Amy Stanley

It was like a competition to see who could be the most uptight. Lowth gave us an early suggestion against the sentence-ending preposition: “This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.” Lowth himself wasn’t completely against it (after all, he used it himself in “strongly inclined to”), just passing an aesthetic judgment. But later grammarians elevated this preference into a full-on ban, and by similarly specious reasoning objected to infinitive splitting and “they” as singular, despite centuries of prior English usage. The same Latin-worshipping tradition was responsible for adding superfluous silent letters to words like “dete,” “samoun,” and “iland,” because “debt,” “salmon,” and “island” look more like Latin “debitum,” “salmonem,” and “insula.” Never mind that “island” doesn’t even come from Latin, or that generations of schoolchildren would now have to go to extra effort. Many languages can’t have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so logical that no one would ever get knocked out. English spellers can only dream!

We could almost feel sorry for the depths of self-loathing that these grammarians must have felt, to be so determined to replace their own language’s forms with that of another, if it weren’t for how they infected us with it as well. While they didn’t wholly succeed at the grammatical side, especially in speech and among skilled writers who trusted their own ear or felt they knew enough to break the rules, they did leave us with a vague sense of unease at the whole prospect of the written word. Even after years of writing, most of us have a hard time trusting what we naturally think sounds like a reasonable English sentence, haunted as we are by the ghosts of misguided grammarians.

But while modern linguistics has moved on, and even modern writing manuals are scraping off the heavy lacquer of Latinization with more or less enthusiasm, we’ve acquired a new form of linguistic authority on our digital devices. Tools like spellcheck, grammarcheck, autocomplete, and speech-to-text impose someone’s ideas of the rules of English automatically—invisible authorities that we can defy but not avoid. If a writing handbook like Lowth’s or Strunk and White’s displeases you, you can throw it across the room or leave it to gather dust, but when you want to type a word that’s not in a predictive text model, you’ll fight for every letter. In her book Fixing English, Anne Curzan describes how Microsoft Word’s grammarcheck continues to perpetuate this same kind of discredited, Latin-based style advice and how her colleagues in the English department, while considering themselves sufficiently expert in writing to ignore or turn off the green squiggles, had still never wondered where the grammar advice came from. If English professors who question the authority of texts for a living haven’t thought to question the origins of their invisible electronic grammarians, what possible hope do the rest of us have?

Language features are not neutral in the way that the calculator feature is neutral. “Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change. Communication tools that expose us to more people may speed up the spread of new words, but tools that aim to help us with language can also slow down natural linguistic evolution by nudging us towards the versions that have already been programmed into the device.

I’m convinced that spellcheck is responsible for people’s consistent misspelling of my surname: my spelling, “McCulloch,” is never found in spellcheck by default, but the very similar name “McCullough” is always there instead, and when people misspell my name on a computer, they always pick the spellcheck version. Conversely, people occasionally misspell my first name, Gretchen, when writing by hand, but never do so when spellcheck is available. It seems that my names belong to two different classes of digital citizenship: one supported by the machine and the other rejected by it. This might seem relatively harmless given my German first name and Scottish surname, but I expect that if we looked at which names are found in autocorrect and autocomplete, we’d find that typical English names would be well represented and names from other languages less so. At a societal level, it’s a case of bias-laundering through technology that serves to reinforce people and names that are already powerful.

Default computer spellings are powerful enough to have created a shift in British English since the 1990s: while American English prefers a Z in words like “organize” and “realize,” British English has traditionally used both -ise and -ize spellings. But spellchecks have tried to prevent people from spelling the same word differently within the same document by enforcing “organise” and “realise” all the time when set to British English, leading to an upswing in -ise endings among the general British typing public and the perception that -ize is only for Americans.

In writing this book, I’m therefore very aware that upholding the old-school Latin worship is a political decision, just as it would be if I decided to go full-on grammar anarchist. I think it’s important to be upfront about such things, especially in an age when everything from books to tweets may later be mined to prove how common or acceptable a particular usage was at a particular time. Yes, I’m writing for you, the reader, but in another sense we’re all writing for the unblinking eye of Data. If the most enduring legacy of this book is the slight shifting of a point on a line graph in some yet unborn person’s analysis of this decade in the English language, I want to be deliberate about which direction I’m shifting that point in. What I’ve seen from several editors and lexicographers is the realization that we’re becoming trapped in a loop: dictionaries and writing manuals refer to edited prose in order to determine what is “standard” English, but the creators of such prose refer back to the same dictionaries and manuals in their editing, each waiting for the other to move first. I’ve decided to play my part in correcting for this bias by opting for the more innovative direction wherever I perceive a choice: going towards where I think edited English prose will be by the end of the century, catering to the reader of the future rather than the reader of the past. As a reader and analyst of data myself, I get a joyful thrill every time I zoom out on the English language and realize that we’re somewhere in the middle of its story, not at the beginning or end. I don’t know how we’ll be writing in the twenty-second century, but I feel a responsibility to help its linguists gain a broad cross-section of the language of the twenty-first by not lingering overlong in the twentieth.

To that end, I’ve chosen to lowercase “internet” and social acronyms like “lol” and “omg” and to write “email” rather than “e-mail,” and when I’ve needed to make a decision on other spelling choices, I’ve looked up which ones are more common in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English and tweets by ordinary people rather than which ones are favored by usage manuals, which has led me to close many compound words. (While I was working on this book, the Associated Press switched its recommendation from “Internet” to “internet,” so I have every expectation that any similar judgment call I make will seem boring within a decade.) I’ve adopted the retronym “networked computers” for what were formerly called small-i internets, and I talk about “websites” rather than trying to insist on a distinction between “the internet” and “the worldwide web” which is no longer active for younger and nontechnical users. (I avoid the now dated-sounding “the Web” or “the Net” entirely, and reserve “cyberspace” for jocular historical use.) I’ve also included a substantial proportion of absolute time references rather than relative ones, aiming to be precise about whether I think something is true of the early twenty-first century, the 2010s, a specific year, and so on, rather than saying “now” or “currently” and requiring readers to flip to the copyright page and subtract a year or two for preparation, as I’ve had to do many times when reading other sources. I’ve freely used the singular “they,” and split what infinitives needed splitting, and preserved all spelling and typographical choices found in quotes from other people, but I’ve otherwise kept to standard bookish spelling and capitalization and punctuation, and even suffered to have my Canadian spellings changed for US audiences. But, although it’s common internet usage, I have not lowercased names of internet companies and platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.