The Grumpy Grammarian

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Even if you consider yourself "grammatically challenged" – the type of person for whom the words "grammar test" cause cold sweats – you probably know more grammar than you think you do.  If someone says, "We be gone to ball game tomorrow if it raining doesn't," you know there's something wrong.  You may not be able to explain exactly why, but your grammatical sense – of verb forms and tenses, of word order, of the use of articles – tells you that this is wrong.

It is worth observing too that, even though you sense that it's not quite right, you may understand perfectly what the speaker means.  You understand – maybe very quickly, maybe only after a few seconds of "mentally translating" it into traditional English – but you know it's wrong, and you will probably have some doubts about the intelligence of the speaker (unless you know that English is not the speaker's native language).  This casts doubt upon the validity of a statement I've heard from time to time:  "It doesn't matter if what you say isn't grammatically corrct as long as people know what you mean."  Something that I tried in my English Comp class proves that it does matter.

At the beginning of the first meeting, before students knew anything about me, I put this on the board:  "This be English 101 Section 81919.  I are Mr Turner and we is going to lerning you well english."  The students' faces registered shock, puzzlement, or amusement.  It was the first class, so they were rather subdued, but there were a few whispers.  "Is something the matter?" I asked.  A few students began to declare, "That's not right"; others joined in by pointing out mistakes, and we soon had a chorus of objections to what I had written on the board.

After facetiously chiding them for having the nerve to come "trotting into my class and criticizing my writing," I conceded that what was on the board was very, very wrong.  I asked them what their first impression was when they saw what I had written, and the first answer was:  "What kind of an English teacher is this?"  Except for one who recognized the ploy and said, "My first thought was that you have a sense of humor," my bad grammar apparently created a negative impression, or at least dismay and concern.  Their response proved a point I wanted to make:  How we express ourselves affects people's impressions of us.

We then spent a little time cleaning up the faulty English until we had something that was acceptable.  In the process, when they said that something was wrong or that it "should be such and such," I asked how they knew.  Most of the time somebody had a partial answer ("The verb is wrong"), and sometimes someone could be more specific ("the subject and verb don't agree").  When they couldn't give a reason – just that it "doesn't sound right" or something like that – I explained what the grammatical rule was, thus reinforcing the concept that we may sense that something is grammatically incorrect even when we don't know what the rule is.

For example, the class readily identified the faulty verb and the misspelling of lerning in "we is going to lerning you," but they had more difficulty explaining why  "going to learning" should be "going to learn" (and then omitting you).  They didn't mention, without prompting, that the last clause should say, ". . . and I am going to teach you," but that is a more sophisticated matter, having to do with consistency of point of view.   That's something to revisit in a future class,

I think I succeeded in demonstrating to the class that almost all of them already know some basic grammar.  (I can't say "all of them" because, believe it or not, some students write the way I did on the blackboard and don't know it's wrong.)  I proved that their previous experience, their ears, and possibly some formal instruction have conditioned them to reject usage that is not widely accepted.  That led to another point:  Grammar is not an arbitrary set of rules that (as one of my former students said) "a bunch of Romans thought up hundreds of years ago" (I commented, to some laughter, that Romans didn't speak English anyway).  It's a set of agreed-upon practices that we have adopted so that we can communicate more easily and clearly.

We can go beyond the obvious lessons of this simple demonstration.  Let's, for example, avoid the value judgment implied by "good grammar" and use instead "correct grammar."  Perhaps we should go even further and call it "appropriate grammar."  As I mentioned to my class, the grammar or usage that is (supposedly) taught in school and is "correct" in the world at large may not be appropriate in the 'hood or in some subsegment of society – just as speaking English is not appropriate in a group of people who, for example, speak and understand only French.  As I told my students, my "correct" grammar would not be appropriate in a neighborhood where some local or ethnic dialect prevails.

Nevertheless, the basic grammar that we all know has some commonalities observed by virtually all speakers of English.  For example, regardless of dialect, we all put the subject before the verb in declarative sentences.  This much we know almost automatically.  Beyond that very limited sphere, what constitutes "correct" grammar is what is appropriate (agreed-upon) among the largest group of educated people.  A considerable part of this must be learned.

Even though we must study and learn it, we do not do so in a vacuum.  We are building on the base of the grammar that virtually all of us already know.  What we are teaching and what students should be trying to learn in English classes is not some brand-new grammar but an expansion on (or adaptation of) what they already know.  Beyond the base are many more rules that have evolved and become agreed upon by a very large number of users of the language.  We need the ability to communicate with the largest number of users possible.  That is why we learn these additional rules.  Moreover, returning to the matter of making an impression, we learn the widely accepted practices because we want to come across as intelligent, educated people.  Most of us are aware that, if we expect people to respect what we say or write, we need to be careful about how we say or write it.

In essence, what we learn is conventional grammar and usage; it conforms to accepted practices and standards.  As noted earlier, in some environments, the accepted practices and standards may differ, so we may need to adapt.  In general, though, we need to conform.  With language, conformity results in communication; nonconformity may cause confusion.  It's a good idea not only to learn this traditional grammar but also to make it a habit.

The sense of grammar that almost all of us have – the sense that enabled even the most grammatically challenged students in my class to question what I wrote on the board – can be expanded.  This expanded grammar can become a habit, something as automatic as the grammar that most of us know even if we cannot explain the rules, if we practice it often enough.  In the other hand, if we practice ignoring it, that will become our habit.  What we're doing today, I fear, is saying that traditional grammar is not worth using as long as we are understood.  It is only a matter of time before "I are Mr Turner and we is going to lerning you well english" becomes good enough.