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I By JAMES J. KILPATRICK » Universal Pren - * The woman who called the radio station sounded a little steamed up. Why were the host and I pleading the cause of good grammar? If a sentence is clear, she wanted to know, who cares if the sentences is grammatically “wrong”? ' Fair questions. At bottom, I suggested, the preservation of “good grammar” may be equated with the preservation of good manners. At every level of society, from the humblest to the highest, certain things are “simply not done.” I asked the caller if she would wear a string bikini to church. She said it was a dumb question, and hung up.
We except a certain deference to tradition, to the customs and mores of generations. If the only function of language is to convey meaning, then “it ain’t so” is indeed as clear as “it isn’t so.” Language .serves other purposes. It signals a level of communication. The difference between “It ain’t” and “it isn’t” may be semantically invisible, but the difference is socially there.
In a famous incident during the ;1992 presidential campaign, Mr. Clinton was speaking in St. Louis. “If you want a spring in your step and a song in your heart,” he said, “you give A1 Gore and I a chance to bring America back.” ' . Editorial writers all over the country jumped on Mr. Clinton for the.grammatical howler. Technically speaking, he had used a nominative pronoun instead of an objective profound, and at the level of presidential speech, this simply isn’t done. It ain’t mannerly.
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