Fake Grammar Experts
A favorite question here at OB is: who are the real experts?
Most people think of grammar as an area where expertise is especially respected and organized; experts coordinate to decide the right answers and then tell the rest of us what to think. That is certainly the impression most English teachers give us. But in fact the "expert" grammar they most often teach was determined mainly by popularity among English teachers, not by what is most expert according to actual grammar experts.
Geoffrey Pullum says the classic Elements of Style is grammatically incompetent:
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. … The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it. …
Both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.
Notice what I am objecting to is not the style advice in Elements, which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harmless. Some of the recommendations are vapid, like "Be clear" (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like "Do not explain too much." …
But despite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy. …
The grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors' own prose on the very same page. … White not only added the anti-"which" rule to the book but also revised away the counterexamples that were present in his old professor's original text!
It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. …
English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.
None of the reviews of Strunk & White have looked at the historical context. Did the book first propound the style guidelines it announces, or were they already current? What concepts of stylistic virtue were in the running when White published the book? Answers to these questions would be more interesting than the polemics of linguists searching for battlefields to enact their obsessional mock war between prescriptivists and descriptivists.
Others have said it, but I found this piece pretty fatuous, given that a) Pullum really does not provide clear examples of what S&W proposed that is actually incorrect (or their own supposed errors of grammar), and b) he agrees that there are no agreed-upon experts, and thus in the end no rules (although I realize that he is partly complaining about people using S&W as the authorities on what the rules are).
One of the things he seems worked up about is the whole "that-which" business, although that seems to have been invented by Fowler rather than S&W. As an editor, I have noticed that this seems to be one of those things distinguishing British English and American English, with the former not obeying this "rule" at all.
Which brings up that S&W are very American, with many Americans admiring "efficiency" in writing (Hanson?). So, S&W are a great hit with their advocacy of brevity and clarity, and certainly the latter is generally desirable. Among no-nonsense Americans, this would be Hemingway, along with Hammett. Of course, this says that Faulkner is a naughty, and, Proust? Well, he is not American anyway.
Needless to say there are times when not following the rules can lead to problems, with the title of that recent book, _Eats, Shoots, and Leaves_ (Panda in restaurant) being a prime example.