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Every so often, I find myself involved in conversations about grammar online. Every time this happens, without fail, someone will trot out some variant of the old saw “grammar is elitist. Who cares if you have every apostrophe or period in the right place? As long as you can make your idea understood it’s fine.”
Inevitably it’s someone with terrible grammar who says this, of course, but no matter.
There are a bunch of standard responses to this argument, but they all miss an important point.
The standard responses are typically something along the lines of “using proper grammar helps make sure your idea is understood,” or “using proper grammar gives you credibility,” or “not using proper grammar makes you look like an uneducated hick, and why should anyone pay attention to an uneducated hick?” All of which are true, but all of which miss an important point, and play into the “grammar is elitist” narrative.
The mistake people make when they talk about the value of proper grammar is in focusing on the person doing the communicating, not the person receiving it.
The most compelling reason I know to learn and understand grammar isn’t about making yourself understood. The real value? Preventing you from being played for a fool.
I spend quite a bit of time tracking down scammers, spammers, malware writers, and other lowlife vermin on the Internet. The Internet started out as a hack on top of a kludge on top of some interesting ideas by brilliant but naïve people who wanted to make a better world but didn’t think about the way the tools they were building could be put to evil use, so it was built from the ground up with no mechanisms for authentication, identity verification, or security. Several fundamental decisions made very early on, when there were only about twenty sites on what would become “the internet” and everyone who had an email address knew everyone else who had an email address, would later make the Internet a haven for criminal activity. (In fact, I’m writing a nonfiction book that talks about this right now.)
The Internet is swarming with scammers and con artists. Many of them don’t speak English natively; in Nigeria, for example, Internet frauds are the nation’s #4 source of foreign income.
Knowledge of English grammar is one of the first, best defenses against being scammed and conned.
Consider this, a fake Quora profile made by a romance scammer likely somewhere in West Africa:
This is a bog-standard celebrity impersonation scam; needless to say, this account is not owned by TV actress Kaley Cuoco. The man (it’s almost certainly a man) who created this profile most likely speaks English as a second language. Certain tells (“I got this page newly”) point to a native speaker of a West African language.
There are quite a few of these “tells” that can suggest where a scammer is from.
Native speakers of Yoruba, one of the languages of Nigeria, struggle with English first-person pronouns, which work differently in Yoruba than they do in English. So they’ll say things like “am a single woman, am looking for a good man” instead of “I am a single woman, I am looking for a good man.”
Nigerian scammers often have difficulty with English conjugations of “to be,” and rather oddly, will frequently use the word “at” in place of “have.”
Overuse of the word “kindly” usually suggests a scammer in India, particularly when it’s used in the expression “kindly let’s,” as in “kindly let’s talk on Signal.” The phrase “do the needful,” which is strange to English ears, is unique to India. “Please quickly” is another phrase common among Indian scammers. Indian scammers also tend to add a -s to the end of words that are already uncountable plurals, like “stuff” becomes “stuffs” (for example, “I need to get some stuffs from the store”).
Russian scammers struggle with English indefinite articles and often leave them out of sentences completely.
“I need urgently” is a phrase that is common to scammers in Myanmar but almost never seen outside Myanmar. “Against” in place of “at,” as in “I am angry against you,” is also unique to Myanmar.
Standard received wisdom is that Internet scammers make deliberate grammar mistakes in order to target only the least educated, most dimwitted marks. That’s (sometimes) true of phishing emails, which try to trick a mark into visiting a fake website like a phony banking site or a phony PayPal site, but romance scammers and confidence scammers succeed best when they speak convincing English. The romance scammers who make these grammar mistakes do so unintentionally, and at HKs (Hustle Kingdoms, scam academies in West Africa where budding scammers pay to learn scam techniques and buy scam scripts), scammers can learn better English.
The point is, knowing “correct” grammar (I put “correct” in quotes because grammar is a consensus construct that changes all the time; properly understood, grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive) is not just about communicating your ideas clearly, though of course it does help with that. It is also a potent defense against being scammed, particularly by scammers who don’t speak your language natively.
Weird, incorrect, idiosyncratic grammar is often one of the best early warning signs that someone is attempting to scam, mislead, or trick you.
This goes beyond Internet scams, too. Most people, most of the time, prefer to be honest. Few people are comfortable with telling direct lies. However, people are quite comfortable paltering—that is, lying without telling a direct untruth, by carefully constructing what they say to be technically true but to lead you to a false impression. People palter because they can tell themselves “I’m still a good person, I didn’t lie, everything I said was factually true.”
There are a number of ways to detect paltering that are outside the scope of this essay (I talk about that in the nonfiction book I’m working on right now, too), but one of them is grammar that’s just a little bit off. A palterer will torture grammar and syntax to make what he says technically true, by the most rigid definitions of “true,” but also evasive or misleading.
This is particularly the case in direct questioning, where a palterer will offer answers that seem to answer the question, but if you stop to think about it, actually don’t. Palterers may omit important information, add extraneous information that doesn’t actually address the question, or use vague language to avoid some part of the question; in all these cases, strangely convoluted grammar and syntax can alert you to the palter.
To sum up: It’s not about what you say so much as about what you hear, what you as the person receiving the communication perceive. Knowledge of grammar makes you harder to con.