Grammar

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.

I remarked yesterday on the consequences of newspapers' eagerness to throw their copy editors over the side and the erosion of quality that inevitably follows. You may have imagined that I exaggerate. So let me show you a particularly painful case.  At The Cincinnati Enquirer ,* the editor, Carolyn Washburn, sent out a memo to the staff in January that included these passages:  Also, it is simply true that there are fewer layers of editing to catch us when we fall.

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."

Last week at Ragan's PR Daily , Steve Vittorioso published a little article, "20 (more) signs you're a word nerd," which neatly encapsulates the combination of sound counsel, ineffective generality, and downright error that marks much of the current writing about language and usage. Writing as "InkHouse's resident grammarian," he starts off (and you may have seen this coming) with "You eat, breathe and sleep Associated Press style - and text and tweet it. " I don't, and neither should you. The AP Stylebook is one of many manuals, and like the others it makes reasonable choices about capitalization and other mechanics to provide consistency.

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.

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)

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.

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!

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

Each week The Sun's  John McIntyre  presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar - another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: MINATORY No doubt you had such a teacher as Mrs. Jessie Perkins. She taught me in the fifth and sixth grades, and when she stood at the blackboard, illustrated a point of grammar or arithmetic, and said, "That's all there is to it," fixing us with a look that brooked no dissent, we shrank from her minatory gaze.

An inveterate meddler, I stepped into a minor controversy on Twitter today about the use of periods or, as our colleagues across the water call them, full stops.  Someone innocently inquired of @guardianstyle, "Full stop at the end of a bullet point?" To which @guardianstyle replied, "Yes. Every time. Like this. " Seemed sensible enough to me, but Patrick Neylan, tweeting as @AngrySubEditor, demurred: "I disagree. If it's not a sentence, it has no right to claim a full stop.

Comptroller Peter Franchot wants Maryland schools to teach financial literacy. Maybe they should start with regular literacy, as even those at the top echelons of government in this state do not understand basic grammar. The former head of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, Prince George's County's Ulysses Currie, successfully relied on an "I am dumb" legal defense to explain in federal court why he didn't follow simple ethics rules about reporting outside income. The latest politician to fall prey to grammar is Senate Majority Leader Rob Garagiola, a lawyer who is running for the Democratic nomination for the 6th District congressional race.

The day of my first piano lesson, I picked out "Yankee Doodle," right hand only. It would be insane to start a  beginner with one of Bach's partitas or one of Lizst's Hungarian rhapsodies. One starts simply and progresses by stages as far as one's inclination, abilities, application, and instruction go. Yet in teaching writing and editing to undergraduates, I find many who have not managed to advance very far beyond the "Yankee Doodle" stage. I fault two things: misguided instruction and the prevalence of fussbudgetry.

A few days ago, when I seconded Kory Stamper's indisputable tweet that irregardless is a word,* @kellizuzelka replied " 'irregardless' doesn't even make sense ('ir-' cancels out 'less' and you have some awful double-negative nonsense). " And @soixante10 replied, "by what criterion 'irregardless' a word? Other than pple use. " Let me take these responses one at a time. The response that irregardless is illogical won't stand up, because logic does not govern language.

Sadly, much of what is taught of grammar and usage in the schools, when taught at all, amounts to rubbish, and linguistics is scarcely heard of except at the college level, and seldom there. Oh, you can go to Language Log and eavesdrop on the linguists, but the non-specialist is likely to find articles like “Diglossia and digraphica in Guoyu-Putonghua and in Hindi-Urdu” a little off-putting. Fortunately, there is now enough accessible material about language in general and linguistics in particular for the general readers as to remove any excuse for ignorance.

Grammar ain't what it used to be.Time was, teachers whacked us on the knuckles when our subjects and verbs didn't match up. College professors shamed us for not never showing up for class.At least we knew right from wrong back then.Now, anything goes. They tell us it's OK to knowingly split infinitives. They say a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with. And they say we can start a sentence with "and."And even "but."But only if we don't overdo it.Linguists, lexicographers and grammarians disagree on what is proper grammar these days.

NEW YORK - The third-graders at P.S. 277 in Brooklyn twist upward in their seats, hands fluttering on outstretched arms like flags atop a pole. As teacher Janet Kennedy recognizes them, they march in turn to the blackboard, drawing a collection of lines and connecting dots that would be foreign to almost anyone who graduated from college in the past 20 years or so. This is no arts-in-the-schools project, or even some beginning geometry lesson. The enthusiastic 8-year-olds are learning to diagram sentences.

It was, if recollection is accurate, in the fifth grade that I got my first thoroughgoing instruction in English grammar and usage. My fifth- and sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Jessie Perkins, and my seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, redoubtable women both, took the same attitude toward English that Miss Prism took toward Fiction: The good end happily and the bad unhappily. There are Rules, they are known, they are to be applied universally, and violators pay a price.

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.