I load up the grammar-nazi artillery again

This time, the scrap I got into was on a grammar discussion board, when a person of many fewer years and much less experience than I have decided to upbraid me by implication for having absolute standards of grammar.  And I said (and she said):

> Firstly, “firstly” is most definitely a word. . . . Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

And there you go, citing sources I refuse to countenance, BECAUSE:

They’re all descriptivists!

There are two over-arching schools of thought among grammarians and philologists:  the descriptivists, who tell how language is currently being used, regardless of whether it’s correct, and the prescriptivists, who tell how language should be used, regardless of momentary fashions and popular bastardies.  Let the descriptivists go and be linguistic folklorists, if they’re so ardent to tell us all how people use words, but they’ve no business pretending to be experts in grammar and usage.  The business of a grammarian is to provide the standard of a language against which all else is measured.

I’m a prescriptivist, as were my earliest teachers, and as such I hold no brief for the fashion for descriptive grammar and usage that’s arisen since the Second World War.  This is why my chosen tools are Webster’s Second International (the last major unabridged dictionary compiled by prescriptivist editors), Fowler’s Modern English Usage (the original, not the 1968 botching), and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.  None of them has any use for what E. B. White, in the introduction to The Elements of Style, called “books with permissive steering and automatic transitions.”  Their authors knew the difference between properly-used English and grammatical horrors and abortions, and they made certain their readers knew which was which as well.

In Webster’s Second, the word “firstly” doesn’t appear.  There’s no need for it.  It is a neologism created by back-formation from “secondly” and “thirdly,” which do appear.  “Principally” covers the need very nicely, and I thus reject “firstly.”

> Secondly, your suggested replacement for “I can, however, make a request as to how you reply to my posts.” eliminates a very strong point.  I said “my posts” . . . .

Yes, and you still don’t address my point, which was that your whole paragraph was prolix and should be tightened.  Fix it as you like, but don’t use so many words.  Strunk and White, Rule 14:  Avoid a succession of loose sentences.

> Thirdly, in my initial post, I failed to put the “if” in “if any of us were horribly ignorant.”

As you will, there; I solved the same problem without the “if” construction, which I deprecate as sloppy.  (And again prolix, for that matter.  Strunk and White, Rule 13:  Omit needless words.)

> As to subjunctive mood, it is debated whether a true subjunctive mood is even found in the English language.

Perhaps others debate it; I will hear no such argument.  It does exist, and there’s an end on’t, say I.

> Also, you replaced my “wouldn’t” with “shouldn’t.”  Again, you changed the core meaning of the statement.

No, I didn’t.  I adhered to the rule of using “shall” or “should” when writing in the first person future, and “will” or “would” when writing in the second and third persons.  (Mrs. Williams, my eighth-grade grammar teacher, would be pleased to know that I remember her lesson so well, so many years later.)  Under that rule, “shall” takes the same intent as “will,” and should be so read.

> I think you’ve definitely got the nazi part down, now let’s just work a little more on that grammar.

Thank you, but I have been working on my grammar, and my locution, and my style generally, these last forty years, and I’m just now reaching the point that I achieve the voice I’ve aimed at for so long.  I know exactly what I mean to accomplish, I know fairly well how it’s done, and I needn’t worry myself with those who, due to their tender years, haven’t yet the experience and resources needed to do what I do.