Grammar

"E-MAIL" or "e-mail"?  "Bed and breakfast" or "bed-and-breakfast"?  "Mandarin Chinese", or just "Mandarin"?  "Smart phone" or "smartphone"?  "Mic" or "mike"?

My question isn't which of these readers prefer, but a more abstract one: which of these are questions of grammar?

The Washington Post profiles the Associated Press's "grammar and style expert" David Minthorn today. In raising all these questions (and Mr Minthorn's answers) and in describing Mr Minthorn as a kind of linguistic Solomon, the Post's Paul Farhi never once makes a crucial point: none of these questions has a correct answer at all, because they are not questions of grammar. They are all style.

Yet these questions exercise people hugely. Whether to hyphenate "e-mail" or not is one of the most trivial and boring things I can possibly imagine having a debate about, but the AP's recent move to "email" caused an almighty furore. I honestly can't imagine why. Arnold Zwicky said it better than I can: "this is not even a tempest in a teapot, it’s a fuss in a thimbleful of spit."^*

It's good to be consistent, and that's why the AP and The Economist (and probably the Washington Post) have something called a style. But this is just a series of subjective, almost capricious rulings so that we don't see "e-mail" and soon thereafter, "email", a "Ghaddafi" here and a "Qaddhafi" there. As the name suggests, style is a matter of taste: "First prize" or "1st prize"? "1996-1997", "1996-97" or "1996-7"?  Who cares, for goodness's sake?  Just pick one and stay with it.  

Grammar, on the other hand, really does render "right" and "wrong" judgments. "I spoke" is correct, "I speaked" is not. This isn't to say there aren't open or controversial questions of grammar. And there are meta-level questions about the sources of authority in questions of grammar, the old prescriptive versus descriptive argument. But even the most relentlessly descriptive academic linguist believes in "correctness conditions" in grammar, as Geoff Pullum calls them. Whatever your language or dialect, it has rules. Violate them and you will strike other native speakers as having made a mistake. 

I can't tell if it's the Washington Post's profiler, Mr Farhi, who doesn't get the difference between grammar and style, or Mr Minthorn himself.  I hope the culprit is Mr Farhi. Many people worship and slavishly follow the AP's style. They shouldn't, because the whole idea of slavishly following a style is more like fetishism than a real passion for language. But as long as the AP style is influential, I hope it's being set by someone who has a proper perspective on what he's doing. 

* I can't resist noting that the distinguished linguist from Stanford here commits what I was taught is a comma splice, which I would never knowingly do myself.