Why I’m a dad who’s a stickler about my kids’ grammar.

There are certain things many prospective parents decide well before their children arrive—including some of what they will and won’t say in front of the kids. My wife Cyd and I knew we’d try to keep profanity to a minimum. (We had no idea, until our daughter Rebekah was old enough to be a mimic, how often Cyd says, as when removing a particularly noisome diaper from our young daughter, “Oh Jesus!”) Yet when Rebekah, who is now 2 and a half, started parroting our language back to us, we discovered a concern that had never before occurred to us: our grammar.

I started to worry that if I didn’t get my “whom”s and my “who”s lined up right, Rebekah would spend a lifetime running afoul of her English teachers, or at least of the ghost of my late grandmother Rebekah, her namesake, who never forgave her home state of Pennsylvania for the ungrammatical legend on its license plate, you’ve got a friend in pennsylvania. “It should be you have a friend in pennsylvania,” she wrote to her state senator. Now the license plate bears only the state’s tourist web address, which I am sure she would not have considered an improvement. What if I bequeathed to my daughter the habit of saying “a whole nother topic of conversation,” instead of saying, simply, “a whole other”?

Worst of all, what if she inherited my generation’s habit of saying “like” all the time? I long ago made peace with my own inability to de-like-ify my speech, but I have always taken some comfort in the existence of older people, parents and grandparents and aging teachers, who do not speak that way. They uphold the dignity of the language so that I don’t have to. But my grandparents are dead and gone, and here I am, raising two impressionable girls (Rebekah has a baby sister), and teaching the occasional college class. I was not, I had to admit, being the role model I ought to be. I said to myself, ”I’d better start speaking like a grown-up.”

I recognize, however, the faulty assumption here, that how grown-ups speak determines how their children speak. Parents often overestimate how much influence we have. And while it’s a contested question among psychologists whether peers generally influence children’s behavior more than parents do, nobody doubts the primacy of peers when it comes to language. The children of immigrants have the accents of the country they are born in, or move to as a small child, not of their parents. And the school and street are where they get their inflections, their slang, their speech rhythms. Parents can obviously expand their children’s vocabulary—they must, otherwise nobody would ever grow into an adult talker. But that’s about the limit of what we can do. As the linguist John McWhorter told me, when I sought his expertise, “People’s speech patterns are based mostly on their peers’.” End of story.

Still, accepting that children will talk like their friends when they’re with their friends, parents can still insist on a certain vernacular in the household, which we’re free to enforce with, you know, repeated floggings with copies of Strunk & White. Surely some parents in Cambridge and Swarthmore are still enforcing the antiquated (except in the southeast of the United States) h in the wh of “white” or “whale,” insisting on pronunciations of “hwite” and “hwale.” Perhaps under the sway of William F. Buckley’s example, somebody in the land requires of his son or daughter the yod, the inserted y-sound that makes “pursue” sound like “pur-syew.” I would never go quite so far, but I do know parents who monitor their young children’s use of “can” versus “may,” and also those who try to stamp out verbal hesitations like “um.” The question is whether my wife and I want to preside over such a regime.

Put that way, of course not. After all, while there may be a moral component to some aspects of self expression, such as the avoidance of euphemism—what the Bush regime approved must be called torture, not “enhanced interrogation”—there is nothing moral about “good” grammar for its own sake, just as there is nothing morally repugnant about trendy vernacular habits, like the rising inflection, common among adolescent girls, called up-speak (“So I’m saying to my dad? That I graduated? And totally need my own car?”). English usage is a matter of convention, and it changes with time; it was not ordained by God, nor by language prisses who think they are God. (David Foster Wallace memorably wrote of “SNOOTs,” the Syntax Nudniks Of Our Times.) To demand that my children adhere to particular linguistic rules, on the supposition that rules I was taught are fixed like the stars, would be nonsensical, and a bit tyrannical.

Still, anything does not go. My maternal grandparents, who were born soon after the turn of the 20th century, modeled certain principles of correct English usage for a few reasons (only one of which was snobbery). For starters, as the children of immigrants who never learned English well, they understood that life was not fair, that there were precincts in America where one was judged according to how far one deviated from some uncodified, but widely recognized, Standard English. They wanted to equip their children to use it. They also loved the tongue and believed that treating spoken as well as written English with care equaled respect for education. These are things I’d like my daughters to understand. Language is not, ultimately, something about which to be slovenly.

Tags: anne fadiman, david foster wallace, grammar, john mcwhorter, parenting, strunk & white

Mark Oppenheimer , a founding editor of the New Haven Review, is the author of a forthcoming memoir, Wisenheimer: Memories of an Articulate Childhood. When he has 500 Twitter followers he plans to send his first tweet.

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