree that (10) sounds prescriptively “bad”, but that neither (11) nor (12) really sounds right either: [This was noticed by Jeffrey Parrott, ms.]

(10) John and them went to the store
(11) They and John went to the store.
(12) John and they went to the store.

Faced with this dilemma, speakers resort to other ways of expressing the same (or similar enough) ideas:

(13) John and those guys went to the store.
(14) They went to the store with John.

Linguists don’t yet know why, but the prescriptive rule about case in coordinated pronouns is only really sticking with “I”.  And it’s also introducing a change of its own.  When speakers who say (7) or (8) are corrected to say (9), they aren’t always told why (9) is correct.

Given just that evidence, there’s really two reasons that (9) could be right: The first is the “real” one, that only nominative pronouns should be used as subjects, even if the subject is coordinate.  But the second possible reason might be easier to come by, namely, that the nominative form (i.e., “I”) must be used in case of coordination.

The result is that there are probably many speakers of English who believe that “me and Kim” is impolite and/or unsophisticated, while “Kim and I” is the proper way to say it, always.  The result is that people use “and I” coordinations, even in object position.  Examples include “my sister and I” from your poem, as well as this example from Samuel Pepys diary (written in 1666!).

(15) I pity her, and will do her what kindness I can; yet I observe
something of ill-nature in myself, more then should be: that I
am colder towards her in my charity then I should be to one so
painful as he and she have been, and full of kindness to their
power to my wife and I.

II. In the process of language standardization, some prescriptive rules try to make a local dialect more like the standard (i.e., the dialect from somewhere else that got chosen to be the standard).  An example of this is the rule against “double negatives”.  For some speakers, it is perfectly natural (and systematic) to say things like this:

(16) I didn’t see nothing.

But by the rules of Standard English (which are also natural), the same idea is expressed like this:

(17) I didn’t see anything.

Speakers who say (16) naturally are told that that’s wrong, or illogical.  In fact, it’s just a matter of dialect difference.  (16) and (17) both represent perfectly consistent, natural, and functional linguistic systems, but (17) is from the dialect that got promoted to Standard, and so (16) is stigmatized.  In fact, plenty of perfectly respectable languages (including French) use the equivalent of (16), even in their standard varieties.  Here’s how to say it in French:

(18) Je n’ai     rien    vu.
I  not+have nothing seen.

III.  Finally, some prescriptive rules come from grammarians studying other languages (in the case of English, typically French or Latin), and trying to make English more like those languages.  I believe that the rule that says “do not end a sentence with a preposition” (aka “a preposition is something you should never end a sentence with”) is one such example.  I think the source for this rule was French.  My favorite example for debunking it is the following story: There once was a little boy who lived in a two story house.  His bedroom was on the second floor, and his toys and books were stored in the playroom on the first floor.  Every night, his dad would bring up a story book and read it to the little boy before he went to bed.  One night, the dad brought up a book that the boy didn’t like, and the boy said: “But Dad, what did you bring the book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?”

The last sentence of that story ends in a sequence of FIVE prepositions. But it still sounds like perfectly natural, comprehensible English. What the example shows us is that nothing about English itself prohibits stranding prepositions at the end of a sentence, although such a rule might in fact apply in other languages.  (In fact, it’s not the fact of being at the end of a sentence, but rather simply prepositions appearing without their objects that would be bad in such a language, so that (19), (20) and (21) should be equally bad.)

(19) Who were you talking to?
(20) Who were you talking to over there?
(21) Who were you talking to about me?

In summary, prescriptive rules can come from attempts to preserve an older state of the language, attempts to make other dialects conform to some standard, or attempts to make English be more like some other, prestigious language.  In all cases, prescriptive rules contrast with the natural rules that all speakers learn as they learn their native dialects.  However, the prescriptive rules are still real and still a part of our linguistic heritage.  Together they help to define a formal, “correct” style that we learn in school to use in certain situations.  What prescriptive grammarians sometimes miss, however, is that there are plenty of situations where vernacular, non-standard varieties are more appropriate.

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What shall we do as writers when what we hear and how we hear ourselves think do not reflect school-house grammar?  I think we need to listen carefully to the way people speak and to the way we speak to people.  In writing dialogue, we certainly need to honor what we hear.  And cases like my poem where I was “thinking” in the vernacular indicate that there are times when sculpting our own sentences we may opt for something that sounds right to the ear rather than sticks to the rules.

As writers perhaps we can rely on the following set of rules:

• Listen to how people speak and allow the dialogue we write to reflect that.
• Become dexterous with our own sentences and write our way around difficult sounding but proper grammar.
• Relax a touch and sometimes allow in the vernacular way of saying something if it isn’t confusing or too grating on most ears.
• Refuse to negatively judge other’s use of grammar in a knee jerk “you have done it wrong” kind of way and consider whether that writer is actually alone in the usage set forth.
• Coming in the very near future–more correspondence with the family linguist!