Behind Enemy Lines Thinking and feeling about grammar

Author: Andrey Tolstoy

Non-native English speakers arriving in Middlebury will be quick to discover the inadequacy of their own mother tongues when it comes to describing emotion. Far from the dispassionate academics the media portrays them to be, students here are adept at describing a whole gamut of feelings, including "happy," "tingly," and "the Fed should cut its key interest rate by an additional .25 percent." The campus in daylight is a sanatorium, with group therapy sessions held across all departments. Patients have the opportunity to share their feelings about English and Theatre, as well as the traditionally less emotive disciplines like Physics and Chemistry.

The colloquial transition from "I think" to "I feel" was probably gradual, but it only caught my attention this fall. Perhaps, the trauma induced by the economic crisis has blurred our cognition; or maybe we've cut down on our video game time and become more sensitive. Whatever the reason, people afflicted with the verbal syndrome are either up to something genius, or up to something that isn't.

After all, one could read this use of the verb as a cunning rhetorical device. Feelings, unlike thoughts and opinions, are immune to attack; or prickly at best. The next time someone responds to an "I feel" statement by making a logical dent in it, counter by saying your feelings have been hurt. The next time a professor expresses a point of view you disagree with, let him know he can't tell you how to feel.

In reality, though, "I feel" is just another example of sloppy language becoming a fad. The trouble is these fads usually stick. Separate words first grow hyphens, then morph like Siamese twins (to-morrow eventually becomes 'tomorrow'). The stately William Strunk, in The Elements of Style, lambasted us for confusing "hopefully" with "it is to be hoped." That battle is long lost. Grammatical genocide is committed daily when "people who" (implying that the subject is, or once was, a living, breathing human being) are cast into mass graves of "people that."

Here are a few more culprits in the vocabulary department: "Actually" should not be used unless subsequent information actually warrants it. "Basically" all synopses start with this word. In 99 percent of cases when it's used in speech, it shouldn't be. "Like" seriously.

My fear is that we are underestimating the impact of language on our thought process. We naturally discern feelings (physical sensation) from thoughts (mental process), and therefore have separate names for the two; but when we start using "I feel" and "I think" interchangeably, we eventually forget that they aren't the same. Academic discussion is grounded in epistemology, and saying that the means by which you arrive at a logical conclusion is physical sensation is absurd, if not plain stupid.

Stephen Colbert described this phenomenon in an interview with The Onion's A.V. Club: "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore… Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality."

I'm glad there's a celebrity who feels the same way I do.