At Ambit Gambit, Graham Young comments on the grammar controversy over a resource guide prepared for the English Teachers’ Association of Queensland – which was criticised by Emeritus Professor Rodney Huddleston from UQ and damned by Kevin Donnelly as “a progressive, cultural-left approach to English as a subject”. Among Donnelly’s objections:
[Parents] and their children will not be surprised at the erudition of some of the learning activities proposed in the articles. These suggest that students identify nouns and verbs by analysing newspaper previews for Home and Away and Neighbours. Pathetic.
Perhaps Milton should be set? Oops, they wrote before traditional grammar was entrenched… Or one William Shakespeare who used the double superlative “most unkindest” before… As Young writes:
The Romans, driven I suspect by their infatuation with standardisation (which palls in comparison to ours, but they caught the disease first), invented grammar. It didn’t exist before them, people just spoke languages. English grammar was invented because without a grammar it was an “inferior” language. And as Latin was by this time seen as some sort of Platonic form amongst languages, English grammar was made to conform to Latin in areas where it didn’t. So was born the ban on split infinitives and the insistance that two negatives made a positive, even in circumstances where two negatives used to mean something like “double plus bad”. If that’s the way that Latin did it, then that’s the way a language with pretensions must.
When you think about it, there are probably more languages in the world without formally taught grammars than there are ones with, but how many speakers of these languages complain, or have trouble learning their languages without it?
The author of the guide, Dr Lenore Ferguson, has claimed in her defence that Professor Huddleston had invented his own “Cambridge grammar” which differed from “traditional grammar” and that this was at the core of his objections, over and above a few trivial mistakes.
The ETAQ’s website doesn’t make Ferguson’s guide available, as far as I can see. But they have posted two papers by Huddleston (including his objections to the guide), which are of a rather intimidating level of complexity. I’m not sure if he’s arguing that school students should have to know the difference between “canonical” and “non-canonical” clauses, or “determiners” and “determinatives” or “objects” and “predicative complements”. It reads very much as if he’s leveraging a technical and scholarly argument with Ferguson into a “shock! horror! the kidz communic8 wrong” story. I’m almost certain you can write English well (begging the question of what constitutes good or even standard English) without instruction in the arcana of linguistics. And would it really be a disaster if “whom” were no longer used? (Note my deft use of the subjunctive!)… What price “precision” in language and is “precision” equivalent to understanding what a “predicative complement” might be?
Young concludes, referring to another defence of grammatical instruction from Melbourne University’s Baden Eunson:
In the history of the world hardly anyone’s learnt language through grammar, they’ve generally learnt grammar through language. Is that what Eunson means by osmosis? Should he have a problem with it? Is there really a standard way to speak English, or a number of standard ways, varying over time and geography? And if so, what is grammar but an attempt to impose one set of preferences on all, just because they happen to be the set of prejudices to which the particular grammarian subscribes?
Who was it said: poetry comes of the destruction of language? Well if that’s true then we should be getting a lot of poetry about now.
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Seriously. Standardizing english is important for the simple reason that there are so many ways of speaking it. The Oxbridge/Edinburgh/Dublin hierarchy of spoken English mixed withn standard grammar was developed in aid of the ‘voice of command’ and thence the voice of the BBC: an English voice that everyone from Yorkshire to Durham to Boston to Kingston Town could understand. For that reason it’s important, it holds the language together. Of course if that were all there was to it then it’d be a pretty dry language.
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Viz the specific objection I haven’t read ‘em yet (I’ve got square eye so goodbye the screen for a while) but grammar is important, having a standard English is useful. Naturally these days Standard English is actually American.
No one in this debate is actually saying grammar isn’t important, Adrien – the dispute appears to be in part how to teach it, and in part about what sort of grammar should be taught. Issues which are obscured rather than brought into focus by the reporting in The Australian and Donnelly’s commentary.
And dot say: why de mon hef to make de Englishay Yanquis mon? Speak it de way we do in Jamaica and der be no fussin’ no more we just say sway raggamuffin’ an’ swing. Turn the choon do’n – fas’
Carribean forms of English might be outliers in terms of mutual comprehension, but who could really argue that Indian or Singaporean or African-American or dialectical Englishes aren’t mutually intelligible? Would English really “fragment” without a standard?
Sometimes I do an impersonation,of Sir Robert Menzies in reading material! I often try to read science articles on matters of cosmology with a child”s voice.. inflection,and what the written material is suggesting,by its style and content,the rhythm of such.Coming across complex words to speak,whilst not understanding them at all,and then trying to define what the words actually could mean,by their contextual placement. As a child would reading it for the first time.In that voice I am about eight years of age. I blow my chest out large,take on a robust American newsreader voice and analyse the news on-line,or commentary etc. I have a Uncle voice,who is always having a shot at me,in the matters of how I constantly try to reject generalities in any form.He sounds very Australian,slightly angry-passive and the confidence of being familiar as Uncle rather than subject matter. We sleep in bed together,which is uncomfortable for both of us,more so,when I resort to talking to him with undermining insult,so I can get my point across. He and a few other voices keep “Radio Sodsville” in the “airwaves rather than the snoreways”. I was a ARTHUR MEES CHILDREN’s ENCYLOPEDIA user frequently as a kid,and read wonderful literature in them. The grammars wars only exist,because the sides of the war have abandoned a sense of self-play and parody of themselves.They should put their positions to test in public,by being both a developmental character themselves,and the same developmental character utilising their opposites understanding.Human life,can be very long,and reading matter,can test the most skillful of such.I am almost sure the chicken or egg thing is experentially not consistent with the dilemma of reading.We are always associating whilst reading,with whatever our understandings maybe,at that point,surely this must suggest that grammar learning is a playful thing,even into complex adulthood,and only gets rigid by the need to record it in its written form.Better to try to stick to the most expansive ,but detailed of the grammatic exposition in that case.However,what probably transpires is,whilst life may,indeed be long,interest in subject becomes very short.
I wasn’t bringin’ up Jamaican as a warning of linguistic decadence. I like Caribbean English and English in all it’s other forms. The question you ask is a good one. It’s entirely possible given trans-global media that we don’t need standardisation. I kinda think maybe we do but my first comment was more by way of stating what I think grammar does practically. I wasn’t suggesting anything viz people’s stance on grammar. I actually do think poetry comes of the destruction of language. Just ask Caliban.
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But I had a Dutch girlfriend once who was listening to a dude from Durham in England’s far north. He used to end his sentences with d’ja know what I mean. She’d shake her head and say: No I don’t know what you mean.
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I’m not being disrespectful to the dialects I’m half-Scots after all. It’d be hypocritical. Jimmy.
Everyone involved in this debate needs to think hard about what they mean, what they want, and why. I see evidence that they have not been doing so. I get irritated by claims like Young’s: “When you think about it, there are probably
more languages in the world without formally taught grammars than there are ones with,”
Young seems unaware that grammar can be descriptive as well as prescriptive.Just because prescriptive grammar is not taught as a subject in the language does not mean that there are not definite patterns (“rules”, to prescriptivists) of how to use words, word endings and so on. All languages have these. Use the right words in the right order with the right endings, and people understand you easily. Use the wrong ones, and people misunderstand you, or find you comical or annoying.
NB: Latin grammarians were not the first to try to set down in writing the patterns that applied to the formal, written version of their own language. Others had done this somewhat earlier in India, for Sanskrit, which is grammatically more complex than Latin.
I agree that 19th-century attempts to shoe-horn English structures into Latin categories were not altogether sensible. There is some overlap, however, so it rates as a good first try.
I also agree that English takes many forms and styles. I would argue that different grammatical descriptions, as well as vocabularies and phonologies, could be produced for, TeenText English, Building Site Banter English, Corporate Boardroom English etc. Each of those varieties could then be multiplied by the local variations due to local accent (less important in Oz, more in North America and vastly so in the British isles), dialectal vocabulary (“port” versus “suitcase”, “bairn” versus “kid”) and so on.
None of these language varieties are correct or incorrect in themselves, but they all have social/geographical situations where they are appropriate, and others where they are not.
There is some justification for Young’s whinge about “an attempt to impose one set of preferences on all” but this po-mo, phony-egalitarian attitude can be overdone.
If that “one set of preferences” happens to be those corresponding to the language used by upper middle-class professionals in the appropriate country, then learning those preferences will help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to be socially assimilated and accepted in a more affluent milieu if they acquire the right job and educational skills.
On the other hand, the young and impressionable can be disadvantaged permanently if all they get is spin dismissing that set of preferences, denying the advantage of knowing anything about said preferences, and keeping them in ignorance of the fact that there are many different styles of English and that it is possible and desirable to master more than one.
So yes, formal teaching of grammar is a good thing, particularly if done less
prescriptively and more comparatively than of old. Incidentally, it is a godsend when learning other languages, as every kid should do from an early age. Different languages make different connections, associations and rhymes, and knowledge of more than one enriches people’s associative ability generally, quite apart from the more utilitarian functions of facilitating knowledge of other cultures and communication with foreigners.
As a professional scientist, I like written and verbal communication in English that is concise, logical, unambiguous, as well as easy to follow and interesting. This is helped enormously if the communicators adhere to de facto professional standards of spelling and grammar. I tell my students that that is one of the important reasons for good spelling and writing, in fact: demonstration of rigorous adherence to a professional standard.
Bravo, Andyc. This ‘grammar didn’t exist before the Romans’, what rubbish.
Language is one of the most flexible tools in the kit we have to use in order to adapt to varying social and environmental challenges. The only language where every speaker might speak with pure and identical grammatical usage is a dead language – one with no native speakers (ie, learned from birth).
If my wife was awake at this early hour she could point me to the refernence to a recent jounral article showing that T MOS FRQN USRZ F TXTNG LOLZ in the main show high levels of grammatical awareness and tend to be more adept at more standard written forms as well. IE, In order to deliberately mess with the written norms, these kids tend to know them well!
I had a cursory look at Huddleston’s objections and, um, their basis is quite serious. I’ve only skimmed the first couple pages but it seems he’s alluding to gross grammatical errors made by the resource guide itself. Incorrectly classifying something as a grammatical unit when it’s not is not some kind of syllabus in innovation, it’s illiteracy.
Reminds me of a story (apocraphyl possibly) a GP mate of mine who worked in West Lothian, the area to the west of Edinburgh, told me. It’s quite common for the folks of West Lothian to end every sentence with ‘ken’ which funnily enough means “do you know what I mean?” e.g “I’m a bit depressed ken?”. An African GP working in the same practice remained puzzled for a long time as to why all his patients called him Ken despite his name being clearly displayed on the door!
Doesn’t Kevin Donnelly dismiss everything on the basis that it is both “progressive” and “cultural-left”?
I’m just glad I was never taught by the illiterate nongs responsible for this current mish-mash of English. I rarely agree with the Australian, but this time I think they’re absolutely right.Those who have dreamt up this latest mystification of the English language shouldn’t be allowed within coo-ee of our schools, TAFEs and universities. Give thm jobs in occupations where knowledge of the English language is a specific non-requirement. It’s bloody disgraceful!
2nding mr.z+andyc
TextSpeak requires condensing and distilling messages while retaining comprehensiblity. This can require a fair degree of skill and creativity, and omg, thinking about language.
Though this doesn’t seem to work when I’m pissed.
My earlier post was mainly directed against Young of course. Now I’ve read the Opposition Orifice article, I am completely with Huddleston, and Paul Burns @ 11.
ETAQ, damned by their own quotes, come across as ignorant, obscurantist, destructive pursuers of their own power agenda. If re-education camps did not exist, we would have to invent them for such people. And they should certainly be nowhere near students or syllabi at any level.
Leinad @12: unrvLng txtspk tks tIm+cre8EVT I wud prfr 2 spnd Lswhr.
Iechyd da! [hic]
Andyc: shr but tht dznt mk it -artfl or -gramaticl as mode of comms. nt tht i thnk it shud rplace Bill+Milton etc jst sayin’
Adrian’s right that the errors are quite egregious. This isn’t about prescriptivism vs descriptivism, and colouring Huddleston as any kind of conservative (or indeed prescriptivist) is laughable.
Here’s Language Log on the story – really essential reading:
Queensland grammar brouhaha
It underlines an important point, which is that while it certainly is important to teach grammar in schools, teaching badly-misunderstood rubbish as grammar can only be harmful.
Now I read the later comments and see that Andyc and Paul Burns have made similar comments. Oh well, just adding my voice then
The second half of this statement is incorrect; in Latin double negatives are reinforcing. An example of a reinforcing double negative in English might be “I ain’t seen nothing” which would ordinarily mean I didn’t see anything at all; not I did see something.
Peter Hollo “15 ” teaching badly-misunderstood rubbish as grammar can only be harmful.”
Absolutely, Peter. Teaching badly-misunderstood rubbish as anything is harmful. People who spout rubbish, and misunderstand things badly, should not be allowed to teach. We need teachers who have real understanding and knowledge to communicate, and who know the difference between that and rubbish.
It is a shame if this idiocy is used as a stick to beat good teachers, but assuming that ETAQ is composed of purported teachers, they do have some interlopers to expel from their ranks. The lack of intellectual and ethical integrity displayed by Words’Worth in their dealings with Huddleston is incredible.
Leinad @ 14: agrd re Bill+John. TxtSpk bad 4 spkn wrd stuff!
Re: Simon. More accurately, Latin has phrasal concordance, so that a category applied to the head of a phrase applies also to the other constituents. This not only generates what’s known as ‘negative concord’ (a negated verb must be concordant with a negated noun phrase inside the verb phrase), but also gives gender and number applying across an entire noun phrase.
Or such is my rudimentary knowledge of Latin morpho-syntax, derived mainly through a pretty good knowledge of the morpho-syntactic knowledge of other Romance languages. In other words, the above may be totally wrong.
On the broader issue, I think it’s excellent that the teaching of grammar is being debated, but it’s awful that ETAQ have chosen to simplify beyond practicality, a model of English syntax (functional grammar) that is already deeply flawed and not entirely useful for instructing students in basic grammar.
I’ll have more to say when I’ve absorbed more of Huddleston’s article. I should really post something on this, as it’s pretty much my area.
Peter Hollo, that Language Log article is fantastic. Language Log is wonderful generally, because it is usually so entertaining that you find yourself absorbing unfamiliar terms and concepts as you read. But almost everyone I know, from any educational era, says they only really began to learn and retain any truly useful knowledge about grammar when they began to learn a second language (or, even better, a third or more), which gave them conceptual tools for thinking about language and comparing the way that grammar and syntax work in one language with the way they work in another. Which has also been my own experience.
omg I hate grammar nazis. they carry on as if the capacity to learn rules about a language trumps whatever is expressed through the language
the quality of english teachers is terrible, however. a friend is a senior english teacher and she is constantly failing student teacher prac’s. plus, there is not enough pay once teachers hit their maximum to retain the good ones.
Immersion…living language…all that. Not much keen on grammar freaks myself – I’ve met the odd motivating character – but the Asian students in search of a second or third language heart them, particularly in the early days of exposure. Doesn’t hurt to throw some into the mix. But lots of reading & chatting is the go, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not big on forcing kids to watch soap operas. There’s something to be said for accessing the contemporary as a hook into grammar & other such stuff…but unless the shows are analysed there’s a chance brainwashing & ad exposure trumps valuable learning experience.
I know a few w/ plums in their mouths who moan about the dire state of the English language & the potential shape of things to come. I’ve had the finger pointed my way on occasion, heard the banshee-like screams, particularly from those who desire a more permanent seat in the public corridors and classrooms in order to teach their myths on the eve of a predicted apocalypse, the one that is tardy & in all probability is a tool of the sheep herder rather than an impending reality…;)
Perhaps a compromise. Still, not big on the dry stuff.
But then, I’m not a MASTER of the high horse act.
BTW, that doesn’t mean I don’t heart the Bard William…& those who know how to effectively express life’s lessons and emote thru plays, poetry and such. See, I remembered Adrien…;) No drinky poos tonight. Just tortured syntax & a voice.
It is a bit sad when the how becomes more important than the what.
Now lets be honest, English grammar is a mess, to highlight this we are forced to read Shakespeare ( well I assume that is why we are forced to read Shakespeare). You know I think they would have been decent stories if someone had translated them, you know change the grammar and spelling to current forms, well perhaps not current, the forms used in the 60’s would have been nice.
Speaking as an illiterate nong shamelessly mish-mashing English, I can’t help but wonder if all this hubbub about English going down the drain is just another way to keep down people who aren’t emeritus professors.
Just some more observations:
1) I’ve recently trained as an ESL teacher using the latest up-to-date grammar-by-osmosis and grammar-by-instruction strategies; and the texts we used, both traditional and new-fangled po-mo functional grammar, would agree with Huddleston. Perhaps the ETAQ guide was insufficiently proof-read/peer-reviewed?
2) Grammar-by-osmosis is an empirical fact of language acquisition, whether as a native speaker or second-language learner. Children intuitively acquire a level of grammatical proficiency in spoken language by age 5 that often exceeds what an adult learner of foreign languages can ever hope to acquire. Of course this doesn’t mean that direct grammatical instruction is redundant or of no classroom value for written language. But as anyone who has learnt a foreign language knows, you acquire far more language by using it in living interaction with others – grammatical imperfections and all – than by reciting it in a sterile classroom environment. I could directly teach you a complete Japanese grammar in about four weeks – it has about the simplest grammar of any living language – but it would be of bugger-all value to you for communicative purposes.
3) There’s a fair bit of research (don’t have it with me to cite properly, sorry) which indicates that abler students who read a lot as children actually do acquire a sound intuitive knowledge of grammar due to their immersion in complex texts. By “complex”, I mean anything that is at or just beyond their current reading ability, as per Krashen. That is to say, the grammar-by-osmosis argument that makes Donnelly et.al. foam at the mouth has a sound empirical basis for some students. But less able students can drown in the complexity and some direct grammar instruction can help them climb out.
4) The debate as presented in the Australian is, as usual, a one-eyed, falsely dichotomous, alarmist, over-cooked pile of tosh. I’m only very new to ESL teaching, but I’ve already observed and taught in several ESL schools in Sydney and here in the USA and worked professionally with ~50 different ESL teachers – I’m yet to meet a single one who doesn’t teach grammar by direct instruction and who didn’t also provide opportunities for the students to acquire it by osmosis.
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The above written by a person who received not a single day’s formal grammar instruction as a child. But who read a lot.
Well, it would be, if it ever did. But the how is instrinsic to the what.
Um, intrinsic.
Proofreading is important too.
Underwriting all of this is the beauty of language.
Isn’t that wild?
The written word has cast upon our lifetimes here on the planet a framework within which we are almost* entirely bound – we’re certainly bound to it as human family. And there’s nothing more powerful than a framework grown invisible by the depth and breadth of its work.
Along the way we’ve been gifted by a combination of words such as to clothe a majesty of thought and feeling and being – no less for when imaginative – so that beauty leaves us, in receipt, speechless. While a bookshelf after bookshelf might be filled with this, and that itself speaks wonders to us, there will always be a phrase or a moment speaking entirely to you. We have at hand, or screen, beauty.
Such has been the occasion of it that beauty itself drives language, and us or ‘the us’ along with it, in perpetuity. Not only is that framework of the stuff of life itself, however real or imagined to be, it is a framework of similar subtle demand, exhorting quietly that we remember beauty.
Beauty is the measure of language.
As is the power of beauty, even in the wrd’s most bastardised form, it still speaks of meaning, for the moment, to someone.
Exultant, glistening grammar as vessel for beauty is no more potent nor (it must be acknowledged) apposite than language fucked. What matters, really, is who is telling, and who is listening.
If only the beauty of language was/were {correct me please, and see my point] more often taught. Then, more of us may be speechless.
*speaking of speechless; one wonders how the quality of language would improve by withholding the impulsive desire to express. Consideration? I think it’s a big part of it, too.
This is not another one of these legal narrowist tiresome nitpickings that occur during a new skirmish in the culture wars, this time where spelling errors or grammatical variations relative to some arbitrary sort of platonic orthodoxy become more more important than the meaning(s) of the story in relation to author, sections of readership and other texts( over determined to buggery)?
That really does do injury to the Greater text, on so many levels. The more Voices the Better and let’s not use abstracted “style” arguments to stifle a viewpoint
“Well, it would be, if it ever did. But the how is intrinsic to the what.”
Thats the debate isn’t it, do you have to know what a verb is to construct a sentence? As I succeed in writing technical documents that people seem to be able to understand, I think the answer is no. Perhaps I could point out the verb with a little thought, but all this other fancy mumbo jumbo, not a hope.
Not necessarily, but that’s not what I was saying. I was saying that grammar is what makes a sentence possible, and that the more you know about how language fits together, the better your chances of saying exactly what you want to say.
And you do have to know what a verb is in order to be sure that what you have constructed is in fact a sentence.
PC, in other words we have to know how to verb a sentence?
Que?
I don’t know what you mean, Paul, but your question reminds me of one of my favourite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, in which Calvin & Hobbes are discussing the way that nouns and adjectives get appropriated as verbs in certain kinds of current usage — “This needs to be actioned”, “He gifted her the book” and so on. Hobbes finally folds his paws in a cross sort of way and says ‘Verbing weirds language.’
Are these complete sentences? Quoting exactly without typos:
Woodsmoke curling from the stovepipe on the roof, the front door standing open to the morning behind the flyscreen.
Dougald standing over by the stove cooking.
A smell of bacon and coffee and frying meat.
PC,
may I compliment you on your remarkable cat photograph. In its own way as sublime as Tig Tog’s sulphur crest. Although, of course, less feathery.
I’m going with no: the first two could be either -ing clauses or noun phrases with relative clauses. The third is a noun phrase.
The answer to this is that it’s good to be conversant in many varieties of English, and each variety has its own set of preferences, with some varieties being more rule-bound than others. Colloqial English, for example, is much “fuzzier” than formal, written English of the kind one might use in a scientific paper. In the latter instance, it’s worth knowing rules to correct our osmosis-based intuitions.
Intelligibility is not the only criterion here. Different varieties can sound jarring together. And it’s not only condemnation of informal language in formal settings — no one would use ultra-formal language at a pub, for example, or at a football match. The question is whether it’s good to have/teach different language varieties for different levels of formality.
Thank you, Paul. She is sitting on top of the piano and looks in the orginal and much bigger photo as though she is about to burst into song. She is also actually quite feathery.
Leon, I would add that technically none of those things is a sentence (of course ’sentence’ is also a grammatical term) since none contains a finite verb, only participles plus whatever part of speech ‘frying’ is in that context. Or to put it another way, they have subjects but no predicates. This does not mean that they are Bad Writing, only that they are not sentences. The same could be said of much of Ulysses, The Waste Land, quite a lot of Shakespeare Himself *curtseys* and goodness knows what-all else. In the case of the above it’s a very common technique, usually in fiction, of representing consciousness via fragmentary sense-impressions, which don’t usually present themselves in complete grammatical sentences.
Leon, you just gave a succinct account of the entire rationale for…
…functional grammar! (Cue evil pipe-organ chords, thunder and lightning.)
Just replace your terms ‘varieties’ and ‘levels of formality’ with the term ‘registers’ and you’d even be right-on for jargon.
Hmmm.
I think the debate above misses the point. Of course a knowledge of formal grammar isn’t necessary to speak English, otherwise the illiterate would also be unintelligible. It is, however, necessary if you’re going to talk critically about what is written or said, otherwise the most incisive comment you can make is ‘that doesn’t read (or sound) well’.
While it is absolutely true that English usage constantly defies rules, there is a deal of difference between deliberately breaking conventions for effect and carelessly trampling over them in ignorance. Many of the conventions exist for the laudable purpose of avoiding ambiguity, such as the prohibition on dangling participles. Others, such as the conventional avoidance of double negatives, apply in some contexts but not others. Obviously, to say ‘I am not ignorant about such and such’ and ‘I don’t know nothing about such and such’ have opposite, but equally intelligible, meanings. Being aware of the convention allows the speaker to choose one or t’other for effect. Being unawsare of the convention means the speaker is also unaware that a choice exists and blind to the connotations each usage carries. Such conventions are difficult to explain to someone completely ignorant of basic grammatical terms.
Jo’boot th’Scawz. Scaw’sh peeple add ‘Jimmeh’ ‘t end’f ev’ry speech lak. Wa? zey know y’ve nout wha’ th’ onaboot sa’s Jimmeh’s ta le’ ye now ‘d ye turin tae speak lak.
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Jimmeh!
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[Joke about the Scots. Scottish people always add 'Jimmy' at the end of every speech. Why? because they know you have no idea what they've just said and so they say: 'Jimmy" to tell you when it's your turn to speak.]
Yes. If you’re a Beat writer.
I agree with PC that Peter Hollo’s link to Language Log provides some understanding of the origins of this. And the end warning that it is far better to own up to errors than continue trying to cover up.
The last thing anyone should want is to turn all this into the latest culture wars’ outbreak, the travesty of which is Huddleston is not even on the Reactionary Right.
As Don Watson pointed out in another context, letting nouns become verbs and so on has actually led to an oppression of ideas in corporate and bureaucratic language. The only way upwards is to conform. There need to be rules in language and grammar easily understood. And they should generally be observed in all but poetry and drama.
I often wonder if I am too pedantic, but I get irritated by the incorrect usage of apostrophes. This has now invaded our retail and hospitality industries where show-cards(“DVD’s only $7.99″) boast of bargains. It shouldn’t be all that hard to learn the correct usage. Maybe PC is right that learning another language might help.
“That is to say, the grammar-by-osmosis argument that makes Donnelly et.al. foam at the mouth has a sound empirical basis for some students. But less able students can drown in the complexity and some direct grammar instruction can help them climb out.”
I have discussed this with a number recently-trained educators at early childhood, primary and secondary levels, and this is the message they’ve been getting from their training. I certainly think these issues are worth debating, but teachers are currently being equipped with a range of tools, all of which are based on solid educational research, and more importantly they are aware that no single teaching tool is guaranteed to succeed.
I think one reason why there is so much anxiety over these questions is that in this area there are no absolute guarantees given in by single teaching strategy, but teachers already know this to be the case.
I think a few people are missing one of the key factors of what grammar is. Learning this sort of stuff in primary or high school is not (or shouldn’t be) about learning to avoid double negatives and other invented ungrammaticalities.
Some in this thread have said it, but it’s worth saying again. All languages have grammar. A grammar is not (primarily) a prescriptive set of rules governing how you should speak, rather grammar is the osmotically learned set of word formation and sentence formation laws (I use laws as opposed to rules on analogy with the laws of physics) that every linguistically competent human being has in their heads.
What Huddleston is saying in his reply to ETAQ’s guidelines is that the terminology being used in this flawed theory of grammar are wholly inconsistent, and that the model itself has far too many huge flaws, such that teaching it instead of a version of traditional grammar would be detrimental.
Importantly, when I say ‘detrimental’, I don’t mean that kids won’t learn to talk properly – they’re already fully competent speakers of English years before school – I mean they won’t have the necessary linguistic analytical skills that a lot of (though not enough) adult speakers of English have. This includes being able to look at an ungrammatical sentence and know what’s wrong with it. And I don’t mean ungrammatical but understandable, like Robert’s sentences above, I mean sentences like The rat the cat the dog chased bit died or Hortense showed Eggbert where he put.
The reason that it’s important to know stuff like what a noun is, what a verb is, and how a sentence is constructed, is not that it makes you a competent speaker, that’s already taken care of, it’s that it makes you a competent analyser of language.
By the way, Mark Liberman from Language Log has a follow-up post on many of these issues.
When people learn grammar by osmosis what grammar do they learn? If they are learning the local variations of grammar that could be said to fragment the integrity of the language. Just askin’?
Exactly. The idea that this is any kind of left/right issue is ludicrous. I blame Chomsky.
Don Wigan, it would actually be possible to make a case for “DVD’s” if you argued that it was simply a contraction and the apostrophe was standing in for the missing letters “isc”.
*Runs away*
For the record, those quotes above were taken from a paragraph in Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country – winner of the Miles Franklin award 2003.
Picked it. For mine, the technique employed by Miller failed to achieve that effect: it meant a double take when coming across them (there were lots from memory), breaking the spell of ‘being in the book’, which was otherwise quite beautiful. Those occasions turned an experience into just words. I’m sorry to hear it’s a common technique, though perhaps others have used it more effectively.
This has been a very interesting thread. I’m still interested in people’s views as to what level of complexity in grammar is appropriate or necessary for school education – as I said in the post, Huddleston’s documents seem to me to be very complex but I’m also unclear as to whether he’s advocating that level of grammatical study for high school students.
Adrien, they learn whatever their experience requires they learn. If you grew up in a household that was a predominantly Jordy-speaking one, the grammar in your head will be that of Jordy.
Language acquisition is a pretty complicated area and I wouldn’t be able to do it any justice in a few words, but one useful part is that children learn using an approxmative method. They’re not told that ‘the passive voice is constructed using a stative or inchoative verb and the perfect participle form of the lexical verb’, they just hear it enough times and in enough different particular uses by a broad range of people speaking a variety of dialects or registers, and they (subconsiously, of course) ‘approximate’ an abstract law that, if broad enough, accounts for all the evidence of that construction that they have so far.
Like it or not, English is going to fragment. It’s inevitable. by the model given above, language change is in part driven by incompleteness of acquisition, where a child learning a language doesn’t quite approximate the same laws of grammar as their immediate ancestors, who in turn didn’t quite approximate the same laws as their ancestors, etc. However, when a language is as large and therefore, as inert as English, it takes a serious amount of momentum to get any global language changes happening. The result is localised changes, eventually forming dialects.
English currently has probably dozens of dialects, and the ’standard’ is now a mere abstract reality. Just like ’standard Arabic’, or ’standard Marathi’, which are both recognised as being the ‘correct’ forms of the language, but which are no longer spoken. Abaric has given in to localised dialects, as has Marathi.
Don’t worry though, it’s unlikely to make us less understood; most people in the Anglophone world are proficient in probably several dialects of English, while being able to comprehend almost all of them. The only real outliers are Hinglish and northern UK dialects.
I think this is all good. Linguistic uniformity is among the last things I want.
re Kim, 47
We ‘ave ta lern em good ta talk proper and ta rite rite . They ‘av to git their bowels an’colons ‘afore their condiments. And not ta mess up their grammar, the por ol thing she was.
The wurs apostrophe is alliteracy, summut simile to a long sentence wot is more than just many phases t’gether. Surely makes a future tense if ya just comma long for t’ride.
in a meen time lets ‘ave noun of this nonsense. otherwise us put a pound of syntax under the car and the lotta youse get blowed, literately.
Kim, I don’t think Huddleston is arguing that linguistic tuition of that sort is what kids should be learning in school. I understood what he was doing was using formal linguistic techniques (semantic, morphological and syntactic tests) to show that the model that ETAQ is proposing to teach, is theoretically untenable.
It’s completely plausible to simplify modern formal generativist linguistic theory so as to be made simple enough for children to understand. It’s not even necessary to go into detail with many of these terms, like ’sentential adjuncts’ and ‘determinative phrases’, or even to introduce them at all. Primary school students don’t need to know differential calculus to do mathematics, just that there are mathematic operators like ‘plus’, ‘minus’, ‘devide by’ and ‘times’ and how they work. Similarly, primary school students need not learn about phrasal constituency tests such as ‘no-intrusion’ in order to learn about the constituent units of language, words classes like nouns, verb, adjective etc., phrases that combine words, and sentences that are formed by phrases working together.
In my experience, kids of a younger age don’t tend to ask ‘hang on, I see your semantic evidence for ascribing my to a class of determinative phrases, but where’s your syntactic evidence?’ Unfortunately first year university linguistics students are cluey enough to ask things like this, meaning I, for one, have to be very well versed in much of this stuff.
The crux of the matter is that Ferguson’s model has some indefensible typological errors in it. The first few pages of Huddleston’s response has plenty of them listed, so I won’t re-quote them here. Also, Huddleston wrote a brief grammar of English that could be modified, and used as a model for teaching. It’s vastly more accessible than his highly formal attach on Ferguson’s paper, and, apart from some simplified terminology, it’s very faithful to generative grammar. You can find it here.
And if said Giordy wants to go and work in America what then?
I’m sorry that’s nonsense.
Because a language diversifies and evolves doesn’t mean it fragments. The standardized forms of English (of which there are a few) rely on a reasonably standardized grammar that is dispersed by education systems and used when requiring communication between or across various local zones of pronunciation; for example: broadcasting or international business. Fragmentation requires that the language breaks up and that dialects evolve into other languages. Or this is what I mean.
]. One of the best ways to do this is for grammar to capitulate to linguistic trends. I’m not suggesting upholding the upper lip perpetually stiff but a certain general notion of correct speech and writing is useful. If the grammar that is induced by osmosis is inherently localised (and I can’t see why it wouldn’t be) then there’s a need for proscruotive grammar.
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Hence to fragment one would have to teach Giordy in Newcastle, Scouse in Liverpool, Boganwestie in Bankstown and whatever they call the Noo Joisee lingo there. Eventually this would lead not only to a cacophony of misunderstandaing that can happen when people aren’t able to transcend their own dialect limitations but differing languages.
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I’m all for diversity but there are benefits from standardized lingo that outweigh the charm of a Brummy’s sing-song [con act
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Of course first off we might get a curricula written by people who know what a verb is.
I think students should be fluent in formal speech and writing. This way, they can understand and participate in political debate, scientific discourse, international communication, and — let’s not forget — the humanities, where you find some of the most formal, oblique, jargony prose around. If I had been taught Ethnic Australian English or Aboriginal Australian English or any other nonstandard English in primary school, I would have trouble in those cultural spheres. For people from disadvantaged backgrounds, learning standard English can be empowering.
We should oppose the condemnation of different forms of English based on class, but it’s important to also acknowledge that there are non-class-based reasons to value formality and precision in many contexts.
Pavlov’s Cat
But do you have to “know” you have a sentence to use text to communicate with another person?
And as the last set of words looks like a pretty good collection, my guess is it has a subject, a verb and it can live with a question mark, if not, feel free to read it with a comer, I’m not fussed.
Be honest, English has grammar because a bunch of snobs wanted it to be like Latin, trouble is English is an amalgamation of many languages, it is a complex mess. The result was a grammar that is complex with exceptions, so complex that people who claim they understand it don’t ( see Queensland education dept). O.K wank on about it in Universities, but don’t use the complexities to destroy peoples interest in communicating ideas.
My maths is stronger and I think I can recast this in maths terms. I don’t push abstract algebra or try and convince people that they need to know what a field or a ring is before they add two numbers, yet English teachers push the language used to describe sentence structure as a need to write a sentence.
If you insist I need to know what a verb and subject is to make a sentence then I think it is reasonable that I argue that you need to know what a field and ring is before you add up your tax return.
Regards
“Would English really “fragment” without a standard?”
It will fragment anyway. That’s what languages do as more people speak them! Vulgate Latin fragmented into French, Italian, etc (while keeping Latin as a common ecclesiastical language) and English has already fragmented into many *international* forms … all the while actually consolidating it’s many regional dialects in it’s native land, if some people are to be believed.
Apart from American Hollywood forms, the only real “international standard” English is bureaucratese anyway. As Melvyn Bragg says, try writing poety with that!
Charles, I didn’t say any of the things you’re saying I said, and whether or not you know what a verb is is a matter of complete indifference to me. That’s not what this thread is about.
Hal9000No
I don’t have no apple, not allow because of modern grammar and if used is supposed to mean you have an apple. I don’t know nothing, slang and if used means what a double negatives used to mean before grammar told us a double negative is a positive.
And grammar helps?
Whoa. English has a grammar in virtue of being a language. You seem to assume that when linguists, the ETAQ and Huddleston say ‘grammar’, they mean “A normative or prescriptive set of rules setting forth the current standard of usage for pedagogical or reference purposes.” This is just one sense, not even the primary sense, of the word ‘grammar’. What they, and I in earlier parts of this thread, mean by ‘grammar’ is “The system of inflections, syntax, and word formation of a language; the system of rules implicit in a language, viewed as a mechanism for generating all sentences possible in that language.”¹ By this latter sense, every single language ever spoken by every individual in Human history, had a grammar. This debate is not about adhering to a set of prescriptive rules that have very little, if any, basis in empirical science, but instead about how we encourage students to analyse the language they use, and whether or not they use the Ferguson approach, which is deeply flawed, or an approach grounded in formal linguistic theory.
I’m not saying by this that I think prescriptive rules of writing are necessarily ‘bad’, since Leon is right; we beefit partly from there being a dialect regarded as standard.
Adrien, there’s not much difference between what you consider ‘divergence’ and ‘evolution’ and what I understood you to have meant by ‘fragmentation’. In a typological sense, dialecthood and languagehood are mere points on a single continuum of linguistic diversity.
Agreed. We abstract away from dialectal differences and identify and analyse ’standard English’ as a linguistically real entity, but when we do so, in the classroom, for instance, we’re also quick to accommodate dialectal differences, such as that in American English, you can say “I promise you to do the dishes” but in Australian English this is ungrammatical². So yes; there’s a reasonably standardised grammar, but it is standard in terms of our decription of it. It is not standard in terms of how we prescribe others to use it.
Charles, again that boils down to prescription versus description. No descriptive linguist would tell you that “I don’t have no apples” could possibly be interpreted (by a native speaker of English) as “I have apples”. I think I spoke about Latin negative concord above.
¹Both definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary.
²Specifically, American English allows subjects of transitive clauses to functionally control the subject of an embedded clause, while in Australian English, the closest argument to the embedded clause is the controller. But this is some serious theoretical syntax.
Tyro Rex,
I call “Rubbish!” on the fragmentation question. Latin fragmented because the entity that was holding it together – the Roman Empire – broke down. English is increasingly standardizing. What is bringing it together is trade, international media, the sciences etc. – in other words globalization. To me the pity is that regional diversity is being lost. I cannot agree that it is increasing.
While I agree with Huddleston that a certain rigour is wanting in the guide, I’m quite happy that contemporary texts such as Home & Away should be used. The incorrect yet familiar is often a damn sight easier to use in a teaching situation than forms which baffle in both meaning and context.
And though I also agree that a working grammar is vital, I’m more concerned about rising generations of students who are now appearing in undergrad courses who cannot read serif texts, raised upon digital sans serif typefaces, who cannot therefore scan printed books or journals. The rise of a reading culture who live in entirely in a digital world, for whom the book with its development of argument, building of evidence has become irrelevant. Osmosis only occurs when the exposure to the environment of grammar occurs. Language lives and evolves in common usage, and we are perhaps the last generations for whom the book is the significant transmitter of both written usage and knowledge. What this will mean consumes far too much of my waking time.
And re #58 & loss of diversity – track down Pennycook’s World Englishes. It ain’t necessarily so.
Jangari
You know, if someone had said to me in high school, this is the set of rules we use to understand the structure of English, I would have been a whole lot more interested (and this thread has wetted my curiosity).
That wasn’t the case and I would say Ferguson hasn’t worked it out either, if you look at it from that point of view you have to teach formal linguistic theory because that is the subject.
I think my confusion may be pretty common.
Or Jane Austen who used the double superlative “most handsomest” before…
errr…where exactly does JA write this?
Absolutely. It’s something we linguists have been trying hard to overcome since linguistics was a recognised field of study. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met someone who, on hearing that I’m a linguist, jest to me that “I’d better not split my infinitives”. Grr.
However, prescriptive grammar versus descriptive grammar is not the issue here; Ferguson is trained in these matters and wouldn’t be a prescriptivist, as such. The debate is between a formal theory of grammar that we all learned – probably some have retained it more than others, but at least we agree that we were taught what a noun, a verb and an adjective are – and a model that is absolutely at odds with this, is riddled with completely indefensible errors (‘capable of’ cannot be said to belong to a class of word called ‘adverb’, and no theory of grammar says so) and which introduces novel terms that teachers and parents are unlikely to know. I’ll quote Mark Liberman of language Log, who has posted yet another follow-up to this debate:
Laura, I got that from a tv ad for Northanger Abbey on the ABC last week. I was assuming the dialogue came from the book – perhaps wrongly?
It is accurate to say that the double comparative, double negative and double superlative were still in use in written English though at a diminishing rate up until the mid 19th century.
http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/003163.html
Thanks, charles, but that link is in the post itself – it’s the source of the quotes.
Bernice, students who cannot read serif fonts? The hell?
Sans-serif fonts may be modestly dominant in digital media at the moment, but I suspect that will change as DPIs increase. I certainly know of plenty of websites that specify serif fonts for both body copy and headlines.
Here’s a review of Persuasion which alleges that Austen had some of her characters therein describe Frederick Wentworth as “the most handsomest man that ever was to be seen” after he made his fortune.
Thanks, tigtog.
Then you didn’t understand what I meant. Please see Andrew Reynold’s comment above re fragmentation of Latin.
As one who went through primary school when teaching formal grammar was out of fashion, I really wish that I did get that included in my education. I learnt much more about the structure of language when studying French than I ever did from English classes.
Whilst I think I have enough working knowledge of grammar to communicate with people, I’m not really able to have a discussion about grammar simply because I don’t know what the right terms are. I could spend sometime now learning them, but that sort of stuff is best learnt when you’re really young and the information just sticks in your brain forever (kind of like memorising your multiplication tables).
There’s no such phrase in Persuasion, or NA either.
I just did a quick search of the files at the Gutenberg project, and according to their version “handsomest” is used only once in Persuasion, to describe some curtains. The word is only used twice in NA. In neither novel is it preceded by “most”.
I’m smelling a factoid.
Thanks, Laura, I’ll correct the post then. Shakespeare will do to illustrate the point – eg. “the most unkindest cut of all”.
http://www.bartleby.com/68/97/1997.html
Yeah, I think you’re right, tigtog!
The phrase actually occurs in Tom Jones, as follows:
“..that he is the most handsomest, charmingest, finest, tallest, properest man…”
For what it’s worth.
Like I was saying, Adrien, a lot of the standardisation took place from the late 18th century onwards.
I do wonder whether non-standard grammatical forms were present in the manuscripts of some of the early 19th century novels, but were edited out either at the time or subsequently. But that’s a question for the specialists, I guess.
Scarlett O’Hara uses it in Gone With The Wind. When she’s talking to the twins, she says: I can’t figure out which one of you is the handsomest. I was awake all last night trying to figure it out.
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I know. Totally irrellevant.
Adrien: we need to distinguish between grammar and language. Many languages can have the same grammar, and many grammars can be ‘manifested’ in one language. Our criteria for individuating languages are social, cultural, historical, geographical, etc. Our criteria for individuating grammars are the rules for determining grammaticality.
So even if Newcastle students believe that their language is Giordy, Liverpool students believe that their language is Scouse, and so on, it doesn’t follow that this will result in a “cacophony of misunderstanding”. The grammars might be sufficiently similar so that communication is not substantially hindered (notwithstanding differences in phonology and pragmatic norms).
This sort of case has already occurred with the former Yugoslav republic. What we have now is a bunch of languages – Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin – where previously there was just Serbo-Croatian. This change in the languages spoken by the South-Slavic communities does not equate to a change in grammar. Speakers of these languages can readily communicate with one another.
For how long? Please see Andrew Reynold’s comment viz the originof French, Italian, Spanish et al.
I loathe Kevin Donnelly, so it really galls me that he might be right on this one. Not his point that it is inappropriate to use Home and Away to teach grammar but to the extent he is backing up Huddlestone.
I’m obsessed with the way the bulk of the right has tried to turn issues of scientific fact into political football games, most notably on Global Warming. If it doesn’t destroy society entirely it will eventually take those people out of political relevance. It worries me when I see parts of the left trying to do the same thing.
This is most obvious in the people who want to turn phonetic language teaching into a rightwing conspiracy, rather than something which can be tested empirically (I haven’t investigated deeply, but my impression is that such testing shows more support for phonetics than whole language, although a synthesis of the two may eventually triumph). It looks to me like Ferguson is trying a similar stunt, despite the fact that Huddlestone is apparently something of a lefty.
I have no idea, Adrien. But I don’t think that the rate of successful communication will substantially decline because communities now believe that they are speaking a different a language. What matters for successful communication is sharing a grammar, not a langauge (at least, not nearly so much).
As for the origin of those languages which followed the demise of the Roman empire, I can’t really say much except that I know nothing about it, and what’s been mentioned in this thread doesn’t establish much (I don’t fault the posters for that). But hypothetically, I suspect that the rate of successful communication would decline if there was not substantial uniformity in the grammar taught to children. I think that’s your point, and I agree with you there. But teaching different languages does not mean that there isn’t substantial uniformity in the grammars being taught.
The Roman empire is surely a bad comparator here.
From what I’ve read, the current view is that spoken Latin had already diverged substantially from the written standard by the Augustan age – clever linguists have gone hunting for traces of spoken language in graffiti and written texts. No one in any of the Romance countries (which weren’t “countries” in our sense or nation states at the time anywhere) thought they were speaking a “national language” – the beginnings of literary writing in vernacular tongues contributed to the realisation that there wasn’t just a written or Church Latin and a multiplicity of vernacular “tongues”… etc.
There’s a fair bit of evidence around that mutual intelligibility wasn’t that huge a problem either. Even now people on the borders of say France and Spain or France and Italy are speaking the same dialects, or there are languages such as Catalan which cross borders. Same diff with say German and Dutch or German and Danish – and then think what a multiplicity of dialects – with very wide variations – goes under the heading of “Germans”.
Also if you’ve got a good grasp of say, spoken French, try a conversation with a native speaker of French or Italian. You’ll get on better than you might expect.
Don’t forget that after the fall of the Western empire, travel became much more difficult for a long time and standards of literacy declined very steeply – that had a lot more to do with linguistic differentiation, as I understand it, than anything else. English is in a very different place now than Latin was a millenium and a half ago.
And
Sharing a grammar I think necessitates some standardization. There were variations in language across the Roman Empire but there was a standard form maintained by the apparatus of the Roman Empire. Similarly grammar became standardized in the modern era with the emergence of the nation-state. And especially with the appearance of broadcasting.
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Kim’s point re travel is pertinent. It’s also probably why a lot this conversation about grammar might be moot. When the Empire fell there was a lot less commerce hence people tended to stay where they were for life. Hence you get this branching off of Latin into various zones that later lead to standardized languages like Spanish, French etc. Even in the 20th century people from different parts of the same province could consider themselves nationally different. Martin Scorsese grandparents had some difficult getting their match accepted by their respected familes as, because they came from different border town outide Palermo they were deemed to be of different nationalities.
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Australia is much larger geographically then England but has much less linguistic diversity. This is because it is a younger country and also because it’s arisen entirely within the modern era. Due to greater ability to travel and broadcasting the language standardizes itself. Perhaps in the future we will all be speaking Hollywoodspeak hence no need for linguistic grammar per se.
“Perhaps in the future we will all be speaking Hollywoodspeak hence no need for linguistic grammar per se.”
Well, I wonder how the Texans, New Mexicans, Californians & such are coping w/ the teaching of grammar now so many Mexican diaspora are returning to their homeland…;)…is there a TexMex standardised grammar text to teach from? Imagine this topic on the immigration debate thread. Andrew B., dagget & you Adrien would never get any sleep…:)
I don’t agree. As transnational groups take up English as a second language they develop distinctive dialects (e.g. Singlish).
The “standardised” forms (bureaucratic / technical / legal) aren’t really spoken by anyone. While *England* is losing some of it’s regionalisms I don’t think that *English* as a whole is – in fact it is gaining them as it coloniszes new ground and absorbs the languages it displaces. I wouldn’t confuse that loss of overall language diversity to mean that English is necessarily losing its overall diversity. Australian English has managed to maintain its distinctiveness in the face of two generations of so-called American colonisation.
Sorry Kim, I thought I had read it somewhere else.
Did you follow the link in the comments.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=241
I think it is fair to say the “what” has been lost in the “how” and also fair to say language.. has a collection of grammar nuts that can’t agree on the “how”.
When your 54 you can just dismiss the lot as a bunch of wankers, but when your a high school kid and it’s your teacher, well such nit picking nonsense could be the memory that turns you of expressing your ideas for life.
As a tool to describe the language, fair enough, as a tool to add misery to the life of our youth, no.
you’re
turns you off
nit-picking
Charles, when you’re more than borderline comprehensible, you might have some standing to rail against “grammar nuts”. But today is not that day.
Thanks Ambigulous
“Sharing a grammar I think necessitates some standardization.”
Or to switch it around, in a globalised world where English is now the lingua franca of commerce and interoperability protocols, we really need some standards.
What makes this world work now is a plethora of treaties, contracts, conventions and regulations across nations and industries.
Do you really want a dangling participle in the ISO quality standard covering the assembly of the wiring harness, a task just outsourced by a Tier 1 contractor to a new Brazilian outfit with a cheaper bid, of the next plane you about to catch is?
Speaking of Queensland-related education madness, how about this story, which I haven’t seen much reportage of yet: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080616-parents-up-in-arms-over-australian-student-database.html
Thanks Nick, and on that note I will take my bat and ball and go home.
So, which of the 35 (at last count) grammars that heve been devised to describe English should one use to teach the “rules” of English? If you do want to analyse English do so in use in context. Otherwise leave it alone. Knowledge of formal rules does not make for better writing and the time taken to learn those rules could be better spent improving the writing.
O RLY?
And you know this how, exactly?
And what will ‘improve the writing’ if not a better understanding of how language works and therefore a broader sense of the possibilities of what to do with it, including the capacity to say exactly what you meant to say with knowledge aforethought, as distinct from some of the egregious howlers on this thread from the anti-grammar brigade, whose mysteriously angry advocacy of ignorance continues to astound me?
Sorry, P. Fox, but on the basis of having read numberless exam papers, undergraduate essays and graduate theses, many of them in creative writing, I can assure you most earnestly that a knowledge of formal rules does, in fact, make for much better writing.
If what you mean is that knowledge of the rules of grammar cannot render a talentless writer talented, then of course that is a no-brainer. But that is a different thing altogether.
I’d add to PC’s excellent comment that a knowledge of formal rules gives rise to the wonderful world of deliberate grammatical transgression, which done thoughtfully produces excellent humour. Of course this works only when both author and reader are aware of the which rules have been flouted or flirted with.
Yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition. See how funny?
My tags! My lovely tags! I have broken them!
Let’s just assume the and was the only italic bit okay? Our little secret.
Oh, for goodness sake.
OK PC I do have to bite:
You say “on the basis of having read numberless exam papers, undergraduate essays and graduate theses, many of them in creative writing, I can assure you most earnestly that a knowledge of formal rules does, in fact, make for much better writing.” Pray tell how do you know which of those students has had a training in formal grammar rules and which has not? Pedants are people up with whom I shall not put. And what of Shakespeare? No formal grammar there.
It seems the term ‘formal rules’ is a bit pungent (for some), as though to look at a packaged tray of prime steak or chicken which has gone off. We lament the uselessness, waste and disgust, made worse for knowing how magnificent those ingredients in a healthy natural state can be worked into one of life’s true pleasures – notwithstanding the nourishment provided. “I want nothing to do with that shit,” is that response.
The word ‘grammar’ doesn’t help. It lurks behind the kitchen door, peering in, following every grocery with beady little hungry eyes. You may want to make just a snack or a gourmet meal yet all the while this thing checks for the first sign of failing, and has the ability itself to put it off.
Or is it more like a stick to beat you with, even in silence and solitude, when all you want to do is something good?
It’s quite sad really that ‘formal rules’ (grammar) for some has become so off-putting, because they are not formal rules at all – they are actually the ingredients.
It’s understandable, of course.
I do come back to the point about the beauty of language. To move away from what language is and how it is made, to what it does, helps, I believe. And to find and teach the written word in ways which move you deeply is compelling. What this also does is takes away the road rules focus and puts the person back in the driver’s seat, with the benefits and joys of that (challenges too, but it’s easier to meet the challenge when you feel you are empowered to do so).
Accomplished drivers love the road rules (because they allow us to drive), let’s remember too. Learners? The inexperienced, what are formal rules to them other than to frighten and threaten, when what they really want to do is drive. They’re excited to drive! From the experienced, a little understanding helps.
That said, while I extricate to slay some metaphors gathering, is it ok to put in a request to have some more language and writing posts at LP? They’re terrific. Having them here is not only pleasant, it takes the weight off the professional writers who are not really in a position to head up the posts. This thread has been a beauty.
Well, the “pro-grammar brigade” should go far with the likes of Nick Caldwell among the ranks….
Pretty catty for a hoss, Cap’n!
I’m not so much pro-grammar as I am pro-making-sense. But people who use phrases like “grammar nuts” tend to favour the convenience of the author — whose star-speckled and utterly unique creativity must never be chained by convention — over that of the reader.
If you want people to pay attention to you, don’t let ungrammatical prose obstruct your meaning.
On what planet? Shakespeare played with order inversion and idiosyncratic word usage in order to fit his meaning to his rhyme, but that was the accepted metier of the day and a large part of its effect is, as FDB pointed out, due to both the audience and the writer understanding exactly what conventions were being flouted.
The Bard’s facility with vocabulary, grammatical twists and iambic pentameter are a large part of the argument of those who believe that a GRAMMAR SCHOOL boy from Stratford could not possibly have actually been the celebrated Bard, and who seek to disclose a knight or peer of the realm lurking under the Mask of Avon. That argument is beginning to look a little threadbare, but it would never have had legs at all if Shakespeare was as ungrammatical as you claim.
Actually, tigtog, the grammar in early modern grammar schools was Latin not English.
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Medieval_Schools_and_Universities.htm
Two salient things to remember about Shakespeare are:
(1) His plays were written to be performed and not read. So although there are degrees of formal and informal speech, some at least of the text would more closely resemble spoken than written idiom. Most book publishing in the Elizabethan age was still religious texts, and thus written English was powerfully shaped by the legacies of Cranmer and Tyndale among others.
(2) For similar reasons as with Latin, the fact that English stopped being a written language almost entirely after the Norman Conquest meant that the fairly elaborate grammar of Anglo-Saxon English was no longer the norm (although that’s to simplify things – but anyway…) – so you get a variety of grammatical forms in Shakespeare which aren’t consistent with regard to agreement, tense, sentence order etc. Because there was no accepted standard of consistency. Of course, the grammar is more regular than the spelling which was wildly variant.
(3) None of that means he wasn’t playing with language to good effect obviously!
So, because of (2) in the comment above, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to think of Shakespeare as either grammatical or ungrammatical in his own context because there was no fixed norm which would enable such an evaluation.
It is a little like jazz or tuning your guitar differently; you need to have a grounding in the rules in order to creatively bend or break them (she says, conscious of her own limited grasp of formal grammar). But couldn’t that knowledge be entirely implicit? Do you need to be able to recount a rule in order to follow it or to recognize when someone has distorted it in either a meaningless or creative way?
I’m expecting the definitive proof of my theory that James Joyce was really a front for King Edward VII to turn up any day now. Probably on Wikipedia.
I did not mean to imply that Shakespeare was “ungrammatical” rather that his education in formal rules of grammar (latin translation) would have been minimal and in fact would have been a barrier to his creative use of language as emerged later. He only attended school from 7 to 14 (if at all – the evidence is not clear). He probably developed his literary skills by reading other writers including Greek and latin writers tho this is not clear either. I repeat that every native speaker has all the grammar they will need by the time they are five- before they learn to read or write, so the study of formal rules often only inhibits their understanding of what is good English and stultifies their capacity to develop as good writers. They do much better by looking at samples of interesting expression from the great writers .
My two children learnt English as their second language. Naturally as they were learning I corrected them. They was going to the shop was corrected … they were going …. but I am not at all convinced that my saying “A singular personal pronoun must always be followed by a singular verb, and a plural pronoun must be followed by a plural verb” would have helped them produce correct English. It would only have confused them. Much bettter to give a plethora of examples over time. Their first language is tawala and while I speak it fluently its grammar is a mystery to me. The grammatical rules of the tawala language have never been written down. And yet it is a thriving language with song and poetry and commerce and the basis for intense customary law.
In this and in all the talk of Shakespeare above, it seems as though everyone’s mixing up two very different issues. On one hand there is grammar, as in morpho-syntax, which every single language ever spoken on the planet has, simply in virtue of being a language, and on the other hand there are culturally-specific protocols and conventions of style, that pertain not only to writing, but also to performance, speech, and pretty much any communicative act. The second appears to be what everyone is referring to as ‘grammar’. This is totally wrong, and I’m hereby taking back our word.
The skill of an orator, a performer, a writer, and so on, is their ability, as Tigtog says above, to flout the culturally-specific conventions for rhetoric effect. Shakespeare was one such skilled wordsmith. His ‘grammar’, however, that is, his morpho-syntax, was exactly what one would expect of any linguistically competent Briton at the turn of the 17th century, Early Modern-English.
Yes, English was experiencing a lot of flux back then, especially with the relatively recent invention of the printing press and the surge in literacy. Relating specifically to grammar, the pronoun paradigm was being simplified, cases were being increasingly dropped and word order was becoming fixed to compensate for the lack of dependent-marking, but much of this had already taken place by Shakespeare’s time.
It’s a total fallacy to consider Shakespeare as being any less grammatically competent (by which I mean his morpho-syntactic command of Early Modern English) than any human being with normal mental faculty and normal development over about the age of four that has ever lived. And that includes people with hearing disabilities, by the way.
Pappinbarra Fox just put it more concisely above.
When the Lit Student of the year 2500 does a comparative analysis of the epoch-defining works of 50 Cent and Miranda Devine, they’ll probably conclude that current English grammar is likewise in a state of flux.
Whether or not Shakespeare’s work was ‘grammatical’ is beside the point. What is relevant is that he had a rigorous Latin education, full of grammar drills, and The Luvvies bete noire, “rote-learning.”
Here, we are discussing what is best for school kids. Equipping kids with the best and most challenging is the surest way to maximise their freedom to communicate.
Kid A: A diet of grammar drills, Thucydides, Cicero, Jane Austen, and James Joyce will equip Kid A to: understand High Court legal judgements and Milton; produce felicitous copy equally for The Atlantic, The Sun, Ogilvy and Mather, Home and Away’s and Unilever’s Investor Relation’s department.
Kid A: Fed on a diet of text messages and Home and Away scripts will require a great deal of external assistance if she is to manage anything more complex than the Form Guide and a parole information sheet.
Indeed, the use of “they” as a neuter singular pronoun (as an alternative to the cumbersome “he or she”) has been attested in English since the 14th century. IMO, people who criticise this construction on the basis of violating a formal grammatical rule show precisely where the line between grammar as an aid to comprehension and grammar as an expression of pedantic superiority lies.
Oh, no-one was actually doing that here. Sorry, my mistake.
As Martin Amis put it so well, that a dramatist is generally regarded as the greatest writer in history is a grand cosmic joke. Don’t you all get it, yet?
‘Good grammar’ and ‘precision’ in writing are two entirely different qualities. The former is mere Guild administration. OK, so it’s better to be grammatically correct, or at least only wrong knowingly. But to think there is some causal link between writing ‘correctly’ and writing ‘precisely’ is like thinking there is some such link between kitting up smartly for a game of footy, and playing it well. There is often a correlation, but that’s generally purely circumstantial. The chap* who’s disciplined enough to get his apostrophes in the right place is more likely to be the kind of chap who’ll also check his facts, clear and strip down the expression of his thinking, strive to use verbs and nouns that vigorously describe the concrete world, and so on.
(* Everyone knows wishy-washy girlies can never hope to write like anything but…well, wishy-washy girlies. *Ducks*)
Is there always a positive intrinsic symbiosis in the evolution of writerly abilities like these, and of the mere technical skills? I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe. Probably. Possibly. Sometimes. A bigger vocabulary can as easily make you write less clearly as more. Some writers think semi-colons are a wank, about which more rather than less is better left unlearned; others that obsession with participle and preposition discipline is no more worth striving after than are attempts at humorous parodic excess when relevant grammatical faculty is a writerly quality with which one is insufficiently equipped. It depends a bit on how you think ‘good writing’ should be defined. Is it by the clear communication of ideas? Completeness of sentence? In its poetry? It’s emotional punch? (Is it?) Is it its it’s, its its, its It factor? Truth wrt the real world?
Me, I know some people who write a whole lot less well after they’ve spent a lot of time learning how to write well. I’ve got a terrible feeling I’m one of them. My peak might have been around grade four. I didn’t even know how to spell granma then. I suppose you want to marry good grammar with precise writing, but. Most of the time they are intrinsic to one another, and to good writing. No arguments. The only reason to take issue with those like Fearsome Doc Pav the Grammatical Gunslinger – who would nail ‘anti-grammar’ types (nice straw man, Doc) for swift kicks juz’ coz’ she can, man – in the context of this thread is because…well, we shouldn’t fall for the red herring Donnelly et al are trying to slip us. That original Oz editorial tries not just to conflate ‘grammatical correctness’ and ‘precision’ in language, but in fact largely substitute the former for the latter. It’s a way of winning the debate over language by fixing the terms of reference, a typical Mitchell-Oz gambit these days. Those MSM varmints – they know no-one’s going to argue ‘against’ precision in language.
But the real argument to be had is ‘What do we mean by precision’?
Hence, some of us choose to regard grammatical pedantry as a priority that needs must be strictly secondary to being pedantic about the precision that really matters. As Don Watson has pointed out there is indeed a growing problem in public language, but as he (in Death Sentence) clearly stresses, it ain’t much to do with grammar. What really should be under the gun of language gatekeepers when it comes to ‘imprecision’ is…well, exactly what that word means: not ‘incorrect’ but weak verbs, not ‘misidentified’ but sloppy nouns, not ‘ungrammatical’ but weasel sentences, fuzzy, pappy, malleable verbiage…filler, slop, feelgoods, motherhoods, mishmash, mush; literally, ‘imprecision’ in language.
This is awful grammar but precise language (and IMHO good, moral writing):
1. ha that shit saddam he never had wmds after all youse invasion supporters were wrong wrong WRONG youse either lied to us about your ‘conclusive evidence’ (LOL) or youse was really trooly sucked in yourselves either way youse was just WRONG come on FFS admit it and then maybe yul be more sceptic next time, roit?
This is acceptable grammar, but imprecise language and IMHO bad, immoral writing:
2. It could be concluded, on the basis of the failure to locate any significant relevant material since the invasion, that Saddam’s WMD program was somewhat less evolved than the more uncompromising aspects of the pre-invasion assessments implied. Whether confusion or conspiracy, or (more probably) a combination of the two, was the dominant factor behind the contentious assessments may or may not now be moot. Perhaps what is most crucial is that any failures that were made be openly acknowledged, such that appropriate steps be taken to ensure they are not repeated.
Obviously if you can shift the debate about ‘precision’ in language largely onto the (IMHO secondary) ‘grammar turf’ alone, you’re far more likely to get away with truly damaging imprecision of the latter kind unscrutinised and unchecked. And after a while, that kind of language becomes typical, even influential. Writers forget – as I think we are, or have – just what ‘precision’ really means. Essentialy, vigorous verbs connected to hard nouns, in clean sentences that anchor the language unambiguously in the concrete world it aspires to describe.
As for bad grammar itself, well, it doesn’t ‘hurt’ language any more than an outright lie ‘hurts’ the truth. An easily-pinged ‘howler’ is as much an observance (in the breach) of the epistemological integrity of a system of tools/rules as is perfect observance. It’s always the glib, slick, weaselly, slippery, slimey, mean-nothing/mean-anything – but technically correct – stuff in between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ that blunts the systemic cutting edges.
Another prodigious talent for writing ruined by the education system. Pity – if you were writing up to your grade 4 standard, you’d have this thread completely pwned.
i dunno, quite often in the sort of thing a 1st year Uni student writes, i reckon the poor grammar conceals meaning. not talkin’ about novelists, poets, etc Gwynn. just writing for clear meaning. i’d like to see ‘em get the grammar correct AND the meaning clear. not askin’ for a gem, just a well-washed stone would be acceptable; a lump of mud is unwelcome.
Gwynn wrote, inter alia:
“The only reason to take issue with those like Fearsome Doc Pav the Grammatical Gunslinger – who would nail ‘anti-grammar’ types (nice straw man, Doc) for swift kicks juz’ coz’ she can, man”
aww, don’t yew be gettin’ huffy about thet Doctor Cat: on a good day she kin be mighty helpful ‘n awful nice !! Jess yew wait ‘n see ….
tigtog @ 73: “I just did a quick search of the files at the Gutenberg project, and according to their version “handsomest” is used only once in Persuasion, to describe some curtains.”
A great line – Lady russell is looking out the carriage window telling Anne she’s trying to see ‘the handsomest and best-hung curtains in Bath’ – Anne wonders why Lady R hasn’t spotted Wentworth on the pavement – but that peculiar phrase does suggest she *has* seen the handsome and very probably well-hung Captain, and is consequently avoiding another conversation about him with Anne.
Heh!
Racy Victorian reference repeatedly missed by filthy mind – man thanks woman in comments thread.
Also: when I try to teach students how to improve their writing (and it’s not my job, but I do it when I can fit it in around what they’re really supposed to be studying with me) I make a distinction between GRAMMAR, a command of which is almost innate for native speakers (vocabulary + grammar = language), and USAGE or STYLE.
Works for me, and as far as I can judge, for at least some of them.
All this grammar morality leaves me both bemused and depressed. Thanks, Gwynn Tull, for the voice of sanity.
The thing that always astounds me about this debate and its myriad variations is the way the self-appointed defenders of what’s Right and Good have no qualms about allowing themselves to be manipulated into pursuing the Oz’s ideological causes on the latter’s behalf. Someone above said something about this not letting this be treated as a skirmish in “the culture wars”, but as soon someone starts bemoaning the fact that they don’t teach formal grammar in schools anymore and expressing their horror that *gasp* some school teachers knowledge of grammar isn’t perfect, that’s exactly how things will unfold.
Is there seriously no one on this blog (other than Gwynn Tull, and probably glen, if he’d decided to run with it), which purportedly discusses politics, culture, etc from a “left of centre perspective”, who can see that this is all cover for an attack on public funding of education and on the role of English teaching specifically in producing a critically engaged citizenry? Is there seriously no one here who would prefer not to aid the Oz in giving another kick to an underpaid and undervalued profession but prefer instead to scrutinise the way Donnelly et al. have run with this?
Don’t believe me? Have a look at how far Donnelly has to stretch his points in his opinion piece. Apparently, “adverbial clauses and phrases” is utterly transparent in meaning whereas “circumstances” is “dense and arcane terminology”. And the whole problem can be traced back, it seems, to “critical literacy” and its reliance on “functional linguistics” (notwithstanding the fact that the errors Huddleson identifies are inconsistencies with the functional perspective and not the product of that perspective).
Captain Oats – you talk of English teaching as if it can either be learning how language works, or learning critical thinking. I don’t accept this dichotomy. In my opinion you can’t really be a competent critical reader unless you’ve grasped the structural operations of language. However I really strongly reject the idea that it’s a choice, that teaching one precludes or crowds out the other.
Also, I don’t give a toss what the Australian says, it’s always full of shit in its reporting of & commentary on these issues, without exception, and the insinuation that if I think teachers might as well get the facts right about what they teach, I am therefore a dupe of Donellian propaganda, is a pretty dumb one. The surest way to be suckered by KD is to waste one’s attention upon him.
Enough with the misrepresentation, please, Gwynn Tull and by implication Captain Oats. What ‘grammar morality’ exactly? Can’t speak for anyone else, but I have been posting about language and the structure of language, engaging once with the anger and scorn of the grammar-resistant, which bemuses me, and that is all.
So who on this thread did that, and where?
It’s been a given since the beginning of the thread that most of the people in the conversation understand and deplore what Donnelly is trying to do, or so I would have thought. Donnelly has been trying to co-opt the issue for a left/right agenda, because that is what he always does and because no-one appears to have told him yet that the election’s been over for a while now, and they lost.
The Romans “invented” grammar? Well that is one more to add to their other “invention”; cement.
But seriously, where do these people get this tosh? This news would have shocked the young men skulking around the agora and gymnasium of fifth century Greece. What might we call the instruction these young men received – from the likes of Gorgias, Socrates, and Protagoras – in grammar, rhetoric, music, geometry, epic and lyric poetry, and the finer arts of ‘giving head’? And what of all those Socratic dialogues finessing correct lexis And what of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Gorgias, Protagoras, etc?
I have just finished as essay on fifth century tragedy. I got very excited by Euripides masterful use of epideictic rhetoric. This excitement was largely generated by Aristotle’s discussion of the role of diction – which includes GRAMMAR – in Poetics
Anybody who thinks the Romans invented grammar has obviously never stumbled upon the delights of weak-aorist or semi-deponent verbs in Homer or Herodotus’ deliberate use of intrusive oblique infinitives to augment his proleptic narrative strategies. Oh, and by the way, even the Romans knew it was Aristotle who was responsible the categorisation of “oblique” verbs, which are common to all Indo-European languages – Greek, Latin, German, Celtic, Sanskrit, slavic, Iranian.
This bizarre Leftist fantasy that teaching grammar in schools is somehow another step in a vast right-wing conspiracy speaks volumes about their own education.
“Someone above said something about this not letting this be treated as a skirmish in “the culture wars”, but as soon someone starts bemoaning the fact that they don’t teach formal grammar in schools anymore and expressing their horror that *gasp* some school teachers knowledge of grammar isn’t perfect, that’s exactly how things will unfold.”
And you’re doing what exactly, by insisting that we should be discussing Donnelly and his dastardly plans to make it a culture war issue?
I’d have thought a dispassionate discussion about what grammar really is, and its true role and importance in language and literature, is exactly what one might do to avoid “falling for the red herring.”
Wait, what was that noise?
Oh, never mind.
What FDB said. I’m interested in the discussion, and it’s already been pointed out that Huddleston isn’t raising the issue to score political points.
Donnelly once made a living from doing consultancies for Liberal state governments. There are none of them left. He worked as a staffer for the Howard government. It’s gone. He continues his crusade in The Australian. Who cares? You can’t have a culture war if no one comes to the party.
His stuff has just about zero influence now. By the time the next conservative administration is elected in Australia (which might be a long time), someone else will be touting some other issue.
“What FDB said. I’m interested in the discussion, and it’s already been pointed out that Huddleston isn’t raising the issue to score political points.”
Didn’t say he was. But The Oz is, and always does on this kind of stuff, as Laura point out. I think you should care, Laura, and you should get bolshie in the terms I suggest. You’re a scholar and tertiary level teacher of our language. If your lot is not going impose on yourselves the vocational obligation to at least try to take back the epistemological hegemony over English from, among other usuprers and pretenders, the MSM, politicians and the corporate world…who is?
Ast for those ‘political points’ The Oz is after, they’re not to do with ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, or a ‘Culture War’, either. They are ‘political points’ in the far more important cultural struggle that is underway, one which goes beyond politics or ideology, or rather, renders those puny realms mere subsets of what’s at stake: the philosophical stewardship of our language itself. Who is going to be the genuine gatekeepers of precision in language, and by what means, after the white noise of the Information Age settles? An important – maybe critical – part of this battle is actually ensuring that it gets fought at all, forcing, at every opportunity, the fight between vocational writers and the merely professional into the open. That’s the real pedantry demanded, whether you like it – would prefer to chat comfortably about grammar – or not.
I don’t give a shit about Donnelly’s agenda, nor about the Murdochians’ transient agit-prop strong-armery on this or that CW issue as such. I am with Pav & Co all the way on grammatical accuracy. Nothing is more aesthetically pleasing and even compelling than clean straight craft. OK, I take your point about ‘misrepresentation’, Doc, but modestly counter that even the most deft attempt to redirect a debate – a Comrade, dare I say? (Mmmm, best not, p’raps, tho’ one can dream…) – towards what you reckon are the far more daunting (thrilling, epochal, tragicke) barricades is going to feel like just that: strawman opportunism; overkill; lumpentrollery…ah, but Pav…just because you – or Mark, or FDB, or anyone else – wants this debate about ‘precision’ in language to focus on grammar, doesn’t mean anyone of us has to dance to that tune. We’re easily enough ignored, if you prefer. A big part of the point of my post is, however, to suggest that so many clearly literate and erudite writers accepting the sleight-of-hand ‘fair accompli’ terms of the debate as presented by others is
itself a symptom of operational decay.
You can answer a question by saying ‘The question is bullshit’, you know.
Gummo the Trot, that was not remotely worthy of you. Ironic deprecation of someone else’s ironic self-deprecation clunks like a drunk’s ‘helpfully’ repeated punchline five second after everyone’s got the joke. Do your own set-ups, you lazy blagger.
Personally, I think that a lot of the lamentation that the standards of English are declining is much like the lamentations that the moral standards of society are declining – they are both the results of basis error.
Several of the comments above admit to this without recognising it. An example is Tyro Rex’s at #86 – “As transnational groups take up English as a second language…”. That is to say that standards drop as new speakers take up the language. Sorry to put it this way, but “well, duh”. As the Midlands English dialect was taken up in Kent in the 15th century, the average standard of Midlands English will have dropped – it must have.
Equally, as more people learn to write then the average standard of writing will drop. Is that really meaningful? I would prefer that more people learn to read, write and speak English than we get too concerned about the average standard.
.
I will readily admit to being an apostrophe pedant (and Adrien’s use of “Reynold’s” is, I will admit, a little annoying) but when you consider that in Jane Austen’s time the majority of people in the UK probably would have been unable to read her books then there has not been a drop in standards at all, but a considerable improvement. In this context a misplaced apostrophe is small beer.
I’m not quite sure what your point is, Gwynn Tull. Most tertiary teachers have enough to do with teaching, research and marking (particularly at this time of year!) to keep them busy enough without engaging in struggles for “epistemological hegemony” and I’m not sure that constitutes a vocational obligation either.
I’m also not sure what you mean by “the philosophical stewardship of our language itself” or what function “gatekeepers of precision” would perform, or, what you understand by this struggle for precision and what its stakes might be.
Clarification would be appreciated!
Speaking about precision – I didn’t actually say that I wanted this or any debate to “focus on grammar”. I said I was enjoying this thread.
Oh bitch bitch bitch.
.
Didn’t even realize.
“after the white noise of the Information Age settles”
Gywnn Tull, remember this?…:
“Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data absolutely… Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. it is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. . . Waves and radiation. . . . ”
Yep, Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
Choice.
Great Jones Street beats the shit out of it.
.
As does Libra and Underworld of course. But White Noise is always taught at Unis cause its about them
“The Romans “invented” grammar?”
The only person claiming that is your ideological soulmate, Graham Young, as quoted in the initiating post for this thread.
“This bizarre Leftist fantasy that teaching grammar in schools is somehow another step in a vast right-wing conspiracy speaks volumes about their own education.”
It’s certainly a bizarre fantasy and once again one you can claim total credit for, me ole luvviefield. I don’t see anyone here arguing against learning the principles of grammar. Do you?
However, the one person on this thread who is consistently committing egregious mistakes of spelling, punctuation and syntax is of course you.
You would do well to actually pick up some of the basic elements of the use of the language that you claim to be defending against those that don’t know how to use it correctly.
Let’s face it, your brain is not exactly a serious load-bearing structure is it? On the other hand parrots do live for a long time. Let’s hope your case is an exception.
“But White Noise is always taught at Unis cause its about them”
Exactly Adrien. I think you got my point…:)
Also wondering why Gywnn Tull has now expended nearly 1500 words trying to make the point that if you have a point to make, then get to the point.
And the idea of “grammar morality” is one mother of a category mistake.
Re Don DiLillo, I’ve always felt ‘White Noise’ was his funniest book and ‘Libra’ the best example of his occasionally uncanny ability to speak in peculiarly North American tongues.
But ‘Underworld’. *heavy sigh*. I’ve virtuously tucked it into my carry on bag for some transpacific flights but always found it lost my attention in favour of watching something like ‘Shrek 3′ while wheedling another slice of polymer cheesecake and a baby brandy out of a passing flight attendant. Like ‘Moby fuckin’ Dick’, it just did not engage me. Perhaps the fact I feel about baseball the way most Yankees feel about cricket also has something to do with it.
Which, as I absorb a 18 year old Macallan while rediscovering the the dubious yet exuberant charms of the Allman Brothers, leads me to speculate why cricket has never inspired any decent books or films. OK, the TV series ‘Bodyline’ was pretty good, although it didn’t use the best line generated during the whole contretemps: “Right! Which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard”.
Which, as you’d all agree, is grammatically correct, pungently precise and a uniquely local use of demotic speech. Yet redolent with ambiguities about where the person who said that really stood on the issue in question.
See Gywnn, that’s how to bring a lengthy comment back to the crease.
No doubt a heap of these exist on the net, but for perennial p-platers like me who are interested, this “Guide to Grammar and Style” makes it clear and precise.
Fuck that noise Robert, here’s the bomb on writing proper.
1) Remember to never split an infinitive.
And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
2) The passive voice should never be used.
3) Do not put statements in the negative form.
4) A verb has to agree with their subjects.
5) Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6) If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
7) A writer must not shift your point of view.
9) Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.
10) Don’t overuse exclamation marks !!!!!!!!!
11) Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of ten or more words, to their antecedents.
12) Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
13) If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
14) Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
15) Avoid trendy locutions that sound like the shizz.
16) Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
17) Always pick on the correct idiom.
18) The adverb always follows the verb.
19) Eschew obfuscation.
20) Always spell out numbers between 0 and 10 and use numerals for any number over eleven.
21) Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
Nixon’s speechwrite,. Bill Safire, came up with these guidelines. With a tiny bit of tweaking from me forty years later.
Oh fuck it..
The last sentance should read:
Nixon’s speechwriter, Bill Safire, came up with these guidelines. With a tiny bit of tweaking from me forty years later.
I’ve no idea either how that fucking smiley emoticon thing got in there.
Well yes I do. Drunken cut ‘n’ pasting.
Anyway I hate the fuckers. If you have resort to visuals to spin your point, then you’re not exactly in command of the language to begin with. :<{
And yes, for “sentance” read “sentence”
And for “sausage” read “hostage” throughout.
Nice.
OK, Mark, my point is this:
1. ‘I’m not quite sure that represents a vocational obligation…’ is grammatically correct, but imprecise language. ‘I’m not quite sure…’ is a soft, or weak, verb phrase. Not because it’s diplomatic, or restrained, or polite…but because it’s open to a whole range of functional interpretations from ‘I’m almost (but not quite) absolutely sure…’ to ‘I’m almost (though not quite) absolutely sure not…’.
C’arn, you big girlie. Which is it? Precision won’t offend!
2. The battle for epistemological hegemony/philosophical stewardship is an ongoing process by which writers in different modes and realms stake their claim to dominant authority, in exactly such subjective critical assessments as that (banal) example above. Me, I like to think I’m a literate man, and I think your phrase was imprecise; bad writing. Assuming you disagree…well, who is to be more influential, and how (via what institutional and didactic mechanisms), over other writers, especially the coming generations, and so most significantly affect the evolution of what a ‘literate’ person comes to regard as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing? When the anonymous leader writer for The Australian presumes to conflate mere ‘grammatical accuracy’ with ‘precision’…who’s going to challenge both the opinion itself and the presumption of linguistic stewardship inherent therein, and how, and will The Oz’s challenger prevail, and should they? My view is and always has been that public academics – fulltime scholars of our language, of all disciplines, but most of all of plain old ‘English’ – ought collectively to represent the highest authority on it. Part of that vocational obligation is, I think, ‘forcing’ just that fight, that assertion, upon all other language users in our public realm, the more stroppily the more ubiquitous the target, unashamedly, as both a civic virtue and, what the hell, a joyously shit-stirring intellectual quest. Start some big grinny shitfights over words with the goomba typists of MSM Hackdom! What a sheerly pleasurable thing.
3. The stakes ought to be obvious. No more so than via a post-mortem of the Iraq debates. Again and again and again, the pro-invasion lobby disguised weak verbs and soft nouns – they knew damned well they’d need the wiggle room later – with buckets of big tough adjectives and adverbs, in order to manhandle debate onto meaningless motherhood turf. And most anti-invasionists got suckered and sidelined and red herringed into arguing on that turf, rather than grabbing back the terms of debate.
Pro: The EVIL RUTHLESS Saddam is UNQUESTIONABLY seeking to further enhance his GENOCIDAL wmd capacity and has SIGNIFICANT LINKS to al-Qaeda. CRAVEN APPEASEMENT and ABJECT failure to act BOLDLY and DECISIVELY to preempt the crisis now will ALMOST INEVITABLY raise the threat of CATASTROPHIC TERRORIST activity in future.
Anti: No, he’s not, or we don’t know that he is, or he has no links, or they’re not operational, or this is not the way…blah blah… flailing to find some solid verbs to sink your own solid verby teeth into, when there weren’t any. That’s the point of propaganda. Don’t say anything ‘precise’. And you can never be wrong. Impossible to gainsay with any oomph…except by the meta-process of saying: ‘What a pile of linguistic nothing’. Or better still: Laugh uproariously, and say ‘Fuck off eejit.’ Or do a Monty Python silly walk. Anything to wrench the terms of debate back to the realm of concrete reality, where your own verbs and nouns function properly.
Nabs – and PC, btw – you’re both making that ‘grammar morality’ thing up out of thin hot protesting-too-much air. Of my examples, I said only that they were ‘moral writing’ and ‘immoral writing’. I’d be happy to defend those notions if you really want. I’m sure your mutual straw-conflation of my ‘good grammar’ with my ‘moral writing’ is merely an innocent slip. Haven’t read ‘White Noise’ (but I am wincing at that mixed metaphor of mine…or is it a simile…woteva, ‘noise clearing’ indeed, pah.). As for Underworld…like Nabs I found it unengaging; a great pompous slab of blah, in fact. Tom Wolfe without the page-turning narrative and unabashed CAPITALS AND MEGAPUNCTUATION FOR VISCERAL IMPACT!!!!!!!
I’m told Mao II is a ripper, but. Pity I’ll never find out.
As for ‘category mistake’…pa, Nabs: ‘brevity’ is no more an automatic component of ‘precision’ than is ‘good grammar’.
Have another snifter and flick on the box, you bloviating old bluff-merchant. The Man Who Would Be King is on again. Huzzah!
Gwynn Tull:
(1) I disagree that deliberate ambiguity and imprecision are the same thing. What I’m trying to convey is that I’m not judging or evaluating your claim until it’s clear to me what you’re saying, and how you support the argument. If I want to say something definitive, I’ll do so. But if I’m not sure about something, or if I’d like my interlocutor to clarify, I’ll try to write in such a way as to leave the possibilities open. That’s an obligation, I think, perhaps exceeding a vocational obligation.
“you’re both making that ‘grammar morality’ thing up out of thin hot protesting-too-much air”
Well you were the one that started conflating the two. Not like PavCat or I would conjure such a ludicrous concept out of thin air.
“As for ‘category mistake’…pa, Nabs: ‘brevity’ is no more an automatic component of ‘precision’ than is ‘good grammar’.”
Who said it was? But brevity soul wit, etc. Unlike your prolix bollix.
Mate, you’re too busy admiring what you wrote to properly read what others have said in response. However I doubt this will become an ongoing issue.
“The Man Who Would Be King is on again.”
Well sure, if you got the kind of attention span that can put with LOUD crappy ads every 15 minutes or so. Wait till you discover DVDs. It’ll transform you your viewing habits.
“Huzzah!”
You’ve obviously never tried Kipling either (Insert ‘Carry On Up The Khyber” joke here.) He’s not quite the jingo Empire poet you seem to think he is.
“I’ll try to write in such a way as to leave the possibilities open.”
Fuggedaboutit Mark.
Tully wants only one possibility left open. That his polysyllabic piffle be treated as the best thing ever read on a blog thread.
I have this kinda troll gene in me too, but I’ve been able to dampen it down so far. Mainly because I’ve been adequately socialised. But a para into Tully’s rants and you realise no one would voluntarily buy him a drink in an desolate airport bar at 4am.
Now if only we could turn Tilly and Luvviefield against eachother – like those fighting fish that get enraged by their own reflections.
I realise you’re trying to run a high class intellectual clip joint here Mark. But some of yer more unreconstructed punters like a good ratting exercise from time to time.
139 is a thing of wonder and beauty. Mind if I send it to a few friends?
Oh FFS, Captain Oats said it at #122 and I blockquoted it at #124.
What Nabs said there.
I can’t imagine you not buying Jack R or the Ritalin Kid for that matter, a drink at any time Mr Nabs, though in the case of the latter, possibly more on him. Mean but not too mean, ok?
Grammar, isn’t that the boys school in the city where they wear them funny hats?
Jangari, thanks for your posts & links – I’ve been reading through Huddelston’s ‘new & improved’ guide – “ah, so that’s what them are”. Having left school at 15 (and said schooling was just post formal grammar instruction anyways) more than a few gaping holes in the gerry built foundations at my joint.
Kind of a bit OT, but in the spirit of jollying things up a bit…
Dr. Cat: “your question reminds me of one of my favourite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons… Hobbes finally folds his paws in a cross sort of way and says ‘Verbing weirds language.’”
One of my own faves (a bit of a stretch, but still, it’s about reality and representation, so close enough) is the one where Calvin asks his dad why old photographs are in black and white, instead of in color. The father puts on a truly classical deadpan and replies…
FATHER: Well, because the whole world actually WAS in black and white back then. It started to change to color around the late 1940s, nobody really knows why.
CALVIN: Then how come old paintings from the middle ages are in color and not black and white?
FATHER: Because they’re just physical objects like everything else, and they changed to color too, around 1948 like other things did.
CALVIN: Then why are the old photographs still in black and white?
FATHER (“duh!”): Because they’re just color photographs of the world from when it was still black and white. Understand?
There’s also a pretty good punk rock song from the early 90s called “You Nerve Me,” which is pretty funny despite its, well, weirding of language.
Nice list, Charles MacA/Nabs/William Safire
So something good did come out of Richard Nixon’s office, as it turns out.
Ouch. Sorry about the ‘grammar morality’ fuck-up, PC and Nabs. Talk about a fatal self-inflicted. I’ll keep talking as I sag down with the colours, though: that d’oh! howler aside, I think the main point of my contributions to this thread are worth something more than dismissive disdain. I’m afraid I just can’t explain them any more concretely, Mark. Not without deepening what Nabs and Pav regard as the narcissistic hole I’m already in, probably. Briefly: I think your own second response demonstrates amply that there are more precise ways of expressing uncertainty and inviting further clarification in the way you intended than the phrase ‘I’m not sure that…’. I chose that example not to make a cheap dig at you. Blog-threads, like any dynamic conversation, are only marginally fair game when it comes to nitpicking language (in any way – grammar, precision, style). I was simply trying to ground the wider points I’d been trying to make in the concrete world that lay close to hand. It doesn’t matter – indeed, as you allude, it’s more fertile if – ‘malleable’ verbs and ‘inclusive’ nouns are the staple of dynamic conversations (blogs, tutorials, workshops, counselling, diplomatic negs…). It does matter when their ubiquity in those appropriate realms ‘leaks’ across into what should be the more concrete fields of language use: political/policy debate, reportage and journalism, law-making and public administering, history, story-telling. I think that’s been happening for several decades uncountered, as our language leaders expend a little bit too much energy and time on what are essentially hermetic concerns, such as grammar and various other components of textual/linguistic theory.
I understand that my expressed view that our focus needs to shift is one that many on this thread see as a bit of a thread hijack. I do honestly think that a big part of the problem is, however, exactly the way that debates about language get ‘boxed in’ by parameters which effectively define ‘fait accompli’ outcomes. You may well think that’s self-serving tosh, so thanks for taking the time with your second reply with your usual patience and courtesy, anyway. I know it’s hard for some of your contributors to accept, but I’m not a troll.
I’ve read most of Kipling, Nabs. I’m a fan – not least because of the concreteness in his writing. Even he’s a bit wussy, though – George McD Fraser, now there’s a direct style. My salute was gleeful, not ironic. It was a tentative Masonic handshake, even, offered to the bit of Flashy that runs in your own veins. Or appears to, anyway. Boy, do I have a serial problem with tone. FWIW I suppose #146 was deserved enough. But the sting of #147 felt a wee bit gratuitous. I hardly post anywhere anymore. I read LP regularly, but I don’t think I’ve wasted space here for a couple of months. It was a bit of a blue to dip my toe back in this time, perhaps. But this is one subject I feel very strongly about. Hobby horse, and all that.
yer not a troll, tully
Jack, you wrote: “The Oz is, and always does on this kind of stuff, as Laura point out. I think you should care, Laura, and you should get bolshie in the terms I suggest. You’re a scholar and tertiary level teacher of our language. If your lot is not going impose on yourselves the vocational obligation to at least try to take back the epistemological hegemony over English from, among other usuprers and pretenders, the MSM, politicians and the corporate world…who is?”
You’ve assumed I’m indifferent to all that, but I’m not. I didn’t say I didn’t care, nor even that I wasn’t bolshie. But it’s a question of tactics and of means.
In terms of university curriculum, I think it’s better in every way to teach people about – and invite them to spend their time with – the very best that there is, than to go on pointing out to them all the ways that rubbish and malevolence is bad and so forth. When they get the former they will naturally understand the latter.
In my non-teaching writing, though, I enjoy nothing better than kicking the crap out of evildoers.
yikes!
I’m outta here.
Ta, Amby. Tho’ sometimes I do feel awful troll-like. Especially in these language discussions. The hardest part about dipping into them is that you make your own writing such a target. The assumption is that because you’re proselytising for your notion of ‘good writing’ (in the only style you can call your own), you are automatically asserting that yours is the desirable blueprint. As if. Nobody needs to tell me, after a decade of steadily-accumulating evidence, that I might be just another wannabe who hasn’t quite got it. It doesn’t mean I can’t recognise good stuff when I see it, nor bad. I may not be one but there is such a thing as a vocational user of language, and they’re the ones who should sit atop our literary heirarchy.
I was once manning a booth for the Sydney Writers’ Centre at the Writers’ Festival, and we were advertising our little $10 goodie-bag with a big SPECIAL OFFER!! FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY! The idea was you got a novel chucked in ‘free’ with your purchased bag. Anyway, about halfway through a smooth-running day this angry, anguished, tortured-writer type sidled up to the booth, obviously nervous as all buggery but driven by some seething inner stroppery, and politely asked for his ‘free’ book. He stood his ground for about twenty increasingly-hysterical and – for him – humiliating minutes, while a crowd gathered to watch me explain, to my shame with growing disdain for his ‘trolling’, the ‘conventionally accepted’ meaning of our choice of wording. This guy made a sorry fool of himself – made a point of doing so, I see now. The more I gave him the opportunity to back down and save a bit of face, the more he insisted on forcing the issue of our sign’s ‘anti-language’ betrayal back into play.
He’d say: ‘You’re a writers centre booth at a Writers Festival. I want my ‘free’ book. This MATTERS.”
I’d say: ‘Mate, we’re just volunteers here, OK? Give us a break. It’s no big deal. You’re making a dick of yourself. Everyone knows what that sign means. Stop grandstanding. Stop being precious.”
And on. To the crowd he was of course an idiot. Probably more than a few were quietly sympathetic, but who wants to make a public nuisance of themselves over moot abstractions? In the end, exasperated, I petulantly tore down the sign completely.
He said, “Thank you.” Walked away.
Inadequately socialised solo boozer that I still am but a bit older and wiser after five or six years more Bush/Howard/Blair Age of Anti-Information tomfoolery, I sometimes peer in the wee hours into me lonely cups wishing I’d had the smarts – and grace – to give him his free book, and only then hoik down that infernal bit of trivial blah. The point is that the hardest – the most costly, the most humiliating and easily-mocked – part of his ‘vocational preciousness’ was not prosecuting his opinions, but forcing the debate onto the terms where he could do so meaningfully first.
I hope that guy has had or does eventually have the last laugh on and in the literary world. That’s the kind of literacy I think matters.
Fair points, Laura. Your Austen-humour tour de force was an immeasurably finer strategic riposte to Donnelly’s lame b/s than any amount of tit-for-tat tactical gutterfesting. Best revenge is living well, and all that. And I invariably need a long hot shower every time I let my inner quasi-troll out to bray.
On the other hand…anti-academic thugs like Donnelly, Windschuttle, Bolt, Akerman will not stop. They’ll just keep pom-pom-pomming away, with a kind of animal stupidity. And the accumulated weight, among many of your students, of the lumpen ideas they pom-pom their way…will have an impact on their writerly selves, their ambition for their words, their joi de vivre in language. And you will fight and fight and fight, and deploy your own better didactic angels, to keep their attention on the thrilling infinities of a life of letters, and with the really good ones, your budding successors, you’ll succeed. But they’re not the ones that you’re needed for, anyway.
It’s the vast majority of them – those like me, say, who are just naturally literate and eloquent enough to decide, be inspired by our teachers, that even a life of merely striving after letters is worth it, anyway, whatever else we turn out to be equipped to do – who’ll likely have their hearts and hopes not so much broken but deadened by barbarians who aren’t fought head on. At least sometimes. Just once in a while, to demonstrate the AWESOME REAL WORLD POWERS of applied literacy…’coz’ it’s the ‘general reader’ who suffers most in anti-intellectual epochs. Unchallenged language bullies of Donnelly’s kind hurt most of all the notion of the amateur enthusiast, the well-read citizen; who gets stampeded away by the intimdating cynicism and sneering of these self-appointed, non-vocational Guardians Of Our Language. Because whereas you see ‘literacy’ as an inclusive and diverse and building-block quality (and skill), they see it as prescriptive and narrow and canonistic – and theirs, alone, to police.
I went to the Sydney Writers Festival last month with my two year old boy. Organisers and volunteers aside, I (42) was among the youngest punters I saw there in three days. You’re spot-on in your extracurricularities, methinks – wot the yoof of tomorra need is to be inspired into a lifelong love affair with words by more kickass Eng. & Lit. superheroes slipping off their tweeds in their down time and, lycra-clad, flying out into the brooding city at night.
BIFF! THWACK! K-POW!!!!
I doubt that. Who reads their crap these days?
Byron Writers Festival has a good age mix. What always gets me with the Brisbane Writers Festival is that most of it takes place at the exact same time that it’s busy assessment season for university students – why not hold it during uni/school break? So it’s no great surprise that you get a grey haired audience at events held during the day on week days. But the stuff that goes on at the Powerhouse at night attracts a very different crew. A lot of this might just be down to poor timing and marketing from audiences. And I believe creative writing is one of the big growth areas in the humanities in Oz universities.
“dangling participles must be avoided.”
My old mate Won Hung Lo advised same.
is that how the Boxer Rebellion started, nasking?
Ambigulous, I’m no pugilist. That bully boy the Marquess of Queensbury put me off. Now I just hug (see Gravatar).
I used to start my year 9 grammar lessons with the following:
‘Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.’
(Feersum Endjinn: Iain M. Banks – 1994)
“That’s a joke… I say, that’s a joke, son.”
(Some Foghorn)
I must say, I’ve found these grammar wars most entertaining & amusing. And informative…;) I’ve got me pipe out & puffing away merrily.
Perhaps the following lyrics are appropriate at this stage in the war:
the Battle of Epping Forest,
yes it’s the Battle of Epping Forest,
right outside your door.
We guard your souls for peanuts,
and we guard your shops and houses
for just a little more.
In with a left hook is the Bethnal Green Butcher,
but he’s countered on the right by Mick’s chain-gang fight,
and Liquid Len, with his smashed bottle men,
is lobbing Bob the Nob across the gob.
With his kisser in a mess, Bob seems under stress,
but Jones the Jug hits Len right in the mug;
and Harold Demure, who’s still not quite sure,
fires acorns from out of his sling.
(Here come the cavalry!)
Up, up above the crowd,
inside their Silver Cloud, done proud,
the bold and brazen brass, seen darkly through the glass.
The butler’s got jam on his Rolls; Roy doles out the lot,
with tea from a silver pot just like any picnic.
Along the Forest Road, it’s the end of the day
and the Clouds roll away.
Each has got its load – they’ll come out for the count
at the break-in of day.
When the limos return for their final review, it’s all thru’
- all they can see is the morning goo.
“There’s no-one left alive – must be draw.”
So the Blackcap Barons toss a coin to settle the score.
(a slice of the Genesis pie – from the LP Selling England by the Pound)
Underworld is like Tom Wolfe? Mmmm except perhaps that Wolfe’s novels are Dickensian and Underworld is kind of Dickensian in a po-mo way can’t see that myself. It’s a hard novel to read – very dense and of course the main character is a baseball but anyway.
.
If you ever do decide to give DeLillo another go I heartily recommend Libra of all his novels I reckon that’s the one that important as in will still be in print in the 22nd century important. It’s also easy to read. Detective story easy. But perhaps not. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that…
.
My personal favourite is Great Jones Street about the reclusive rock star and the hack writer who lives in the same building. Years he’s been at it. Success still elusive. And he keeps saying: “Fame. It won’t happen. But if it did. But it won’t. But if it did, but it won’t. But if it did. But it won’t”.
.
Class.
I’ll give that a go then. Was a bit brush-offy with DD. Ta Adrien.
I hope you’re right on the first bit, Kim. Hadn’t thought much along the second lines. Your points on Bris apply to Sydney, too.
Not that there’s any relation anymore between this lengthy debate and the ETAQ’s guidelines, Huddleston’s response, or the teaching of the structure of English in general, but I’ve officially weighed in here, adressing the core of the issue.
Addressing*, gah!
Ugh, Underworld. Good grief. The set piece at the ball-game in the beginning is pretty fantastic (esp. the Jackie Gleason stuff, IIRC), maybe he could’ve just stopped right there; but the rest of the book lost me pretty quickly. Life’s just too short for that sort of thing. One couldn’t help getting the impression that, like most American writers of a certain age, it was just his turn to get all grumpy about the fact that somebody ELSE thought of writing “Gravity’s Rainbow” before he did.
As much as I love baseball, still I gotta say, the White Whale and the No. 00001 were MUCH cooler things to cosmically hunt for than a damn baseball. Sorry, Don. Loved White Noise, though. And Libra’s pretty good too, though I don’t know that I’d go as far as Adrien does above.
Speaking of that ballgame scene at the beginning of Underworld, has anyone here ever read “The Parade’s Gone By”? (If not, and you care about movies, you really should.) In it, if I recall, there’s a GREAT story about the filming of the original, silent version of “Ben-Hur.”
It seems they sent a second-unit team to Europe to go film the chariot race actually in Rome, but when the dailies came back they were shit. So DeMille and his guys, in a fit of panic, decided to re-shoot the whole thing close to home in L.A. So they re-built the entire Coliseum set down on Venice Boulevard (not far from where the armored-car robbery happens in M. Mann’s “Heat,” if I don’t miss my guess, how’s that for intertextuality) and for the emergency re-filming, they called in a huge number of favors to put extras in the stands on short notice, including much of Hollywood royalty at the time. As a result, in the b.g. in the orignal “Ben-Hur,” much of the toga-clad crowd of spectators is actually Chaplin, Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Astor, etc etc all in Roman mufti and having a ball. Comparable in nature to what DeLillo’s doing at the start of Underworld.
Huh. Maybe there’s a better, funnier novel to be written about the Ben-Hur shoot. And throw in a tiresome epic hunt for a missing reel of film (cue Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles both sitting bolt upright, smiling ruefully).
Jangari, that is an excellent an informative post. Thank you!
nasking at 4.55pm
sorry cobber, I meant Boxer Shorts, the preventative that might have saved Wun Hung Lo from a Fate WTD.
*shuffles off to the obscuratorium*
“and” instead of the second “an”!
oh Klaus, you’re not one of those neanderthals who notices spelling mistakes, are you?
I would be interested in being introduced to this Wun Hung Lo fellow.
“much of the toga-clad crowd of spectators is actually Chaplin, Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Astor, etc etc all in Roman mufti and having a ball. Comparable in nature to what DeLillo’s doing at the start of Underworld.”
Strange, a memory popped into my head…but then slipped away again. Was it ‘one day in September’?…not sure which September tho.
“sorry cobber, I meant Boxer Shorts, the preventative that might have saved Wun Hung Lo from a Fate WTD.”
I think he wears boxers like he practices Feng-shui. He likes to walk thru life w/ positive Qi. Sometimes he forgets & puts the tight ones on…he can be very Christian in those moments. And sometimes he likes a bit of freedom, lets it all hang out…gets a bit of fresh air. He swings & bounces to the music.
“I would be interested in being introduced to this Wun Hung Lo fellow.”
I believe he is presently reading through information on vaccines…they are of interest to him considering the lack of one ensured he suffered thru the mumps & became his name. Vaccines are so important, but some people let their paranoia get the best of them…& their kids suffer the consequences. Tho, I guess it depends on who is in charge…& where the vaccine is made. Ruddy seems to know this.
Found these interesting pieces of advice regarding the use of grammar & the audience:
Audience.
The key to all good writing is understanding your audience. Every time you use language, you engage in a rhetorical activity, and your attention should always be on the effect it will have on your audience.
Think of grammar and style as analogous to, say, table manners. Grammatical “rules” have no absolute, independent existence; there is no Grammar Corps to track you down for using “whose” when “of which” is more proper, and Miss Manners employs no shock troops to massacre people who eat their salads with fish forks. You can argue, of course, that the other fork works just as well (or even better), but both the fork and the usage are entirely arbitrary and conventional. Your job as a writer is to have certain effects on your readers, readers who are continuously judging you, consciously or unconsciously. If you want to have the greatest effect, you’ll adjust your style to suit the audience, however arbitrary its expectations.
A better analogue might be clothing. A college English paper calls for the rough equivalent of the jacket and tie (ladies, you’re on your own here). However useless or ridiculous the tie may be, however outdated its practical value as a garment, certain social situations demand it, and if you go into a job interview wearing a T-shirt and jeans, you only hurt yourself by arguing that the necktie has no sartorial validity. Your job is to figure out what your audience expects. Likewise, if your audience wants you to avoid ending your sentences with prepositions, no amount of argument over historical validity will help.
But just as you shouldn’t go under-dressed to a job interview, you shouldn’t over-dress either. A white tie and tails will make you look ridiculous at a barbecue, and a pedantic insistence on grammatical bugbears will only lessen your audience’s respect for you. There are occasions when ain’t is more suitable than is not, and the careful writer will take the time to discover which is the more appropriate.
(Grammar and Style Notes, By Jack Lynch, Last updated 31 January 1997)
———————
I’m not big on most formal wear events. Or nightclubs & restaurants that expect too much of their visitor/customer. Middle finger casual sometimes…guess that’s why I don’t get asked out much…or get offered keys to kingdoms.
Gotta play by dem rules. Snore. Mmmm…can’t wait til my honey gets home.
N’uk, n’uk, n’uk.
Ivana,
are you the true author of such Russian classics as “Anna Karvenina”, “War and Pieces”, “Slice and Punishment”, “The Brothers Katamazoff”, “Dead Balls”, etc? Is the authorship of “What is To Be Culled?” (attr. VI Lenin) in doubt too?