The mystery of ‘it’ in English. The most dramatic moments in grammar history. Ghost Town Mad, the song
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Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson report.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, in honor of National Grammar Day, March 4th, we're going to start with a hardcore grammar topic and then move on to some of the most dramatic grammar stories in history. And if you stick around to the end, I even have a fun familect song. This question came in from a listener.

Why do we need the word it at the beginning of sentences, as in, it rains quite often? Well, the English language has plenty of quirks, and this is one of them. Who or what is the mysterious it that keeps doing all this stuff? We find the word it in sentences like, it's raining. But what exactly is doing the raining? It's getting dark. Who or what is making it dark?

It's freezing in here. But who or what ordered the Arctic temperatures? And it takes time to learn a language. What exactly is doing the taking of time? Think of it in those sentences as a special kind of pronoun.

Most pronouns stand in for actual nouns, like when we say she went to the store, where she stands for Sarah, or squiggly ate them, where them stands in for the cookies. But this it is more like a grammatical placeholder. In formal grammar speak, we call this an expletive or dummy subject. It's kind of like putting extras in movie scenes when the real star is the action itself.

Let's break it down with an example about the weather. It is raining. In that sentence, it is our placeholder pronoun, the subject of the sentence. Then we have a linking verb, is. And raining is a present participle. It describes the action.

In that sentence, it isn't actually referring to anything specific. It's just there because English sentences get stage fright without a subject. It's like having a stand-in actor who doesn't actually perform but needs to be there just so the show can go on. You might have been confused when I referred to the placeholder it as an expletive.

Casually, we usually associate expletives with swear words. But in linguistic terms, an expletive is just a word that doesn't have a semantic context of its own. It only serves a grammatical function, like the it in it's raining. It's also worth explaining that the word it isn't always a mysterious stand-in for some absent who or what. It plays different roles depending on how you're using it.

When it refers to something specific, it's just a regular pronoun, like in I bought a book. It was expensive. Here, it clearly refers to the book. There's also an anticipatory it. That's when the word it saves a place for something that comes later in the sentence, as in it bothers me that people litter.

The real subject is those three words referring to a singular thing, that people litter. You could put the subject first if you wanted to. That people litter bothers me. But that sounds less conversational. Most of us don't talk that way. For whatever reason, we like it better with the dummy it at the beginning. It bothers me that people litter.

Not every language has this placeholder it, though. In some languages, you don't need the stand-in at all. Linguists call those null subject languages. Let's look again at our it's raining example.

Spanish, for example, doesn't need the placeholder it. Instead, the verb itself does the heavy lifting. When a Spanish speaker says llueve, which literally means reigns, the way the verb is conjugated tells you everything you need to know. It's the complete package, no extra words needed. English insists on having both a subject and a verb, it reigns.

Well, Spanish is like, nah, we got this covered with just the verb. Their verbs are super powered that way. Italian and Portuguese, which are also romance languages like Spanish, are similar. The verb conjugation does all the work.

Japanese rarely uses pronouns at all. The subject is often implied by the context. The same is true for Mandarin Chinese and Korean if the subject is understood. Linguists call these pro-drop languages, where the pronoun is dropped because it's already understood.

So next time you say it's beautiful outside, you can appreciate this tiny but mighty word. It's doing absolutely nothing, yet somehow it's an essential part of how we express ourselves in English.

That segment was written by Karen Lundy, a former Quick and Dirty Tips editor who's crafted hundreds of articles on the art of writing well. She was an online education pioneer, founding one of the first online writing workshops. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at chanterellestorystudio.com.

Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson Report.

In honor of National Grammar Day, I thought it would be fun to focus on the history part of the show. Because even though grammar and usage and punctuation are about simple little things, like where to put your commas or whether whom is still a thing—and yes, it is—

Sometimes, grammar gets messy. I mean, duels, scandals, and millions of dollars lost kind of messy. Let's start with what might be the most dramatic punctuation fight ever. It happened in Paris in 1837. Two law professors apparently got into a heated debate over whether a particular passage should have a semicolon or a colon.

Now, the details are a little fuzzy, but this wasn't your run-of-the-mill editing spat. No, these fine academics got so worked up about punctuation that they did the most 19th century thing possible. They dueled with swords, which was illegal at the time. Bad law professors. And yes, they risked life and limb over punctuation. At least, kind of.

It turns out that duels in the 19th century were more about drama than death.

French dueling conventions of the time apparently meant that the fight was stopped once honor was deemed satisfied, which the combatant's seconds often helped mediate. French author Marshall Proust also fought a duel with pistols over an unflattering newspaper article in which neither man was hurt, and some reports say they intentionally shot their guns into the air.

Going back to our punctuation duel, the professor who thought it should be a semicolon received an arm wound, and the one who thought it should be a colon walked away unscathed. Next, going back a little earlier to 1802, an American businessman named Timothy Dexter, who was both wealthy and eccentric, wrote a short autobiography called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress.

And it would be an understatement to say he threw grammar out the window. He defenestrated it with gusto. His book had no punctuation and random capitalization. It was chaos. But his life was so wild and his tale so finely told that the book was a success, going into at least eight printings. Still, readers complained about the lack of punctuation,

So in the second edition, Dexter added a whole extra page, an appendix with just a bunch of punctuation marks, and he told people to use them to pepper and salt the text as they pleased. And as an aside, he was either incredibly lucky or a master salesman because he got rich selling people things that seemed to make no sense, like mittens and bed warmers to people in the West Indies.

Next, you probably know about Charlie Chaplin, the silent film star and comedic genius with a little mustache. But did you know his grammar once became tabloid fodder? In 1927, during a messy divorce, his much younger wife, Lita Gray, told the press that Chaplin was, brace yourself, bad at grammar.

He had said she was not intellectually satisfying, and she countered by reporting that they had tried to learn Latin and French together, but couldn't because of Charlie's poor language skills. Can you imagine such headlines today on TMZ or In the Sun? Hollywood star can't use a relative pronoun. Fans stunned. Next, if you think Twitter fights are bad, try 16th Century England.

In the 1520s, two rival Latin grammar teachers, Robert Whittington and William Horman, went head-to-head in what historians now call the Grammarians' War. Whittington championed traditional rote learning, and Horman pushed for a more modern, example-based approach. Their conflict blossomed when some prominent schools chose to use Horman's Latin primer instead of Whittington's.

But much like our dueling law professors, this was not a polite academic debate. Whittington was offended by the preface to Horman's book, which he took as criticism of his own work, and he published scathing satirical verses about Horman and even posted them on school doors. Their contemporaries then took sides, each group publishing a flurry of biting pamphlets and poems.

It sounds to me more like it was a poet's war, but a couple of years into the fray, the Hormann camp essentially won when a primer by his supporter, William Lilly, was adopted nationwide. Next, we have a case where the stakes are higher because it actually involves the death penalty. Roger Casement was an Irish revolutionary, and in 1916, he was tried for treason after seeking German support for the Easter Rising in Ireland.

The language debate came in when Casement's lawyer argued that he hadn't technically committed treason because of a comma. The law, written centuries earlier in Norman French, was ambiguous, and it wasn't clear whether it applied to acts committed abroad. The answer on appeal hinged on whether a certain mark in the old document was a comma, a bracket, or even just an old fold in the paper.

Ultimately, the court decided it was a comma and Casement was hanged. Casement had wanted his lawyer to take a different approach. And before he was hanged, he complained from jail saying, quote, God deliver me from such antiquaries as these to hang a man's life upon a comma and throttle him with a semicolon, unquote. Next, this one isn't quite life and death, but it was costly in dollars and cents.

In 1872, the U.S. government was revising an earlier Tariff Act. And as with tariffs today, everybody was trying to get their products exempt. And one of the exemptions was supposed to be fruit plants, like lemon trees and grapevines. But somebody put a rogue comma between fruit and plants and actually made all fruit and all plants duty-free.

There's a big difference between a small selection of plants that can grow fruit and all the fruit imported into the country plus every plant you can imagine. Importers saw the loophole and exploited it, and the error cost the government $2 million, which is about $50 million in today's dollars. And let's end with one of literature's most famous messy manuscripts.

When James Joyce's Ulysses was first published in 1922, it was a disaster.

Joyce's handwritten manuscript was nearly illegible. He added nearly 100,000 words to the page proofs, and the French printers didn't even speak English. The result was more than 5,000 typos. And they knew it was bad. The first printing actually had an insert that read, quote, unquote.

It wasn't until the 1980s, when computers made it possible to compare and keep track of the many different versions of the book that had come to exist as people tried to correct it piecemeal, that a team in Germany was able to publish what's believed to be a version that is much more true to Joyce's intended words, after seven years of work and about $300,000 of expenses. And

And the researchers said at the time that they believed the corrections would actually change how people interpret the book. So what's the takeaway here of all these great stories? Well, for National Grammar Day, you can remember that grammar matters. Yes, it's about small things, a comma here, a wrong word there. But it can also be about egos, vendettas, dollars, and death.

So next time someone rolls their eyes when you talk about grammar, just tell them about the guy who got hanged because of a comma. Finally, instead of a familect, I'm lifting up one of my recent favorite familects. If you're a regular listener, you'll remember Sherry's story about a month ago about how her family asks if you're mad or if you're ghost town mad after they had a legendary argument at a theme park called Ghost Town.

Well, my audio engineer, Dan Feierabend, also loved the story and thought it had musical vibes. And I had just had Lex Freeman on the show, who, among many other things, makes songs. So I hired Lex to write and perform a song. You can find Lex at lexfriedman.com. And without further ado, here's Ghost Town Mad. Way back in North Carolina, a brand new term began. A fight so monumental.

Between a woman and her man Dad wanted to visit the Scottish Museum But Mom said, oh no way Four-year-olds care for that And so we remember today Are you mad? Or are you ghost town mad? It's the kind of mad that lingers Are you mad? Or are you ghost town mad? Like your brain's full of middle fingers

Some fights fade like denim, but some are strong as steel. And on that North Carolina, so darn angry in the parking lot. There it goes down in the sky, screaming and carrying on. And thanks to them, that's why we gotta ask, are you mad? Are you mad or are you ghost town mad? It's the kind of mad that endures.

Yeah, we're ghost town mad.