Grammar

You may imagine that journalists, because they make their bread by wielding language, would (a) know something about grammar and usage and (b) write about grammar and usage intelligently. If so, you have a vivid imagination. I put it to you (prosecutorial mode today) that a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on grammar in the workplace is a farrago of shibboleths and cultural prejudices. Even if you accept a broader definition of grammar that includes spelling, punctuation, and style conventions, the article is useless.

I saw a remark the other day that the folks at Language Log are given to peeving about peevers, and it occurred to me afresh how much misunderstanding remains among evidently educated people about what linguists are up to when they expose bogus prescriptivism and peevery. This is not to say that there have never been cranks hawking extreme views among linguists; academic fauna do not always breed true. But I have met Ben Zimmer and Mark Liberman and have corresponded with Arnold Zwicky, all of whom are fine fellows who would never pull a chair from under you or water the liquor.

I received a note a couple of days ago from a gentleman concerned about the placement of commas in the various drafts of the Second Amendment. And today, at The New Yorker , Jeffrey Toobin writes that "the text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical. " Well, The New Yorker may not be the best place to go for instruction on grammar and usage . The Founders (it's a little vexing to have to keep explaining this ) loved Latinate constructions, one of which is the absolute, a phrase modifying a whole clause, often consisting of a noun and a participle.

If you read about language, grammar, and usage, you're as likely to come across rubbish and codswallop as anything else. Thus there is joy at the arrival of a new voice of sense and informed judgment. Stan Carey of Sentence First heralded the arrival last week of Caxton , a new blog on language. Today's post at Caxton includes a reminder about the rules of language that rule-mongers would do well to keep in mind. And it is not novel information, coming from the pen of John Colet, humanist of the English Renaissance and dean of St. Paul's (d. 1519)

CAN A COMPUTER be intellectually lazy? We know people can. That's what explains our ever-increasing reliance on machines to do our thinking for us: the calculators we use to figure 15 percent on a restaurant bill; the spell-checkers and grammar-checkers we lean on when writing with word processing software. Turns out we may be counting on gadgets that are doing a little brain-napping of their own -- at least as far as the grammar-checker is concerned. The New York Times reported recently that an English professor's look at Microsoft's dominant Word 2000 grammar-checker (famous for the wavy green line it places over improperly worded passages)

When coach Norv Turner was discussing the Washington Redskins' sloppy performance in a 17-14 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Friday night, he was asked whether the short practice week after the Monday night game in Buffalo was a factor."

CHICAGO -- Scientists are running out of things they think truly separate humans from other animals. For a long time the reigning difference was thought to be tool-making, but then they discovered that chimpanzees and gorillas use tools. One of the last bastions of human uniqueness, they surely thought, is language. Although animals can communicate, it was thought to be in only a fixed way - using sequences of sounds with specific meanings that never vary. Humans supposedly were different because they can follow rules of grammar.

Baltimore County schools spent $300,000 last fall to buy high school grammar books for elementary school educators, including some who teach music, art and gym, and administrators acknowledge that they failed to follow purchasing rules for the desk reference. The district did not ask the school board to approve the purchase of The Little, Brown Handbook, as it was required to do, until after The Baltimore Sun had requested and been given a copy of purchase orders from October and January.

Carroll County's English teachers are dusting off their grammar books as part of the school system's effort to bolster students' writing and reading skills. For nearly four decades, grammar instruction was discouraged in school systems across the nation, as researchers asserted that the stringent rules robbed students of their creativity. But in a back-to-basics move, school officials are emphasizing the need for students to learn grammar as the key to developing strong writing skills.

It is with great decrepitude that we present another episode of "Ask Mister Language Person," the column that was recently voted "Best American Grammar Column in America" by a panel of Florida voters who were actually trying to order Chinese food. The philosophy of this column is simple: if you have good language skills, you will be respected and admired; whereas if you clearly have no clue about grammar or vocabulary, you could become president of the United States. The choice is yours!

Being a teacher's pet as a child endeared me to no one but teachers. My third-grade teacher, Marian Gulley, once let me take a fourth-graders' history test. (At Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades were in a single classroom; the teacher instructed one class while the other studied, then reversed.) I scored a 96, from having listened to the fourth-grade class and read their history textbook for amusement. It was the highest grade on the test. I was proud, but my mother observed sagely, "I bet that didn't make you many friends in the fourth grade.

As a journalist, I gravitate toward the lurid. That's just how we roll. If some post-adolescent crank tries to set up a "white student union" at Towson University, he is guaranteed ink. If some crackpot explains that George W. Bush was behind the September 11 attacks, he will get air time somewhere. If Orly Taitz does to court to claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, she will get attention from the press as well as from irritated judges. The loonier they are, the more easily we reassure ourselves that we are sane.

If you are a native speaker of English, you have English grammar in your head, and it has been there since you were a very small child. Unfortunately, the process of translating that grammar into terms for discussion of writing has not gone well. Traditional schoolroom grammar borrowed terms from Latin that were not always a good fit with English, and it codified English grammar into a rigid set of rules (some of them bogus) that oversimplified the language for pedagogical purposes.

Much as I am in sympathy with Lucy Ferriss's latest post at Lingua Franca , I fear that something she says may be subject to a dangerous misinterpretation: As I've said before, people want rules. Students, for instance, take notice when they start reading “to the Senator and I” in the newspaper, and when “with she and her brother” receives tacit approval from writing instructors. They may even notice that “I like he and she” has started sounding OK. A little time passes, and they begin to doubt whether me , him , us , and them ever were correct to say in a predicate construction or prepositional phrase.

On the eve of National Grammar Day, I come before you with a caution: grammar isn't everything. Oh, probably you knew that at some level. You understood that it is possible for a text to be spanking clean as far as spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and yes, even AP style if you swing that way, and still be defective. Factually inaccurate. Dishonest. Unclear. Given to mixed or inapt metaphors, Pretentious. You know, if you are an editor, that your scrupulous attention to spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style is, if the larger questions are allowed to go unaddressed, essentially an exercise in what is inelegantly called turd polishing.

Monday, March 4, is National Grammar Day. Are you ready? Grammar Girl, the estimable Mignon Fogarty, has set up a National Grammar Day page  with links to various events and activities.  At Poynter.org, the magisterial Roy Peter Clark will be conducting a webinar, This Ain't Your Grandma's Grammar .  On Twitter, @EditorMark, the indefatigable Mark Allen, is conducting another National Grammar Day haiku contest ...

John Angelo Pentz, a venerable presence at City College where he taught literature, poetry and grammar for nearly four decades, died Tuesday at Memorial Hospital at Easton from complications of a fall he suffered in May. He was 99. Born and raised in East Baltimore, Mr. Pentz was a 1921 graduate of City's arch-rival Polytechnic Institute and earned his bachelor's degree from the Johns Hopkins University in 1925. He was first in his class at the University of Baltimore, where he earned a law degree in 1937.

Everyone knows that cover letters must be spotless. Most people know to be careful as they type e-mails for work. , =, & and @ are allowed. * Shortened word forms such as nite and thru are allowed. * Use proper basic punctuation. * Use proper capitalization. Typing in lower-case doesn't save characters; it's just lazy. Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips For Better Writing

In school in eastern Kentucky in the early 1960s, I got the benefit of traditional teaching of grammar: These are the rules; follow them. Mathematics was taught the same way: These are the functions; do them this way. In neither case was the underlying logic explained. I did well in English, not because of the instruction, but because I intuitively grasped the underlying logic. Think about diagramming sentences. I loved doing that, because I already had a grasp about the way the components operated together, and diagramming was an amusing way to illustrate the relationships graphically.

I received a note a couple of days ago from a gentleman concerned about the placement of commas in the various drafts of the Second Amendment. And today, at The New Yorker , Jeffrey Toobin writes that "the text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical. " Well, The New Yorker may not be the best place to go for instruction on grammar and usage . The Founders (it's a little vexing to have to keep explaining this ) loved Latinate constructions, one of which is the absolute, a phrase modifying a whole clause, often consisting of a noun and a participle.