The Grammar Hammer

One of my pet hates is that almost any language discussion seems to reach a point where someone says 'They don't seem to teach grammar these days'. My response often goes something along the lines of 'what, as compared to three centuries ago?' If you actually read old books, such as those written fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago, then you will discover the same whine, the same complaints. So:

Shut the Eff up! You have about as much understanding of grammar as a dead ant.

Boy, how long have I wanted to say that.

Not that it will make the slightest difference.

But it felt good!

One of muy favourite pieces of bigotry is the insistence that Latin grammar is the ultimate controlling grammar of English, well, with a good measure of Greek. Latin is a pure grammar, did you know that? Yes, that English in your head, no matter how well honed, no matter who utters or writes it, is mere second rate bumbling unless one applies Latin grammar to it. Our education system in terms of language is based on this principle, hence the never-ending whine about the state of teaching language. Luckily, there are vast numbers of teachers who realise that English is a language in its own right with its particular grammar, one in many basic ways deeply different to Latin: You cannot split an infinitive in Latin, and articles mean almost nothing. However, this only serves to widen that gap between happy English users and the Latinite Grammar Hammers.

One of the most hallowed Latinite principles is that a noun is a noun is a noun. A noun can never be an adjective, verb, or adverb, and so on. Once a noun, always a noun. Once an adjective, always an adjective, once a, I think you get the picture. Fair enough, 'table' must always be a noun, 'chair' must always be a noun, so why don't I chair a meeting on this and table a motion that English grammar be thus - except that I cannot since I have just used 'chair' and 'table' as verbs. Similarly, if I teach maths in a traditional way, I cannot say 'two twos are four' as numbers are adjectives and can never be plural.

Switching words between grammatical forms is a very powerful feature of English, as is the ability to split infinitives and subtly edit meaning by varying the articles, and yet these areas of thw language are among the most often ignored or attacked by the hammers. English, like most languages, was not officially taught until at least a thousand years later than Latin, and the teaching of other languages was done by comparison to what had been observed and taught about Latin. As a first methodology for teaching, it was a good an idea as any - if you were a teacher in a classroom its better to teach what you know rather than have to research the whole subject. As a result of tradition, many of those early make-shift teaching methodologies hung on, they still control people's thinking on the language even today.

I think this is another area in which a reappraisal is long overdue in the public areana, it is time people writing or speaking the langauge they were brought up with were made to feel guilty because their image of the language fails to match another's.