|
GRAMMAR OUT OF THE SLAMMER!
According to Paul Moses’ piece “Grammar lessons back on chalkboard” in the June 5 edition of Newsday, grammar education has been on a sharp decline for the past twenty years, and is positively “verboten” in some schools. (A modified version of this article can be found at www.talendocenten.net/taleninhetnieuws65.htm.) Moses traces a few of the educational initiatives that supported such a fall from grace, and gives startling evidence for a virtual blacklist of grammar and its pedagogical proponents. One English teacher is quoted as saying that at some schools teaching grammar was “absolutely forbidden” and that one teaching assistant who mentioned grammar was told to drop the subject or “she would never get a job there.”
Happily, however, it looks as though an agreement is about to be reached, and not just between subject and verb. Due to alarmed complaints from university administrators, both the College Board (which creates admissions tests) and the National Council of Teachers of English (which “long ago declared that any systematic teaching of grammar belonged to the Ice Age”) have now radically reversed their stance. The January 2003 issue (vol. 92/3) of The Council’s magazine English Journal was dedicated to the topic of “revitalizing grammar.” And the photo accompanying the Newsday article shows a third-grader diagramming a sentence on the blackboard at “Brooklyn’s grammar-conscious P.S. 277.”
Although this piece didn’t go there, I suspect PCRA (“political correctness run amok”) is at least partially at play here: the guilty feeling that an insistence on “Standard English” is somehow racist. Or at least prone to raising thorny academic issues like the linguistic validity of “Ebonics” or what used to be called “Black English.” Better, some apparently think, to ignore the thicket completely. And then there’s the whole feminist take on grammar. (Oh womyn, don’t even get me started. We wrote the book on “neutral” language.)
“Freedom of speech” has always reminded me of “poetic license,” a concept I found stunning when I stumbled across it as a kid, perhaps because of its metaphorical quality, its being the sort of thing you could imagine at first as being something else. But when I learned that it simply meant you could say whatever you wanted however you wanted to… as freeing as the thought of that was, it paradoxically made me want to learn the fundamentals even more. It now seems to me that “poetic license” is the freedom of speech of style, just as critical to the spirit of the First Amendment as content.
Let’s stop waiting for the other participle to drop and welcome home the prodigal solecism. Grammar isn’t just for Gramma anymore! In fact, it’s too important to be trifled with in the modern-day way of “grammar checkers” ¾ even sillier in their suggestions than spell checkers often are. Don’t let an overreaching piece of software make you self-effacingly reach for the red pencil, out of an unquestioning regard for “authority.” So let’s all cheer the return of Grammar from its extended educational exile. Remember…
First tout (don’t taunt) the tools,
Then you can flout (not flaunt) the rules!
This year marks the simultaneous release of new editions of the Miriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style. Funny and informative reviews at: http://slate.msn.com/id/2086628/ and www.villagevoice.com/issues/0332/edmorales.php.
This one’s a bit of a stretch, you may be thinking, in the “What does this have to do with censorship?” game. But let me give it a go…
Although proofreading is a patently underpaid profession, and an understandably unsung one (it’s like trying to prove a negative, or showcasing the lack of something), there is nevertheless an implicit positive value between careful editing and clarity of expression, or access to the facts, in fact to the truth. It’s a good thing, as Martha used to say.
And yet, for years now, it’s been painfully clear that many publishers prefer not to pay even the pittance proofers can command. Typos pile up alarmingly, amusingly, astonishingly. There is rich irony to be mined from the fact that even the publishers of the Chicago Manual of Style were evidently willing to cut corners in the proofreading department. And, come on, the very idea that “grammar” schools would ban the teaching of, uh, grammar … provides a rather Ravitchian frisson.
Bertrand Russell once wrote, in a classic 1930 essay:
“The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: ‘A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends.’ The bishop was compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor, and Latinity did not recover until the Renaissance…”
This essay, which was published in 1936 in the book Why I Am Not a Christian, seems terrifically modern-minded for its time. A copy of it can be found at: www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/library/has_reli.htm.
And one more delectable tidbit for you word nerds who like to mix it up!
Posted to ALAOIF by John Gear:
The inimitable Sam Smith finds that the wordsmith.org (site of a cool anagram engine) recovered this little bit from the even less imitable Ogden Nash ...
RECOVERED HISTORY
There was once a rightwing, prudish senator from Utah named Reed Smoot whose anti-pornography efforts won him the newspaper headline “Smoot Smites Smut.” Which inspired Ogden Nash to write a poem in 1931 that began:
Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)
Is planning a ban on smut.
Oh rooti-ti-toot for Smoot of Ut.
And his reverend occiput.
Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut.,
Grit your molars and do your dut.,
Gird up your l-ns,
Smite h-p and th-gh,
We’ll all be Kansas by and by.
MORE http://wordsmith.org
NEXT ARTICLE |
