THE REASON WHY: We have no
British staff members at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired. Their version of English has become too
different. For all our slang and world
dominance, American English has remained rather conservative, while the Mother
Tongue has evolved a bewildering variety of dialects and slang vocabularies,
and, most important here, has rather looser and less consistent rules of
grammar and usage.
For instance, the English regarded try and with a lazy wave of the hand perhaps a century ago, and it
has gradually supplanted the proper try to, even in this country.
Eats, Shoots, and
Leaves provides another handful of instances. In this best-selling grammar and usage guide of a few years ago,
the British author not only lays down rules plainly wrong by our standards, but
she also doesn't consistently follow some of her own rules.
This brings us to the
reason why. What is so unclear
about, say, "And here's the reason"?
Think about what the reason means: the root cause; the why, so to
speak. The reason why is redundant, like future plans, and using redundancies is the mark of a careless,
sloppy writer or speaker.
By saying this, I indict some great writers, first British,
such as Rudyard Kipling, and later Americans who affected British usage, such
as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. So be
it. They could make mistakes like the
rest of us. Shakespeare occasionally
used double negatives. Pointing to them
as models is like using at Danica Patrick as a guide to normal hughway driving.
The same goes for the
reason is because. This is as
redundant as toxic pollution, and
certainly pollutes clear language.
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