Chicks on the Right:

I have no idea how I missed this before, but I did, and I’m kinda wishing now that a clever and competent reader hadn’t put it on our FB page, because I read it, and now my head hurts from all of the ridiculousness in this article. 

It’s written by an English teacher, and it’s about grammar and how oppressive and racist it can be.  No joke.  And because it’s written by someone who ostensibly cares a great deal about correct syntax and proper sentence construction, it’s written really well.  Unfortunately, it just says a lot of really really really ridiculous stuff.

Because the author is a social justice warrior (I know), she has a problem with “grammar snobbery in social justice movements” and believes that “purporting one form of English as elite is inherently oppressive.”

She believes there’s “a difference between understanding grammar and demanding it.”  She explains that there are two schools of thought about what entails successful communication; specifically:

Prescriptive grammar– which is what “grammar snobs” champion – says that there’s such a thing as one true, honest, pure form of a language and that only that version is correct or acceptable.

Descriptive grammar, on the other hand, argues that however a language is being used to communicate effectively is correct – because that is the basic purpose of language.

She uses an example whereby a Facebook comment that said, “That their was an example of cissexism” might be corrected by a “prescriptive” grammarian,  but a “descriptive” grammarian would simply know that the intent was to use the word “there” in place of “their” and they wouldn’t kick up a fuss about it, because essentially the point was successfully communicated.

And she actually suggests that positioning the “prescriptive” grammarian as better than the “descriptive” grammarian  is OPPRESSIVE. Why?  Because the dictionary was created by “a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal system.”  I’m not even making that up.  In fact, she insists that people who desire and expect correct grammar (prescriptive grammarians) are, OF COURSE, “privileged.”  Educationally privileged.  Class privileged.  Native Language privileged. Ability privileged. White privileged.

That last one is important, because it leads the Everyday Feminism author to a big fat discussion about “sounding white” and giving African American Vernacular English (AAVE, colloquially known as ebonics) credit for being perfectly grammatically correct and as perfectly English as the standard English we are taught in gradeschool.  To think or say otherwise is racist, naturally.

I don’t care how many linguistic professors want to come at me and argue that AAVE is a legitimate English dialect, and that it has its own rules about tense and its own grammatical structure.  Legitimizing a bastardized form of the English language by slapping a “dialect” label on it is pointless.  It doesn’t matter that it “makes sense” to people who speak it to one another.  So does Pig Latin. That still doesn’t make it proper English.  If it did, it would be taught in schools.  The reason it isn’t is because it makes sense for there to be one common standard language spoken and taught across a nation.  That’s what successful communication is built on.

But the Everyday Feminism author insists that positioning “the English that white people are more likely to speak as THE English” means we’re “creating a hierarchy where white people are on top.”  And, obviously, that’s racist, you racist proper English speakers.

The Everyday Feminism author says that language is ever-evolving, which I don’t argue at all.  The fact that words like “texting” and “LOL” and “brb” are now recognized words in the English language is proof positive of that.  But that doesn’t mean we should legitimize text-speak as an authentic dialect.  Recognizing grammatically correct English as the standard isn’t elitist or snobbish or privileged.  It’s just CORRECT.