The first of an occasional series of blogs by guest contributors.
Grammar Nazism: An Apology
It has become fashionable to diagnose yourself with an acronym. Everyone’s at it. We’re all getting OCD about our BMI, which only exacerbates our IBS. As a school-teacher, I’m exposed to more acronyms still. The lively kids are suffering from ADHD; the nerdy kids are in the thrall of their ASD… and then you’ve got the ODD kids, who are clinically incapable of being nice.
Amid this free-for-all of swirling capital letters, I want to catch hold of an O, a C and a D. Most people are obsessively compulsive about something, and if everyone else gets to diagnose himself on the internet with a proper-sounding excuse for his annoying habits, I want in. Some people can’t tolerate mess; some people can’t tolerate things that aren’t perpendicular to other things; some people can’t tolerate lactose. I can’t tolerate bad grammar. I’m allergic to hanging modifiers, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
This is my confession. Before defending grammar, I should acknowledge my innate and unthinking bias. Arguments aside, I find bad grammar ugly, messy and annoying. Yet good grammar isn’t just beautiful, tidy and satisfying. It’s also useful. This is the crux of my argument. Those of us who whinge at a ‘would of’, reel from a ‘writ down’ and laugh at a lax ‘literally’ are not trying to re-attach this or that dangling part to an ailing system; we just think there should be a system.
GCSE English never formally tests the grammar of its candidates. Some mark schemes punish errors in spelling and punctuation, but pupils are never required to name the parts. The nitty-gritty of the English language is allowed to remain a mystery.
I know formal English grammar is more subjective than people think — Dryden seems to have made much of it up as he went along — but effective communication is a massive life advantage. We admire those who are good at sport or music or sex. So why not admire those who are good at communicating? Sportspeople need their tactics and formations; musicians need their keys and time signatures; lovers, unromantic as it seems, need to know some pretty technical facts concerning anatomy; and anyone wishing to communicate would do well to familiarise himself with word classes, and the various moods, tenses, cases and voices in which they can be employed.
The existence of the term ‘Grammar Nazi’ is a symptom of a sickness. Our culture doesn’t care about grammar. Those of us who like it, know it, value it… we are regarded as an eccentric special interest group — and that’s at best. More likely and more often, we are dismissed as out-of-touch snobs who obsess over our stuffy, yellowing rule-book because we hate the poor and the stupid. Stephen Fry and many others have argued that language evolves and we should not oppress one another with silly, old-fashioned rules. Who cares if the lone butcher at your local Butchers’ has erroneously pluralised himself with a misplaced apostrophe? We survive in spoken English without using or implying any apostrophes at all!
This completely misses the point. You can argue that the apostrophe rule is superfluous. You can argue that split infinitives are sometimes more poetic, and in any case work perfectly well outside of Latin. You can argue that ‘data’ has always functioned in English as a collective rather than a plural noun. You can argue that prepositions make just as much sense at the end of a clause. You can argue that distinctions between amount and number, between less and fewer, are unlikely to impact upon clarity or poetry.
You can argue all of that and much more, but only because you understand the rules and terms of grammar, without which the whole discussion could not happen. Those who rail against us Grammar Nazis commit their own form of elitism. The kids I teach respond better to the clear-cut rules of grammar than to the more prissy business of drawing inferences from texts. The idea that grammar should be the preserve of a pampered elite who have time for it, but that it needn't matter to the proles who just need to grunt basic ideas at one another... this is the real snobbery.
Studying spoken language and text-speak with teenagers has been a real eye-opener for me. Once you sacrifice grammar, it is possible to convey simple notions (if the reader takes charitable account of context), but it becomes completely impossible to convey nuance, irony, subtlety or complexity. For that stuff, you really need semi-colons and subordinate clauses.
I am in the process of helping out an aspiring writer with his work. He’s fourteen years old and has more natural talent than I have. He’s going to be great and it’s a pleasure to watch him become so. But for the minute, I’ve still got some stuff to teach him, and it is all incommunicable without reference to grammatical rules. He sometimes employs adverbs where he would do better to select a more telling verb; he sometimes uses tautological adjectives to compensate for a poor choice of noun; his desired rhythm and emphases would sometimes benefit from a more judicious application of dashes and semi-colons. I am at pains to explain any of this to him without reference to those crusty rules upon which our culture spits.
But what about the kids who don’t have natural aptitude? Should we thrust them behind the wheel and tell them to careen their way through the labyrinth of English using just their instinct? Of course not; they need to know how the vehicle actually works. They will need to send emails and letters. They will need to win arguments. They will need to take out loans. They will need to apply for jobs. They will need to make friends and attract lovers. Some of them may want to write their own stories, plays and poems. They will need to inform, explain, describe, argue, persuade and advise in so many contexts for so many reasons. It is precisely the kids with the least flair who benefit from the most structured, practical and technical instruction. Who wants to tell me that the luxury of understanding how language works is a needless imposition on these children?
Snobs, that’s who. Snobs whose privileged exposure to so much good grammar at such a young age has left them unable to empathise with the majority of kids who take our culture at its word. We are raising generations of children who don’t know what ‘grammar’ means and resent the idea that they should. The grammar-deniers are engaged in a very unsightly attempt to ‘get down’ with these kids by means of the evolution argument. Of course the rules shift and change and die and get invented, but they don’t stop being rules.
Spelling governs the arrangement of letters into recognisable words, punctuation clarifies the rhythm and relationship between those words, and grammar decides the order in which they can be put. We can argue, we really should argue, about which rules work and which might be updated… but to militate trendily against the very idea of having rules at all? This is a dangerous game. Without the rules, Hamlet is just squiggles on a rag; I have a dream was just a noise coming out of a dead man’s mouth. Grammar is the foundation of the palace, the engine in the car, the biscuit base of the cheese-cake. It’s the bed of the flowers, and we trample it at our peril.
Amid this free-for-all of swirling capital letters, I want to catch hold of an O, a C and a D. Most people are obsessively compulsive about something, and if everyone else gets to diagnose himself on the internet with a proper-sounding excuse for his annoying habits, I want in. Some people can’t tolerate mess; some people can’t tolerate things that aren’t perpendicular to other things; some people can’t tolerate lactose. I can’t tolerate bad grammar. I’m allergic to hanging modifiers, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
This is my confession. Before defending grammar, I should acknowledge my innate and unthinking bias. Arguments aside, I find bad grammar ugly, messy and annoying. Yet good grammar isn’t just beautiful, tidy and satisfying. It’s also useful. This is the crux of my argument. Those of us who whinge at a ‘would of’, reel from a ‘writ down’ and laugh at a lax ‘literally’ are not trying to re-attach this or that dangling part to an ailing system; we just think there should be a system.
GCSE English never formally tests the grammar of its candidates. Some mark schemes punish errors in spelling and punctuation, but pupils are never required to name the parts. The nitty-gritty of the English language is allowed to remain a mystery.
I know formal English grammar is more subjective than people think — Dryden seems to have made much of it up as he went along — but effective communication is a massive life advantage. We admire those who are good at sport or music or sex. So why not admire those who are good at communicating? Sportspeople need their tactics and formations; musicians need their keys and time signatures; lovers, unromantic as it seems, need to know some pretty technical facts concerning anatomy; and anyone wishing to communicate would do well to familiarise himself with word classes, and the various moods, tenses, cases and voices in which they can be employed.
The existence of the term ‘Grammar Nazi’ is a symptom of a sickness. Our culture doesn’t care about grammar. Those of us who like it, know it, value it… we are regarded as an eccentric special interest group — and that’s at best. More likely and more often, we are dismissed as out-of-touch snobs who obsess over our stuffy, yellowing rule-book because we hate the poor and the stupid. Stephen Fry and many others have argued that language evolves and we should not oppress one another with silly, old-fashioned rules. Who cares if the lone butcher at your local Butchers’ has erroneously pluralised himself with a misplaced apostrophe? We survive in spoken English without using or implying any apostrophes at all!
This completely misses the point. You can argue that the apostrophe rule is superfluous. You can argue that split infinitives are sometimes more poetic, and in any case work perfectly well outside of Latin. You can argue that ‘data’ has always functioned in English as a collective rather than a plural noun. You can argue that prepositions make just as much sense at the end of a clause. You can argue that distinctions between amount and number, between less and fewer, are unlikely to impact upon clarity or poetry.
You can argue all of that and much more, but only because you understand the rules and terms of grammar, without which the whole discussion could not happen. Those who rail against us Grammar Nazis commit their own form of elitism. The kids I teach respond better to the clear-cut rules of grammar than to the more prissy business of drawing inferences from texts. The idea that grammar should be the preserve of a pampered elite who have time for it, but that it needn't matter to the proles who just need to grunt basic ideas at one another... this is the real snobbery.
Studying spoken language and text-speak with teenagers has been a real eye-opener for me. Once you sacrifice grammar, it is possible to convey simple notions (if the reader takes charitable account of context), but it becomes completely impossible to convey nuance, irony, subtlety or complexity. For that stuff, you really need semi-colons and subordinate clauses.
I am in the process of helping out an aspiring writer with his work. He’s fourteen years old and has more natural talent than I have. He’s going to be great and it’s a pleasure to watch him become so. But for the minute, I’ve still got some stuff to teach him, and it is all incommunicable without reference to grammatical rules. He sometimes employs adverbs where he would do better to select a more telling verb; he sometimes uses tautological adjectives to compensate for a poor choice of noun; his desired rhythm and emphases would sometimes benefit from a more judicious application of dashes and semi-colons. I am at pains to explain any of this to him without reference to those crusty rules upon which our culture spits.
But what about the kids who don’t have natural aptitude? Should we thrust them behind the wheel and tell them to careen their way through the labyrinth of English using just their instinct? Of course not; they need to know how the vehicle actually works. They will need to send emails and letters. They will need to win arguments. They will need to take out loans. They will need to apply for jobs. They will need to make friends and attract lovers. Some of them may want to write their own stories, plays and poems. They will need to inform, explain, describe, argue, persuade and advise in so many contexts for so many reasons. It is precisely the kids with the least flair who benefit from the most structured, practical and technical instruction. Who wants to tell me that the luxury of understanding how language works is a needless imposition on these children?
Snobs, that’s who. Snobs whose privileged exposure to so much good grammar at such a young age has left them unable to empathise with the majority of kids who take our culture at its word. We are raising generations of children who don’t know what ‘grammar’ means and resent the idea that they should. The grammar-deniers are engaged in a very unsightly attempt to ‘get down’ with these kids by means of the evolution argument. Of course the rules shift and change and die and get invented, but they don’t stop being rules.
Spelling governs the arrangement of letters into recognisable words, punctuation clarifies the rhythm and relationship between those words, and grammar decides the order in which they can be put. We can argue, we really should argue, about which rules work and which might be updated… but to militate trendily against the very idea of having rules at all? This is a dangerous game. Without the rules, Hamlet is just squiggles on a rag; I have a dream was just a noise coming out of a dead man’s mouth. Grammar is the foundation of the palace, the engine in the car, the biscuit base of the cheese-cake. It’s the bed of the flowers, and we trample it at our peril.
