Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, October 03, 2004
 | Getting Personal with English Usage
OK grammarians, today is Pet Peeve Day, a day arbitrarily set on this blog whenever I see another error of usage that drives me crazy. Let's talk about Personally. Here are examples of correct usage:
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Here are examples of incorrect usage:
- Personally, I object to the war in Iraq.
- Personally, I favor capital punishment.
This use of "personally" is incorrect for two reasons:
First, the word itself is not modifying any single work in the sentence. Instead, it's set in front of the main clause as a qualifier of the entire statement, and such a qualifier is weak and not allowed in correct writing. Ambiguous modifiers are always distracting and confusing. We tend to use words that end in -ly for these errors. The other major culprit is "hopefully". (Hopefully, we will win the canoe race. It's impossible to assign the word "hopefully" to any single word that it modifies.)
Second, the use of the word is illogical because of the meaning of the word, and there are two reasons that it is illogical. The moment a person states a belief out loud to one other person, it ceases to be personal. It is now public. The fact that statements like the one above are most often about highly charged emotional/political/religious topics indicates that they are certainly not personal at all, nor does the speaker intend for them to be merely personal. It is logically acceptable to say "I have personal reservations about the war," because the statement allows that there are private thoughts going on, but they are not shared, so they remain personal. It is also acceptable because the person allows that the reservations may not be moral, legal, spiritual, or strategic. They may simply be reflections of personal inclination: a distate for loud noises, squeamishness at the thought of bombings, anxiety about killing, no matter what the reason or justification.
The second logical fallacay has to do with using the word "personally" in a way opposite to its very definition. When a conclusion is merely personal, the speaker is allowing that the basis and authority for the conclusion is nothing other than taste or preference. It also indicates that the ultimate authority for the conclusion is something within the person. So if the reasoning for any claim is based on morality, Biblical teaching, logic, the rules of strategy, then any conclusions a speaker draws are not merely personal.
When a Christian says, "Personally, I favor capital punishment because there is a Biblical justification for it", the Christian has just contradicted himself. If a belief is derived from the Bible, the conclusion is then based on an authority. It is not based on something that has sprung up from within the speaker, so it is not drawn merely from personal inclination. It is illogical to say, "Personally, I think over-committing US forces in the Middle East has left us exposed on all other fronts," because there is a strategic reasoning that the sentence expounds, so there is nothing personal in the way the conclusion was reached.
Any time we write or speak about controversial topics, we do best when we rely upon moral reasoning, logic, facts, or even mutually held beliefs that we share with the people in the discussion. Therefore, the word "personally," as it is so often used, does not belong in such discussions. Our conclusions should rely upon authorities far more significant than that which springs up from within us. And we should never hold up ourselves as our own ultimate moral authority and source of truth.
