Stupid Rules Deserve to Be Broken

And Ought to Be

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr

I am on vacation this week but Shelf Life is not, a fact that I remembered very late—embarrassingly late—so I hope you like screeds that have been kicking around the draft folder a while, because that’s what you’re getting.

The quote above, or variations on it, are sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson although there’s no evidence that he said or wrote it (while there is textual evidence available that King did write these words in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”). I’m not surprised that there are people who want to credit this thought to Jefferson, even though Jefferson thought it was just to enslave his fellow human beings as property because, after all, that was lawful. And also to beget children on your lawful property, which is something we do have evidence Jefferson did. This illustrates that the perception of a rule or law being unjust may be contextual. It doesn’t mean the rule or law wasn’t unjust at the time; only that there may have been people who didn’t perceive the rule or law as unjust in context.

English has a lot of stupid rules, on account of being a stupid hodgepodge language. It’s a West Germanic language originally but then it got replaced for awhile by Anglo-Norman French following the Norman conquest of England and also the rules come from Latin for some reason, also stupid. 

Latin, like many other languages, is inflected, meaning one word is changed to a different form of the same word based on number, case, aspect, tense, person, gender, and a bunch of other stupid stuff. English is also inflected but in less ways than Latin. So in English you might say “I’ll have one pizza” or “I’ll have nine pizzas” but in Latin you could not say that because those primitive savages didn’t have the concept of pizza. Or maybe they did, I don’t know. In English, “pizza” is singular and “pizzas” is plural and in Latin same deal, it would be something like “pizza” is the singular and “pizzae” is the plural. But then in Latin you also have to inflect your pronouns for gender (not just masc and femme, but also neuter—progressive). And case—nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative. English doesn’t have all that garbage, thankfully.

Anyway, English has this stupid rule that you can’t split an infinitive: You can’t put another word in between the two parts of an infinitive verb. For example, the infinitive of go—“to go.” (I’ll take my nine pizzas to go.) If you wanted to modify the way of going, for instance, if the going was done in a bold fashion, you could not say “to boldly go” and be grammatically correct, because you have split that infinitive and placed an adverb in the middle of it. This is against the law. 

Jail for you. 

Jail for you for 10,000 years.

But why is it against the law? Because in Latin, an infinitive is always one word. It is never a two-word construction—“to go,” “to eat” (nine pizzas), “to love.” The infinitive form of a verb is always one word. So you can’t split it. You can’t put anything in the middle of a single word without speaking nonsense, like when some of you say “a whole nother something” instead of “another whole something.” That’s nonsense talk. What the heck is a “nother”?

English has this stupid rule that you can’t split an infinitive because many of our grammatical rules (including that one) come from Latin for no reason and in Latin you can’t split an infinitive because you actually can’t.

Why does English take rules from Latin when the origins of the language are Germanic? Probably because of the Norman-French influence, if I had to guess, which I do because I’m not going to read up on it right now. Or possibly because Classical Rome (along with Classical Greece) holds a very special place in the heart of white people, who see it as the cradle of white civilization.

Another dumb rule is making kids learn mnemonics for stuff in school instead of just memorizing it, like how in school I learned the order of the planets in our solar system with the mnemonic “my very educated mother just sent us nine pizzas.” Like, what do you even do when Pluto gets demoted to a moon or an asteroid or whatever? What am I supposed to do now? My fundamental knowledge of the solar system has been obliterated. 

I can’t just learn a new thing, I’m over forty. You can’t expect people over forty to learn new things.

I’m saying this because a lot of people my age and people in my profession (and people my age in my profession), my profession being the grammar police, have trouble with the use of the pronoun they to describe a single person. “I want to be respectful of nonbinary people, and anyone else who doesn’t identify as she or he, but can’t they come up with a new pronoun? They is for more than one person, I can’t possibly use it to describe one person, it’s too confusing!” “What about when I’m reading a book and there’s dialogue, how am I supposed to know who’s talking if the dialogue tag says they?”

I don’t know how to tell you this but there were like hundreds of years of books with dialogue where nobody talked but MEN and nobody got confused. It was fine. It’s going to be fine. 

“English has rules, and I want to be respectful toward people but we can’t just break the rules.”

You know what other rule English had? The pronoun “you” also, once, referred only to groups of two or more people and could never be used for single person. The old singular “you” was probably something stupid like “thou” (oops I checked it was “thee.”) But you couldn’t say you as in “hey, you—yeah, you, in the pink shirt!” That was not allowed. You could only say you as in, for instance, “while confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities ‘unwise and untimely’” (referring to a collection of religious leaders).

But then people started using you to mean one person or multiple people because it’s just easier to have one word and now we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years and nobody finds it confusing. You can read about the history of the word you in this Online Etymology Dictionary column.

Do not confuse etymology with entomology: A good rule to not break.

Language rules are colonial in nature. I don’t have any cognitive dissonance around this. You can be an editor and also understand that enforcing grammatical rules is a colonial practice. This all came to mind because a friend and colleague the other day said to me that it’s hard for us, as writers and editors, to get over the grammatical aspect of opening up the pronoun class of the language to admit a new use. Yes, inside the bone prison where my brain meat lives, I had to get the hang of it but I learn new things all the time and it’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. If I can order nine pizzas from a tiny computer I carry around in my pocket with enough processing power to send a rocket ship to the moon, I think I can figure out one new word?

“Well your mother’s from a different time, you can’t just expect her to—”

Listen, my mother is very educated and just sent us nine pizzas from a tiny computer she carries around in her pocket. It is absolutely reasonable to expect her to figure this out.

We, as in the community of English-speaking people, own the rules of the language. The dictionary, thesaurus, style manuals, and so on, are a recordation of the way we use the language. They are not like the Office of the Federal Register where all the Federal laws of the United States are written down and codified and those are what everybody has to follow. It’s a different kind of rule and a different kind of register. 

When I was in elementary school, in addition to learning about the nine pizzas (the main takeaway, get it?), I learned from my fifth grade teacher that “ain’t ain’t in the dictionary.” She would say this in a super condescending tone of voice whenever she heard a child say “ain’t.”

Example 1: Ain’t is, in fact, in the dictionary.

Example 2: Under Merriam-Webster’s definition of literally you will see that the second definition of literally is “virtually—used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible.” Because so many people during the last 10 or 20 years have been using literally to mean the opposite of what literally originally meant, the dictionary now includes that usage because the dictionary is a record of how people speak our language. If the documentation was a set of rules handed down for us to faithfully follow, it would not be updated as our use of language changes.

Example 3: The same but with nonplussed.

Let me pose a theoretical scenario: You and a friend duck into a coffee shop to get out of the rain and sit down at an empty table. You lean down to sit your backpack on the floor and you see there is an umbrella already on the floor where you were going to set your backpack.

“Oh look,” you say. “Someone left their umbrella.”
“They won’t get far without it in this rain,” says your friend.
“We should let the barista know in case they come back for it.”

Literally no one would bat an eyelash at that exchange. No one would say, “Wait, they? What do you mean they? Don’t you mean his or her umbrella? How can multiple people have left one umbrella?!” Also literally no one would say, “He or she will be missing his or her umbrella any moment now.” 

People use they as a singular pronoun all the time, without thinking about it, just like people use the singular you all the time, without thinking about it, because it’s easy to tell from context in 99 percent of situations whether you refers to one person or to multiple people, and the other 1 percent of the time does it even matter?

Sometimes we have to learn new things even if they make us uncomfortable.

My very educated mother just sent us nudes. 

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