In the fifth season of NBC’s “30 Rock,” Liz Lemon recounts the one time she went to Los Angeles. She asked a passer-by, “How do I get to 10?,” at which he, a rioter for Rodney King, interrupted his hell-raising to deliver this disdainful line: “It’s the 10.”
Every city has similar tourist bait: location-specific grammar quirks that show up on Urban Dictionary instead of in Merriam-Webster’s. In San Francisco, one “rides BART,” not “takes the BART.” “Hella” is to be used only as an adjective.
Around campus, Tele-BEARS is the personified villain of the Cal school system. Use of the third gender pronoun “ze” is taken in stride. To say you want to “hit the stacks” is relevant only to our own Moffitt Library and would likely be met with confusion on any other campus. We at The Daily Californian refrain from using either “chairwoman” or “chairman” but instead adopt the genderless metonym “chair.”
The point is that grammar and vocabulary are certainly not as simple as a set of fixed and universal rules set by uppity nitpickers. Both grammar and language are dependent on arbitrary factors like location or even popular culture (YOLO, anyone?) Grammar’s purpose is to provide language with clarity and specificity, and language changes with use.
Our ability to change language by using it correctly or incorrectly imbues every one of us with a certain responsibility. In 2003, University of Edinburgh linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum coined the term “eggcorn” in reference to a person who misspelled the word “acorn.” An eggcorn is a phenomenon in which a person mistakenly substitutes a word or phrase for words that sound similar. Eggcorns are very much like puns but are unintentional mistakes that have found their way our collective lexicon. For example, many accidentally say “The Notebook” made them “ball” instead of “bawl,” that they “wrecked” havoc instead of “wreaking” it and — perhaps most egregiously — spell “voila” as “walla.”
Do your part. Practice safe syntax.