Roberts Corrects Framers’ Grammar
Via Norman Geras, I see that Steven Pinker has a plausible yet amusing explanation for Chief Justice John Roberts’ bungling of the presidential oath of office.
How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.
Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”
[…]
In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.
President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.
I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s declaration that, “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”
AP Photo/Jeff Christensen
The NYT, via OTB, has an interesting explanation for the bungled swearing-in by Chief Justice Roberts. http://tinyurl.com/d2oajk
Hmmm. To pick a nit:
I think Whitney Houston that was…
Grammatical rules like these mostly serve to distinguish the upper class from the others. While I am no cunning linguist, I have heard at least one argue that the preposition rule has no other purpose; putting one at the end of a sentence doesn’t cause any ambiguity in English (although it can in other languages like Latin).
She covered Dolly’s original (from the “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” movie soundtrack).
Admit it, you wrote this entire post, just for the “cunning linguist” line.
I think that’s largely right. I never really learned the rules but developed a strong feel for “what sounds right” by having read a lot in my youth.
Some of it, though, was just the silly translation of rules from Latin without considering whether they made sense.
Ah.
More from Wikipedia:
So, it was actually a cover of a cover of a cover!
“She covered Dolly’s original (from the “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” movie soundtrack).”
And IMHO, better than Dolly. Dolly didn’t have the vocal range.
I completely disagree with Barry-Dolly’s version is by far the best. I never liked Whitney Houston’s.
I will admit only to stealing that phrase.
I was actually going to post on Big Bag on this very topic. Then I thought, nah, nobody cares about this. But, obviously I was wrong. D’oh! My first thought at noon-plus was, “Split infinitive! What were the framers thinking?” I had a poli sci prof at Middlebury who was a stickler for such things. I wonder what he thought.
Roberts made another small error that no one seems to have noticed. He didn’t say “do.”