Grammar Gulch

   Grammarians write the rules of what people do. Teachers instruct others that this is what you must do -- follow these rules, no matter how arbitrary and contrary to what the students hear at home or on the street.
   Linguists, however, point out that all dialects are equal, and the only thing that gives one dialect more prestige than another is that its speakers have more prestige. But this is a social judgement, not linguistic.
   Nevertheless, if an ambitious person wants to advance in society, he or she will adopt the dialect and speech patterns of those whose support he or she seeks.
   It's not uncommon, therefore, for politicians to speak one way in the halls of Congress, and quite another on the stump among the home folks.
  Even so, a knowledge and practice of the rules and definitions of grammar and words is the mark of an educated and intelligent person, and public figures, including politicians, ignore these rules at their peril.
   
   It has become a common practice among those who perpetrate information on news sites to put a question mark at the end of every sentence containing one of the five Ws or journalism -- who, what, where, when, and why.
   That is an error, both grammatically and linguistically.
   Why is that? This is why.
   Is this a question? This is a question.

   The difference is in word order. In what grammarians call an interrogatory -- a question -- the verb comes first. Otherwise, it's a statement.

   Politicians set themselves up as examples of what citizens should be, and ask others to follow their lead. But when they persist in using grammar in ways that diminish the language, they succeed in diminishing their own status.
   One example is the use of the word "that" in place of "who" when speaking of people. An easy way to remember the difference is to keep in mind that the pronoun "who" refers to people, and the term "that" refers to things.

   And finally, there are standard definitions -- general agreement -- on what certain words mean, and to mix them up marks the misuser as less educated than he claims to be.
   The current president of the United States regularly predicts that the Affordable Care Act, which he derisively calls Obamacare, "will explode."
  The appropriate word is "implode," which means the system will collapse in upon itself from its own problems.
  Whether it actually will or not is another issue, but at least the chief executive of all government laws and programs should use correct terminology.

   Finally, uptight teachers insist that the word "but" should always be followed by a comma.
   No so.
   Consider these two sentences: 
   1/ But that's not true.
   2/ But, according to experts, that's not true.

   In the second example, the phrase, "according to experts," is independent of where it's placed. Commas usually come in pairs, which enable the editor to lift a phrase or clause and move it elsewhere in the sentence.