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Smart TalkSmart TalkSMART TALK
by Dr. Manda Rynne

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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