Was That "Passive"?
In his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926, so not so terribly modern but still rather fun), Henry Fowler famously described the attitudes of people in regard to the split infinitive in English:
The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish. . . . [quoted]
The worst, of course, are those in category #2, those who don't know but care very much (TWDKBCVM).
In recent times misplaced, or misguided, anxieties over the use of split infinitives seems to have given way to a new leading concern for TWDKBCVM, namely, the dreaded (to them) passive verb construction. Wannabe "sticklers" that they are, they seem convinced that passives are sneaking into English usage and undermining its foundations with the same pernicious–but unspecifiable–undermining effect as (some believe) same-sex marriage has on so-called "traditional" marriage).
The biggest irritation, since we are talking about TWDKBCVM here, is less that they care so very much than that they know so very little; remarkably many people happily call out others on their use of the passive without having the least idea what a "passive" actually is. They want to protect the virtue and purity of the English language with a vigor and irrelevance that used to be ascribed to the French Academy, yet they can't recognize a passive construction even if it bit them in their gerund. But perhaps I state the problem backwards; the biggest problem with TWDKBCVM is that they seem to see "passives" positively everywhere they aren't. The irritation lies in the glee with which they rush to point out the phantom passives.
I had my own run-in recently with a young woman (of, perhaps, high-school age), a fresh recruit to the passive police. She had occasion to read a story I had recently completed and, in the excerpt we considered, she identified an embarrassing profusion of "passives" and suggested that I might invigorate my writing by using more "active" constructions. Happily, and perhaps with an over abundance of schadenfreude, I pointed out to her that none of the instances she voiced concern about were actually passive constructions, but merely instances of past progressive tenses. She seemed alerted to these suspect verb forms by the presence of "was", but I pointed out that when one was writing (<-- not passive!) in the past tense, "was" frequently appeared even in active constructions. Well, perhaps they weren't passives, she grudgingly agreed, but maybe I'd like to have a look at them anyway. I suspect that she had fallen under the influence of a well-meaning but misinformed teacher who taught that spotting an instance of "was" would probably indicate a lurking and dreaded passive. As a brief aside, I'll mention that I'm quite happy to have people read my stories critically, especially if the story is new and about to go public, but I do wish that more of them would concentrate on critiquing my characterization, my plot, my symbols, or my prosody, rather than trying to discover a typo or an unnecessary comma or a phantom passive. I'm not even going to attempt to say what a "passive" is because it takes some care to pin it down with precision. Fortunately, Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log has done it ("The passive in English"). It takes some careful reading, but you'll read it if you car–or need to defend yourself from TWDKBCVM.
Now, while Pullum has the dais and we're talking about this violent allergy TWDKBCVM have even to placebo "passives", one naturally wonders at the source of such an aversion. I'm readily convinced by this article of Pullum's ("50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"; see also "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18") that a great deal of the blame goes to that precious little book known to its friends as "Strunk & White", i.e., those author's Elements of Style. Why, in Pullum's phrase, this obnoxious book came to have "the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates" is unclear. Perhaps it's due to the uncritical assessment of said students' teachers, often TWDKBCVM, who sold it to their students because–why?–it's so much easier to point to a simple reference that can be easily purchased and read in one sitting than it is to teach something? But then, that esteem would probably not grow so much if it weren't that many of those selfsame college graduates were also TWDKBCVM and desperate for an authoritarian voice to back them up, not on actual facts, but for their control-queen attitudes in trying to stomp out bad "grammar", even when they're woefully wrong.
Perhaps the answer is as simple as the observation, documented by Pullum, that Strunk & White were themselves TWDKBCVM rather than actual authorities on what a "passive" really is or why it might be bad. Regardless, I've known for some time that I have a fierce aversion to any icon of popular culture whose esteem vastly outweighs what it deserves.
Say, while we're on the subject of "grammar", what's the deal, apparently recently, with calling absolutely everything that has to do with constructing clear, written English "grammar"? The other day I saw a cartoon that made a deal out of "bad grammar", but used that to describe some grammar, some punctuation, and some confusion over homonyms, which I take to be diction. I mean, here we have all these amusing categories for the anal-retentive who really want to learn lots of semi-obscure nomenclature (although I try to convince my fellow writers that knowing some of it, so they can talk about their craft, is really vital to being an actual writer). Arnold Zwicky mentions the phenomenon ("Grammar shit"), but happily eases us back into amusing topics for conversation by mentioning Paisley designs and paramecia.