Grammar, as we often think of it, as a set of fairly strict definitions and rules that must be followed if we are to obtain legitimacy as “educated” and “erudite” people, has a fairly short history in the English language. Before about 250 years ago, few people thought of grammar as a distinct set of rules. Rather, syntax was people’s primary concern. That is to say, there were certain conventional ways of speaking and writing that were learned through reading and discourse. And, strangely, the people who first started to talk about and write about English grammar were often Latinists who, having spent a tedious chunk of their lives learning the complexities of Latin grammar began to impose similar ideas onto English. This is why for generations students of English were plied with odd, seemingly arbitrary, rules of grammar. If you are over forty, you were likely told many times in your schooldays that it was a terrible no-no to split an infinitive. And how many old-school English teachers were horrified when they first saw the title sequence to the original Star Trek in which Captain Kirk had the gall to split an infinitive when he said “to boldly go”? The irony, of course, is that the restriction against splitting an infinitive is not a result of the fact that it is frowned on in Latin (or Latin-based languages), but because you can’t actually do it. While in English infinitives are two words (such as “to go”), in Latin (and Romance languages in general) the infinitive is a single word (such as “ire”) so you cannot split the infinitive even if you wanted to. So, just because the early gate-keepers of “proper” English were Latinists and Classicists, generations of English speakers imagined that there was some real reason that they should be restricted from saying “to boldly go.”
Early English grammar primers began to appear in the 18th century as more and more “middle-class” members of society began to spend years becoming educated. Though I haven’t spent a lot of times attempting to collect these early primers, I have only read about and seen a couple in all my years of book collecting and education. I am sure that before such grammar primers were being properly printed, there were mocked up versions created by private educators, of which there were many in England in the late 18th century, for their own personal students. I have never seen one of these because I am sure only a handful have survived, but I have read about them in various books about the Georgian Era. I recently got a reminder of how rare technical discourse on grammar was even in the early 19th century when I was reading a 1809 letter by the legendary political theorist William Godwin in which he was talking about a Grammar Primer written by great essayist William Hazlitt. Godwin writes – “I never saw the parts of speech so well defined (I could almost say at all defined) before.” In other words, Godwin, who was already an accomplished writer and had written one of the most important books in English on political theory, had scarcely even seen the parts of speech defined before. To put it another way, Godwin had never really seen technical grammar, and yet he was a famous and accomplished author.
I have recently thought about this issue a fair amount because of a few rather heated internet discussions. I believe, and there is plenty of academic research to support such a position, that attempting to teach young students grammar doesn’t really make them better writers, and can actually harm their attempts to write. Teaching students grammar not only makes language more antiseptic, but it can make students leery of even trying to write because they become paranoid that they will get something wrong. The best way to make better writers is through a kind of anticipatory socialization process of reading and writing. You don’t need to actually know what a dangling participle is to know not to use one, you simply have to have read a lot. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t really matter what a dangling participle is, what matters is that you can use language efficiently and effectively for what, and with whom, you are trying to communicate. Very few people will ever achieve the stylistic competence of, say, Henry James. But then, very few people are trying to communicate the way James was trying to communicate. What matters, nine out of ten times, is simply that writing is straightforward, not confusing, and easy to understand. I am continually amazed when people complain, for example, about young people using a particular word order or syntax, when there is no question about what is being communicated. Of course, when we are accustomed to certain word orders or grammatical structures, certain things can sound strange to our ears. But much of the time basic exchanges of information are what are really at stake, and there is seldom any confusion about that. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand the “correct” usage of “lay” and “lie,” but how often will the “incorrect” usage cause any actual confusion? Are any of us really confused when Eric Clapton told “Sally” to lay down, even though “technically” he should have told her to lie down? And doesn’t it even sound a little odd when we correctly use the “lie” in the past tense, such as if we said “I lay down on my new couch yesterday” ? Most people would think it sounds more correct to say “I laid down on my couch yesterday” even if it is technically incorrect. Of course, if you are writing your PhD thesis, or addressing some professional group of people, you are going to need (for the most part) to conform to their standards or risk rejection. But by the time you go to write a thesis or address a professional body, you have usually already been socialized to such expectations anyway. And most of the time, people are using language with a fairly straightforward goal of being understood in the moment, so lay down or lie down, whichever you prefer, I don’t mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment