Did key defenders of the Miers nomination botch the grammar? It's all relative. Relative pronouns, that is.
posted 10.31.05
THAT WHICH IS THAT OR WHICH
Does the use of "which" instead of "that" in a construction in which either adequately performs the role of a relative pronoun constitute evidence—let alone definitive evidence—that one has stumbled across a site thatorwhich is rife with grammatical error?
In a column published around the time of the Miers Supreme Court nomination and slamming rickety defenses of that nomination, Ann Coulter writes:
One website [the unnamed site is The American Thinker] defending Bush's choice of a graduate from an undistinguished law school complains that Miers' critics "are playing the Democrats' game," claiming that the "GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness." (In the sort of error that results from trying to sound "Ivy League" rather than being clear, that sentence uses the grammatically incorrect "which" instead of "that." Websites defending the academically mediocre would be a lot more convincing without all the grammatical errors.) The same "grammatical error" may be found in the following sentences of the American Thinker article as well:
There is a doom-and-gloom element on the Right which is just waiting to be betrayed, convinced that their hardy band of true believers will lose by treachery those victories to which justice entitles them.... He anticipates and is defusing the extremely well-financed opposition which Democrat interest groups will use against any nominee.... I don't dispute that some of these locutions could go. But any bone-picking about the whiches brew is not about the unambiguous violation of a clear-cut grammatical rule. One will find the same "erroneous" use of the word "which" in just about every major English-language author from the time of Shakespeare to the present day.
There is in this grammatical vicinity a cut-and-dried rule pertaining to restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. It has to do with the commas surrounding or not surrounding a modifying clause—the worst-case blunder being the deployment of only a single comma when either none is required or two are required. The result is that in many such cases one has no way of knowing whether the clause is intended to be restrictive or nonrestrictive.
Now, it is true that some grammarians want the that to be always reserved for restrictive clauses (which should not be set off by commas), and the which to be always reserved for nonrestrictive clauses (which should be set off by commas). But this is an injunction one should especially obey only when there is a possibility of confusion. There is no such possibility with respect to the sentence "The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness." Could any competent reader construe this sentence as if the meaning might be "The GOP is not the party," with "which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness" tacked on as a mere nonrestrictive modifier? Actual grammatical errors can often be mentally rectified by the reader, but no such effort is required here.
The Columbia Guide to Standard English offers a reasonable summary of the situation:
Many have thought it would be good were that always to be used to introduce only restrictive clause modifiers (The big dog that is barking is a nuisance) and which, only nonrestrictive ones (The big dog, which is barking, is mine). This neat dichotomy has been much recommended, and some conservative watchdogs of our Edited English do follow it pretty generally. But—especially in Conversational or Informal contexts—most of us use which almost interchangeably with that in restrictive modifiers and rarely but sometimes use that to introduce nonrestrictive modifiers. Then too we often omit any relative at all, as in the car I want to own, rather than the car that I want to own or the car, which I keep in the garage.... Best advice: use that or which or nothing, depending on what your ear tells you. Then, when writing for certain publications, know that you may have to replace a good many whiches with thats, and perhaps a that or two with a which, to conform to the "rule" almost no one follows perfectly in other than Edited English and few can follow perfectly even there. It is Thomas Lifton's reasoning that deserves rebuke, if it does (it does), not the alleged grammatical error allegedly symptomatic of a site allegedly pockmarked with grammatical errors. If one actually reads his article one sees that Coulter is making a cheap shot. We all know that plenty of web sites do incontrovertibly exemplify the rampant carelessness of which Ms. Coulter speaks.
I don't want to go off on a tangent or anything but there is a grammatical choice in Coulter's own text that one could carp about if one were discussing grammar and style and suchlike instead of the wisdom of the Miers nomination. Per Strunk and White, I follow the rule that with few exceptions, one forms the possessive of a proper name that ends in an s by adding an apostrophe and an s (to wit: 's) to the word, not merely an apostrophe alone as one does when forming the possessive of a plural word. So the word "Miers' " in Coulter's text should be "Miers's," in my book. This rule makes sense to me with respect to the purpose of grammatical rules, which is clarity of expression in a particular language, not avoidance of unseemly s-contiguity. And "Miers" is singular, not plural.
Was it Coulter who chose to form the possessive in such deranged fashion? Some editor? I neither know nor care, because it only proves that a different (though, in my view, inferior) convention from the one I follow is being followed, not that Coulter's writing is lousy with crudity and blunders. And I know that beyond a certain realm of the indisputably correct, we suffer unending debates about this sort of thing. I also know—and I hope no one will be shocked by this—that in the rush to get stuff done even the best writers on occasion commit what they themselves would regard as stylistic or grammatical errors.
By the way, the phrase "rather than being clear" in Coulter's column strikes me as an unnecessary lapse of coordination. I would have preferred "rather than trying to be clear." But let's not go there....
David M. Brown is the editor of The Webzine.
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