The goddess is grumpy about grammar. Yes, grammar. What does this have to do with love? Follow me here for a minute.
In a riveting and potentially tragic piece on the front page of the New York Times this morning, a story links an Austrian banker named Mrs. Kohn to Bernard Madoff--and states that she is missing, possibly in hiding from billionaire Russian investors, whom she apparently unwittingly led astray and into the giant global Ponzi scheme Madoff initiated.
"Mrs. Kahn's background could not have been more different than that of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villebuchet, the French aristocrat who committed suicide in New York last month after his firm, Access International, lost $1.4 billion," the story says. And indeed Mrs. Kohn attracted a different kind of investor to her funds--banks, rather than kings and princes. But the sentence should read, "different from," not "different than."
And in a terrific column by Maureen Dowd on Caroline Kennedy, in which she asks the question, Why, when we want so much to change the ways of Washington, are we suddenly asking Caroline Kennedy to be the kind of politician we essentially hoped to vote OUT? "She's smart, cultivated, serious, and unpretentious," Dowd writes. I agree with everything she says, including her vetting of Ms. Kennedy as just the sort of person we should be welcoming--but the word is cultured, not cultivated. Ms. Kennedy is not a plant.
I have noticed an increase in bad grammar in our most illustrious papers and magazines. I've seen, in The New York Times, the phrase "myriad of" in editorials recently--a piece of faulty grammar that would send anyone educated in the English language--at least up here in the Pantheon--up the wall. It doesn't upset the Times's editors, evidently.
And that won't do.
Why is this important? Why speak well, when there's so much else to focus on? And what has grammar got to do with love, or sex, or dating--the goddess's natural subjects?
Speaking well, knowing how to express yourself properly, is one of few ways we let each other know who we are and what matters to us. Language matters a great deal in every relationship we have. It's hard enough for lovers and friends to communicate to one another. If our language deteriorates, if we accept the slow erosion of proper speech and writing, we erode--even if slowly--one of our few and most precious vehicles for communicating.
TLG
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