Free at Last & Guilty No More - the Death of the Rap Across the Knuckles

Do you recall getting a C- minus in secondary school English-class grammar, despite the fact that you were able to communicate effortlessly with everyone with whom you came in contact? Oh sure, perhaps your spelling needed a little polishing, you needed to improve upon your ability to format a paper or letter, and you were grateful to get assistance with punctuation, but beyond that hardly anyone corrected your speech except to point out teen slang such as "I dunno", or "I ain't gonna do that."

Parts of Speech
Have you ever wondered why you needed to be able to label parts of speech when you are perfectly adept at putting those parts where they belong, have been ever since you can remember, and have learned the hard way that the parts of speech defy simplistic definitions and rules of usage anyway?

Now, this is no trivial matter - parts of speech of speech have dominated grammar instruction for centuries - Lowth's 1762 edition of his influential A Short Introduction to English Grammar devotes 47.8% of its content to parts of speech and just 10.3% to punctuation.

Not every interested party has always supported the teaching of traditional school grammar, its just that your English teacher most likely would have preferred to die before allowing you exposure to dissenting opinions...such as -

If there is one thing I dislike in grammar, it is definitions (of parts of speech) too often met with in our textbooks. They are neither exhaustive nor true; they have not and cannot have, the precision and clearness of definitions found in textbooks of mathematics, and it is extremely easy to pick holes in them...And thus we might go on to the definitions found even in the best grammars: they are unsatisfactory all of them and I do not think they are necessary. [1]

Perhaps you are wondering who wrote the above quote - perhaps one of the Three Stooges? No it was Jens Otto Harry Jespersen (July 16, 1860-April 30, 1943) a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language and was a professor of English at Copenhagen University from 1893 to 1925.

About learning grammar Edgar H. Schuster, author of Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers through Innovative Grammar Instruction, made this observation about persons claming to know the parts of speech:

...what did they learn about English grammar? My guess is that they finally learned how to apply terms to the grammar they already knew. They learned a metalanguage; they learned how to talk about grammar. They'd always known that X was a noun and Y was a pronoun. They did not know that X was called noun and word Y, pronoun. Is this knowledge worth having?

Or how about this from Joseph M. Williams (August 18, 1933 - February 22, 2008) professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at University of Chicago:

Until we recognize the arbitrary nature of our judgments, too many of us will take bad grammar as evidence of laziness, carelessness, or low IQ. That belief is not just wrong. It is socially destructive. [2]

Now, this last quote might just as well come from the Bible since the book of Acts tells us this about the attitude of the rulers, elders and teachers of the law who stood in judgment of Jesus Christ's disciples -

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus...they...commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard [3].

Notice the Bible does not say that Peter and John spoke with grammar perfectly acceptable to the rulers, elders and teachers - just that Peter and John spoke with courage and power.

Yes, long before traditional school grammar was foisted upon unsuspecting children, great men were shaping the world, not with perfect adherence to arbitrary rules of grammar, but with speech content that mattered.

Standard English Usage
What is standard English? Can anyone define it?

According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language:

1.) It is the standard fare of printed materials - newspapers, books.
2.) It is used by most broadcasters.
3.) It match the average level of attainment of persons who have completed secondary school.

Thus, standard English might best be described as the English employed by those who control the flow of information in society..."those who run things".

This neat little world begins to disintegrate when we realize that spoken and written standard English differ. One cannot gain approval writing could of, or should of (could've or should've is standard) but those-who-run-things speak of with could and should all the time.

Or consider the word ain't - it is unacceptable today among those-who-run-things, although it was used for centuries by educated speakers. Who decided it was no longer acceptable?

Use of double negatives (I ain't got no more) is sure to get bad marks in school and frowns in polite society, but who will quarrel with this usage of double negative - No, I didn't commit the crime -, or strongly object to this usage - You can't not admire those people.

Can anyone imagine a news broadcaster describing an attack by one politician on another thus - That was the most unkindest cut of all? Nevertheless, Shakespeare liked that line, for he put it into the mouth of Mark Anthony, referring to Brutus' stabbing of Caesar.

In 1941 John C. Hodges catalogued 280 standard English usage errors in Harbrace Handbook of English. 57 years later only 65 of those "errors" were still considered errors, as catalogued in the 1998 edition of the same work. If only all the little boys and girls who flunked English in 1941 could get their grades reevaluated!


Can You Identify the Bad Writer?
The following was written, informally, by a fifteen year old girl about King Henry VIII -

It is however but Justice and my duty to declare that this amiable woman [Anne Boleyn] was entirely innocent of the crimes with which she was accused, of which her beauty, her elegance and her sprightliness were sufficient proofs, not to mention her solemn protestations of innocence and the King's character; all of which add some confirmation, though perhaps but slight ones when in comparison with theose before alleged in her favor [4].

Can you find the errors in the above sentence? Find all you can and only then see citation No. 4 below to discover who the author was.

About writing John Steinbeck observed:

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel., and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers too near the sun [5].

As author and educator Edgar H. Schuster has pointed out -

contrast the hours we have spent practicing speech to the hours spent practicing writing...And writing must be practiced...even by those who appear to be gifted writers...We don't correct the speech of eighteen-month-old-children...many eighteen-year-old college students are in the same position (when they write) [6].

Retired English professor Gary Sloan demonstrated in an article published in College Communication and Composition that professional writers make almost as many errors as Freshman English students - the pros had no spelling, apostrophe, capitalization, or subject-verb agreement errors but were twice as verbose and fifteen times more trite. Pros had almost as many comma errors and wrote almost three times as many sentence fragments [7].


Major sources for this article include:
Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers Through Innovative Grammar Instruction, Edgar H. Schuster

Citations
[1] Cited in Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers Through Innovative Grammar Instruction, Edgar H. Schuster, p. 19

[2] ibid [1] p.47

[3] Acts 4: 13-20

[4] ibid [1] p. 93; author was Jane Austen

[5] ibid [1] p. 97

[6] ibid [1] p. 96

[7] ibid [5]