“There is a wrong way and a right way to break up with someone.”
This sentence is grammatically incorrect. Because the subject is compound, the sentence is plural. The grammatically correct sentence is, “There are a wrong way and a right way to break up with someone.”
It freaks me out me that I didn’t know the first sentence was incorrect.
***
The freaking out was eased by the reaction of my two English teacher friends to the third English teacher friend who brought up this example.
One said: You have to tell your students that it is correct but you will, ironically, sound uneducated if you use the correct version, so use the incorrect version.
The other said: This is why I tell my students to avoid “There is” constructions.
***
I learned that there are two schools of grammar: the prescriptive and the descriptive. But both positions feel wobbly. Since English didn’t evolve from axioms, prescriptive grammar always feels dishonest or clueless and since the whole point of writing is to be honest and clueful, it can be hard to take so-called prescriptions seriously. But since most of us want to know “what’s the best way to write?” value-free generalizations are unsatisfying, too.
My take is this: we want rules but some rules are stupid. Who mourns “whom?”
Then there are colons. The rule is that they are terminal punctuation–i.e., a period–and thus need to be preceded by a complete sentence. The more you use colons, the less sense this rule makes. The whole point of a colon is that you have some more to say.
And then there is “and.” People who clutter every sentence with jargon, who hide behind passive constructions, who have never met an abstract noun they didn’t like or a concrete one they did, and who–lacking some handy jargon–always opt for Latinate puffiness over Anglo-Saxon clarity, have the freaking gall to correct me when I start a paragraph with “And.”
“And” is a transition no different from any other conjunctive transition (‘additionally”).
And I will continue to use it, just like Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson and John Updike and Martin Amis. And you will get off my back.
Or else.
