The Trouble With Rules

I had dinner the other night with a friend from out of town who's a newspaper editor and writer. I was explaining to him what my blog was about and he mentioned that at his paper there is a strict preference for "such as" over "like" in references to examples of a set ("Bands such as [not 'like'!] the Stooges and the New York Dolls helped set the stage for punk rock").

The reasoning behind the rule is that if you say "things like X and Y," you are excluding X and Y from what you are talking about: not X and Y, but things like X and Y. Substituting "such as" indicates that these are examples of what you are talking about. (Note that this rule is far from canonical. Even prescriptivists like/such as Wilson Follett and Theodore Bernstein pooh-pooh the distinction.)

My friend said he'd never encountered that rule before starting at the paper, and he found it irksome, because "such as" often sounded fussy and stilted. He resisted the rule for a couple of months, but then he gave in. By then he found that he had unconsciously internalized the rule, and he'd begun to feel irritated whenever he came across an improper use of "like." The problem is that "such as" still didn't sit well with him either, so he was in a bit of a double bind. That's what happens when you subject yourself to all these conflicting prescriptivist rules: You become Tongue-Tied.

He mentioned another nefarious phenomenon involving linguistic rules. An editor at a publication he once worked for once told him that it was wrong to use a contraction when the verb is "has"—i.e., you can write "he's" for "he is" but you can't write "he's" for "he has." He thought this rule was ridiculous and decided to ignore it. But soon enough he found himself flinching whenever he came across an example of someone writing "he's" for "he has." Somehow he'd managed to internalize a rule that he disagreed with.

What is this strange power that these rules have, even over someone who doesn't buy into them? I find it fascinating that one can almost against one's will be induced to feel irritation at someone else's use of language simply by being exposed to a rule, no matter how groundless it might be. Maybe it has something to do with hearing the rule from an authority figure. You are confronted with a dilemma. Do you defy the authority or succumb to it? It's much easier to go along, of course. And once you've submitted, the tendency is to want to impose it on others, too. Hence the almost involuntary feeling of irritation that arises when someone else breaks the rule. You've agreed to comply, to be obedient—why should others be allowed to get away with defiance?