The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

27Grammar Wars: The United States

JOHN ALGEO

1 Introduction

Grammar war is not a new phenomenon, nor has it been limited to the United States. The Greeks had a word for it – logomachia, “a war about words.” St. Paul used that term in his first epistle to Timothy (6:4–5), where he wrote of one who “is puffed up, knowing nothing but doting about questionings and disputes of words [logomachia], whereof cometh envy, strife, railing, evil surmisings, wrangling of men corrupted in mind and bereft of the truth.” In the anglicized form logomachy, it has been used in English since 1569 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). The usual sense is “an argument that is about words rather than things,” but because that is what most grammatical disputes are, they have their place in the ancient, if not honorable, tradition of the logomachy.

Logomachy, including grammar wars, is not limited to unimportant arguments about words, however. Words are powerful things, and disputes about them can have significant, indeed catastrophic, results. Because logos means “word, reason, order,” arguments about words may be arguments about the perception of order in society or, for that matter, in the cosmos.

To dispute about words is to dispute about how we conceptualize the world around us, as Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) pointed out long ago. To dispute about grammar, that is, about how we conceptualize words, is to dispute about epistemology – how we know the world. Grammar wars are thus philosophical ...