Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome Ruins Language

Have you ever had your grammar corrected in ordinary conversation? Maybe you said "lay" when you should have said "lie." Or perhaps you mixed up the applications of "if" and "whether." Regardless of what your error was, you probably felt annoyed and confused - people shouldn't be correcting your use of English.

There are two problems I see in this matter. The obvious issue is that in most contexts, correcting someone's grammar is rude, and it can make the person feel uncomfortable. The other, less visible issue is that language thrives on errors and inconsistencies. The mechanics of an old word can change, and new uses can become widely accepted. Sometimes, new vocabulary is introduced by ordinary people creating new, unusual jargon. If people didn't use nonstandard English, the language wouldn't be able to adapt and evolve.

Linguistic development is similar to biological evolution. If every human being shared the same DNA and there were no random mutations among genes, our species could never change and advance, just as if every human being shared the same grammar and never introduced new word usages, language could never change and advance. In both of these areas, although most transformations are negative, almost all bad changes die out quickly, while good changes survive, proliferate, and benefit future generations.

Next time you notice someone making a grammatical mistake, don't be so quick to correct them. It would be better if nature could take its course and English could live life on its own.

Puns - Timeless Laughs on Reddit

When I need to pass a few minutes, I sometimes go on Reddit, a social news and entertainment website where users can submit posts and comments and rate others' submissions with "up" (good) votes and "down" (bad) votes.

Most of the time, there are interesting discussions taking place in posts with titles such as "What Is Something You've Seen that No One Will Ever Believe?" and "What is the Worst Thing You Have Ever Been Falsely Accused of?" However, more often than not, lying right in the middle of one of these discussions is a chain of user-submitted puns. For example, in response to a post discussing a surprising political move by Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, a user commented "Kenya believe it?" This small pun inspired 51 punny responses, completely detracting from the discussion at hand. All of these replies received positive feedback, with upvotes on most replies ranging from amounts of 50-100 each.

Many new Reddit users are amused by these pun threads and even go out of their way to start them and comment on them. However, after a while, users find that these chains become boring and commonplace, more annoying than humorous or entertaining. I think this is because users realize what makes a pun funny in the first place - timing. Lack of timing is why punny headlines and punny Reddit posts aren't usually funny - because we know that a news writer or a Reddit user took his time to craft the pun. When we laugh at puns, we laugh because the person telling the pun came up with something clever against the pressure of time more than we laugh at the pun itself.

Quality

In his philosophical treatise and narrative Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig hypothesizes that all of the world's progress and evolution is due to a need for Quality - a concept he deems indefinable. Pirsig explains, "Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates...'Quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct" (319).

So, if Pirsig can't tell us what Quality is, how are we supposed to understand it? A search in the dictionary yields the definition "high grade; superiority; excellence." For Pirsig, this explanation doesn't do the subject justice. One way to examine Quality, he says, is to experiment with amoeba. If you were to place amoeba in a plate of water with a drop of sulfuric acid nearby, the amoeba would pull away from the acid and swim in another direction. If they could speak, the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, would say, "This environment has poor quality."

Responding to Quality, amoeba will manage to survive and reproduce, eventually mutating and becoming more complex and refined. It can therefore be stated that Quality created the world we live in today. Through billions of years, organisms have responded to Quality and evolved. This evolution relates to the reasons why we can't define Quality. Pirsig writes, "Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself" (320).

It seems strange that a word may exist without a definition. When I first read Zen three years ago, I fought against the idea. I searched through my mind for arguments against Pirsig's meaning of Quality, but I could find nothing. Finally, after weeks of frustration, I gave up and decided that the entire concept was irrational and of little importance. However, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I found examples of Quality in everyday life. When I laughed, I laughed at Quality. When I heard good music, I experienced Quality. When I was tired, rest meant Quality.

Finally, after a year of pondering, I resolved to reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Although it still didn't make complete sense, I managed to gain a simple understanding of Quality. Since then, two years have passed, and I'm still not fully certain of what Quality is. I don't know if I or anyone else ever will be.