Like (as If ?) Grammarians, Language Cops Go by Book

As I have often pointed out here, I am not a grammarian. I write by ear, but I try to observe the rules of grammar, spelling and syntax, in the interest of clarity.

Indeed, the language changes constantly, and yesterday’s rule may be today’s discard; but most rules are products of common sense; without them language suffers from ambiguity.

Some rules make no sense, and should be ignored. Infinitives ought to be judiciously split. Prepositions are often good things to end sentences with. None is plural as well as singular.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. My prose is fair game for the regiment of irregulars who scrutinize my every word and pounce on me when they find the all-too-frequent error.

The language leads us into some quandaries that resist solution. In commenting the other day about the author of an article scorning what he called language cops, I pointed out that his own prose observed the very grammar he appeared to despise, and wrote: “He must have learned it somewhere: perhaps, as most of us do, at his mother’s knee.”

Dirk Tousley, a language cop among my readers, pointed out the incongruity of my words, “as most of us do, at his mother’s knee.”

Tousley argues that, since most of us presumably did not know his mother, we could hardly have learned anything at her knee. He says, “I did learn a lot at my mother’s knee, but not at his .

“His mother’s knee does not make sense. . . . ‘ Our mother’s knee,’ might have slid by unnoticed, but it isn’t correct. What to do?

“It looks like this is one pronoun we’ll have to write around, if we are to be correct. How about no pronoun at all? Would ‘at mother’s knee’ do? It’s a poor choice, too.”

Tousley is right. That was bad writing. The only solution I can see was for me to have rephrased the sentence, as follows: “He must have learned it somewhere, perhaps at his mother’s knee, as most of us did at ours.”

My language cops are not always right. William A. Kline of Laguna Hills takes me to task for this sentence: “However, I have no doubt that my calling the President a wimp will provoke dozens of letters from outraged Republicans advising me to leave politics alone and stick to what I know about, like my dog.”

“Why do you misuse like ?” Kline asks. “I spent my professional life teaching in college, trying to help my students appreciate the beauties as well as the correct use of our language. When such a respected (writer) as Jack Smith misuses words, it is pretty difficult to persuade budding writers to be more attentive to correct usage of words.”

What should I have said? “As my dog?” That’s like saying “He looks as his brother.” “Like my dog” is OK.

I find that many good writers use as when like would have been correct. For example, “It shot into the sky as an arrow.” As would be right only if the writer meant that the object was pretending to be an arrow, or flew in the guise of an arrow.

The other day I found this on the editorial page: “The new court buildings rise from Van Nuys as the church once did from a medieval village, as if the Valley’s spiritual center.”

Either “as if” should be followed by “they were,” or the phrase should be replaced by like . (This writer, by the way, writes beautifully, and her grammar is usually impeccable.)

I suspect that good writers eschew like because they were frightened by language cop Edwin Newman’s fulminations against “Winston’s taste good like a cigarette should.” In that slogan, modern grammarians say, like should have been as since it is a conjunction that introduces a verb clause.

In fact, Newman was being a purist to condemn the Winston’s slogan. Bergen and Cornelia Evans, in “A Dictionary of Contemporary Usage,” note that the construction is well-established, having been used by Shakespeare, More, Sydney, Dryden, Smollett, Burns, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Darwin, Newman, Bronte, Thackery, Morris, Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Masefield and Maugham.

Like Newman, though, Tennyson was against it. The Evanses note that when a visitor defended the usage, the poet argued: “It’s a modern vulgarism that I have seen grow up within the last 30 years; and when Prince Albert used it in my drawing room, I pulled him up for it, in the presence of the Queen, and told him he never ought to use it again.”

I don’t know. Tennyson’s quote sounds apocryphal to me. Who recorded it?

Or maybe Tennyson liked to tell that story as a way of letting people know the prince and the queen had called on him.