Being an English teacher, I can tell you a thing or two about quotation marks. Being somebody who sometimes types faster than I look, I can tell you a thing or two about looking at something that I’ve written and seeing misplaced quotation marks, too. Being somebody who’s sometimes too lazy to press the shift button, I can tell you a thing or two about going British style and using a single quotation mark,when we normally use doubles. But one thing remains true in any case, and that’s the fact that the stuff inside the quotation marks is supposed to be an exact duplicate of what was said. That much goes without saying, no pun intended. But what happens when you’re quoting a source whose speech is littered with grammatical errors? Minor stuff like double negatives and whatnot; stuff that won’t change the meaning, but will give some readers a reason to consider the speaker to be unintelligent. Should that be changed, or should it be left as-is? Well recently, there was an instance in the Washington Post where R*s running back, Clinton Portis was quoted with two sayings. Here’s the Post’s Deborah Howell…

Several readers of an early edition of the July 28 Sports section noticed different versions of the same quote from Redskins running back Clinton Portis in a story by Howard Bryant and a column by Mike Wise. In Bryant’s story, Portis said: “I don’t know how anybody feels. I don’t know how anybody’s thinking. I don’t know what anyone else is going through. The only thing I know is what’s going on in Clinton Portis’s life.” Wise quoted him as saying: “I don’t know how nobody feel, I don’t know what nobody think, I don’t know what nobody doing, the only thing I know is what’s going on in Clinton Portis’s life.”

What happened? Weeelllll, glad you asked. The editor in question is Black. So is the running back in question. And I’ll let him tell the rest.

Bryant, who just left The Post for ESPN, thinks the policy is wrong. “For me, having covered athletes for 15 years, I’ve always felt conscious and uncomfortable about the differences in class, background and race — I’m an African American — and in terms of the people who are doing the speaking and the people who are doing the writing. I really don’t like to make people look stupid, especially when I understand what they’re saying.”

What Bryant did is common among sports journalists, said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, assistant managing editor for sports. “Sportswriters have been making minor grammatical fixes to athlete’s quotes forever. The meaning of what the athlete is saying is not altered, just the grammar. It’s rooted in the belief that you shouldn’t embarrass someone whose command of grammar is weak. We have told our writers to run quotes verbatim or paraphrase when the grammar is horrific, but some old habits die hard. We will try to do better.”

What if television or a tape recording should catch a quote that Bryant changed? “I don’t really worry about it,” Bryant said. “I am totally convinced — along racial, class and cultural lines — that when it comes to white players from the South, reporters instinctively clean up their language. Redskins coach Joe Gibbs, in his own way, can sound as inarticulate as Portis in terms of perfect grammar, so I clean up his language to not embarrass him. I also do it with athletes. What’s fair is fair.”

Now it’s interesting reading the reactions of the other parties involved, including Howell, who is the Post’s ombudsman, because there’s an element of what Bryant is talking about that they just don’t seem to get. Sure the rules say you should state it exactly as it came out of the person’s mouth. Furthermore, Wise, the reporter who wrote the more accurate quote, has a point when he says, “I just have a hard time cleaning up anyone’s quotes. I just feel it robs people of their personality. And if I’m not capturing who the person is through the rhythm and cadence of their words, I’m not telling the readers who they are. I just feel people need to be portrayed as they sound, irrespective of whether you’re an aging white coach or a young black athlete. Otherwise, we run the risk of homogenizing everyone.” Being someone who deliberately alters his speech for the express purpose of not sounding homogenized, I can definitely see his point. But it’s not as cut-and-dried as that.

We live in America, land of the self-righteous. People will seize any opportunity to feel like they are better than somebody else. That’s the real reason for my dismay with the reaction to the Bonds and Vick situations. I’m not really concerned with what them dudes did or didn’t do, but I am very interested by the fact that people’s reactions do not seem to be proportionate to the offenses. Even after you control for celebrity and the rise of media entities like ESPN, that cover the comings-and-goings of athletes to an obscene degree, I think people are still outta hand. I think the reason for that is self-righteousness. And that’s in the case of some pretty far-fetched events. When it comes to things that people do every day, I think the self-righteousness quotient goes up, even if it’s unwarranted.

Wanna hear something funny? Raise a discussion on AAVE and listen to people argue against it. Count the grammatical errors in the defenses for standard English. The thing about it, though, is that because we use language as one of the primary indicies of intelligence, we really do tend to think that people who use nonstandard constructions outside of certain contexts are less-intelligent. Of course, that’s not necessarily the case, but sometimes it’s hard to stop judging long enough to remember that. And I believe in AAVE, so I imagine that it’s only more difficult for people who don’t. Add to that the fact that most people have some knowledge of the reading statistics and all that, and then you see that non-standard usage can definitely influence a reader’s opinion, even before they get to actually understanding what the speaker is saying. Exacerbating all of it, of course, is race. How much? I can’t tell. But I know that I don’t quite think Bryant is outta line by “cleaning up” the quotes.

But, and this is a sofa, I also hafta go back into my own life to point out that the counter is true as well. When I was in 1st grade, I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated. In the issue describing the game when Magic came back from his torn meniscus, they quoted him as saying (I think), “I’m gonna take a shower.” That was a pivotal moment in my personal linguistic development. I knew that the people I knew didn’t talk like the people in the Dick and Jane books they had us reading at school, but I had never seen our speech in print. Until then. That was when I knew. I didn’t quite know what I knew, but I knew I knew somethin. Sorta like the first time I saw the album cover for Honey. I KNEW I knew somethin!

Ultimately, I can empathize with Bryant’s dilemma, but I think the question of whether to “grammatize” should depend on the publication’s style guide.

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