The entry on its versus it’s struck a chord. Many informative e-mails came in, nearly all sympathetic to saving the language.
Why should we care? One person wrote: “The trick is convincing people that meaning matters, that since language and life have inherent and unavoidable confusions, nothing is to be gained and much lost by adding unnecessary ones.”
One person, only one, argued that I should ignore grammar and focus on the content of the message. I think he is dead wrong. Here’s why. The truth of any message, its validity, is usually open to question. I must evaluate the content and its worth. To do that, I use signals. They include the structure and content of the message itself, indeed. But they also include the grammar of the message because that tells me something about the education and care taken by the sender to get the content right. Grammar and word use do provide signals about the message itself. The grammar and the message’s validity and impact are not uncorrelated with one another.
Grammar is a component of language, which is one of those crucial items of social capital that we share and that enhance our lives. That’s another argument for maintaining (conserving) the basic rules. If we allow or encourage chaos in the language, we raise the costs of communication. We all lose.
Of course, language changes through time. Slang often enhances it. New words enhance it. Words change meaning. One hopes that the changes are for the better and facilitate communication.
I have been told that I was actually talking about the use of words or style and not grammar. I think that view has some merit if one takes a strict view of what grammar is. I meet that criticism halfway (I’m not one to split hairs too finely), because the incorrect use of it’s and its necessarily involves one in incorrect grammar too. They are different parts of speech.
1:45 pm on January 10, 2008 Email Michael S. Rozeff
