Splash No. 189 - Italics and Grammar
Italics and Grammar
According to many grammar style guides, you’re supposed to italicize words from other languages. It’s not lassi, it’s lassi; it’s not pyaar, it’s pyaar. It all seems so othering like it wasn’t enough that these words only imperfectly fit the Roman alphabet, destined to be mispronounced by the limits of the letters. What makes distinguishing all non-English words with italics so arbitrary is the assumption that there’s a clear line between English and other languages, that English isn’t entirely built on loan words from other languages. To name a few: bandana, cheetah, jungle, avatar, and mogul are common words loaned from Hindi and Urdu; curry, mango, teak, pariah from Dravidian languages. If we started to italicize every loan word too, the written language would be unreadable!
So, I’ve decided that I won’t italicize non-English words, preferring anyone reading to look it up if confused, rather than perpetuate the idea that the unfamiliar is something to be considered other, receiving, treatment unlike other words. Italics is a useful tool for identifying names of books or movies or providing specific emphasis, and they’re better suited to those purposes than just pointing at an unfamiliar word as unfamiliar.
It feels personal for me as well, as someone who has always lived among words that live beyond languages. I haven’t been fluent in Hindi since I was young, yet my family has always spoken Hinglish (Hindi + English) that includes words from Urdu and Punjabi and other languages as well. At the same time, I’ve never been able to read those scripts, so seeing them in Romanized text has been the only ever way I’ve seen those words written. Sometimes, I still struggle to remember the English word for something (usually food-related) that I’m more familiar with in Hindi. To me, speaking and writing have never just been English, so why would I start drawing a line now?
It’s not just the italics. These days, grammatical rules make less and less sense to me. I know the basics around subject-verb agreement or tenses, but I can’t tell you the first thing about how commas work or where they belong. I have long abandoned trying to write with correct grammar, even if means that Microsoft Word would attack me with green squiggly lines for all of my sentence fragments. No, I no longer write to be correct, I write to express, even if that comes with a few comma splices here and there. The more poetry I read and write, the more I realize that sometimes grammar just gets in the way, that maybe we don’t always need so much structure, that these rules had to come from somewhere and they weren’t always well thought out.
Instead, I have my own rules when it comes to writing — avoid being too verbose, avoid being too abstruse, or using uncommon words like abstruse (it means difficult to understand), be expressive, try to be positive and inviting. Those seem good enough for me.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - january 22 - some hardcore punk, some drum'n'bass, some bedroom pop
ARTICLE - "Good Riddance to the Red Delicious, an Apple That Sucks" by Rebecca Onion - I consider myself an apple connoisseur, so I'm very excited for red delicious apples' reign of terror to come to an end
POEM - "Dew Light" by WS Merwin - "I know none of that as I walk out through the early garden"
With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
Donate to those who could benefit from mutual aid Mutual Aid Networks
Thanks so much for reading! If you're not already subscribed, I'd love for you to subscribe here. You can also check out my older newsletters here.
Also, I'd love to hear your thoughts— you can reply to this email if you loved or hated the letter, or you want to tell me about how your day has been. I'm all ears.
, Ciao
Nikhil