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GRAMMAR AND THE AMATEUR DISCIPLINARIANAug 18 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line The elimination of all those self-righteous warnings regarding "good" grammar.
Quite a few years ago, in a city of the Great American Midwest which name I refuse to remember, I lived at beer can throwing distance from the rambling and ruinous residence of the rather briefly sic transit gloria mundi heavy weight world champion Leon Spinks. Sprawled on the grass or perched on some lawn chairs at the door of his home, some of his relatives, friends and neighbors listened to games and fights on a large portable radio and we drank some of the filthy local beer together in sporting camaraderie. One day, Leon got in trouble with the boxing supervisory board for some presumed shenanigans that took place on his corner during a championship fight. So he had to go and stand in front of some judging committee of some sort –spare me, I don’t quite know the bureaucratic details—and answer some leading questions under oath. Apparently Leon had taken a sip of some suspicious substance from an also suspicious black bottle handed to him by his corner man between rounds. I was chatting with some buddies at his door when he left for his appointment with justice. His Mama came to the door, embraced him and told him to be good and tell the truth. And this is what Leon said when asked… and he was serious, formal and firmly polite: “I ain’t gona to tell ya that there wasn’t no black bottle ’cos there wasn’t no black bottle.” I laughed for days! That was one of the few happy times I had in that dreadful city! Now… If the judges and other functionaries --all of them paralyzed with the expressions of startled wombats on their officious faces— didn’t understand what on earth Leon had just said, and if we must –as our repulsive self-righteous habits dictate— find someone to blame… Whose problem or fault is it? If those fellows live in a social vacuum, isolated by their privileges, provincialized by their social inadequacies, by their fears and prejudices, unable to enjoy some social mobility in the land of the free, and joyously rub elbows with members of the many subcultures that give America its unique richness and variety of looks, ideas, styles and ways of using our fine language… Why should anyone blame Leon’s speech habits and colorful dialectal expressiveness? To Leon’s friends, peers, family and neighbors –and to some large groups of Americans-- what he had said that morning was perfectly clear… crystal clear. How come it was not so for the startled bureaucrats? When Leon finally made it back home his Mama embraced him again and told him she was proud of him because he had behaved very well! And considering the tempestuous character of the fellow… He had behaved extremely well! There are always some self-righteous and pompous sophomores ready to give us a “bad grade” because we make a mess of prepositions, let go of our grip on concordance, use slang words, believe the dictionary is a semantic cemetery and don't "respect" the norms and rules that have been snowballing down since in 1640 Dr. Johnson forced our language into the Latin grammar and structure because--of course—Latin is the language of God --no less!-- and our language's only chance at purity is if we, as speakers, behave ourselves and comply with the divine rules... Yeah! Right! The disciplinarians who stick their not very clean spoon in these things, with no more knowledge of language than some of those rules, seem to ignore the many different grammars that keep coming out as results or corollaries of the many linguistic theories, approaches and rather concrete research on the human linguistic apparatus. They take for granted a whole lot, ignore even more and affirm that language is a tool of communication and nothing else. But the purpose of language perhaps is not communication but the creation of images. Communication is –sometimes, not always-- OUR purpose. Words transmit images from one mind to another. This makes communication both greater and more difficult. And an image is NOT worth a thousand words. The “description” of an image may take a thousand words, but in reality a word is worth a thousand images and many more, created in the mind of a listener by a word from the speaker. And language is free. It obeys no rules and we create it continuously as we use it. It has a certain structure, we believe, but not rules. The rules, the grammar as it is known in the land of simplifications, is a completely artificial construct, and all those who claim that it is needed to make things clear seem to forget that most speakers of any language on earth completely ignore grammar and yet… They can function as speakers without any major inconvenience. The authoritarian PRESCRIPTIVE grammar legislating the use of language and impoverishing it for us --imprisoning our linguistic creativity in the name of communication, law and order— is slowly being replaced by a freer approach, a DESCRIPTIVE grammar showing how different groups and individuals use language in different ways; making us aware of our true linguistic powers, riches and freedom. This bothers a lot of those folks who prefer the imposition of a certain amount of laws. As a result, many speakers feel oppressed in subtle ways, pushed to conform in a way that would be similar to the use of “newspeak” in the horrid world that Orwell predicted in his depressing novel “1984”, an official way of expression, a form of slavery similar to the sort of things that Stalin wanted in his dreadful Soviet Republic, when he commanded that the language spoken and written by the Georgians had to be dropped and one and uniform version of Russian had to be used, officially, always… or else. Linguistics is NOT a bunch of sentences with numbers above. It isn’t “the same old stuff with new terminology”. It is a way of behaving, an activity, a process of doing something and includes hostility towards dogmatism and authoritarianism and an understanding that all answers regarding language and its uses are tentative and, we must enjoy our willingness to accept that some answers may be conflicting. But when we use the real powers of observation and deduction to find out the role of language in our affairs, we discover that most folks ignore that grammar is an invention made by human beings and they believe that grammar is something that is just right there, like the seasons and the tides. And predictably, these folks are rather confused by the “new developments”. They would love to hear again the rather fascist speech of Lord Chesterfield when Dr. Johnson published his first grammar of the English language: The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption, and naturalization, have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we find them, and at the same time, the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and choose a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote to Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare, that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay, more, I will not only obey him like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair.” The problem as we see it now, is that a grammar book and all its rules should never attempt to teach people how they ought to speak or write, but on the contrary --unless it is the sort of antique that seems to influence so many amateur grammarian and dictators in Epinions—a grammar merely states how, as a matter of FACT, certain people do speak and write at the time the book was written. And NOTHING else. Grammar is the study of the ways in which a language achieves structural sense, not a set of rules to follow! And please note how this definition doesn’t make any mention at all of this like “good grammar” or “bad grammar”. For instances… To a real grammarian the expression “he don’t have none” is as grammatical as “he doesn’t have any”. Both structures convey meaning and both are interesting and informative for the real grammarian, but of course they are not for the disciplinarian who wags a finger and warns us in his or her personal page in Epinions that “bad” grammar won’t be tolerated. Good or bad grammar has been used from time immemorial to oppress, put down, marginalize and reject the speech patterns and writing forms of too many folks. But this is America. Modern linguistics is here to stay and –like it or not—the amateur authoritarian is on his and her way out. An example of our great American freedom… Interlingualism --capisce caro?—is a legitimate part of the tremendous riches brought by the cultures of those who came to make this country the special jewel of extraordinary linguistic vastness it is, comprendes, yokel? And the speech patters of many of our national groups is now the stuff of legend everywhere in the world. Americans are a free nation that speaks a continuously evolving and colorful mishmash of tongues, all of them extremely beautiful, colorful and, as it suppose to be, free! The mentality of Lord Chesterfield is also free to express itself among us, of course, because this IS America… And for the same reason, we must be feeling completely free to laugh at it, to ridicule it and to tell those prescriptive grammarians that as soon as we get the time traveling machine ready they should get a ticket and go back to Soviet Russia or better yet, to the fascist world of English grammar of the Year of Their Lord of 1640. So… What DID Leon Spinks actually said? Go to some other speakers of that particular form of our American language and listen, listen, enjoy the music of it, pay attention, feel the melody of that fine form and converse, have a dialog, talk about the things you like, smile a lot and you will find out what is it that he said. How else would you be able to understand a language, a dialect, a slang? Berlitz? No. Of course not. You don’t have the time, the inclination, the spirit of adventure, right? You want discipline and results, uh? Uniformity, rules and regulations… And specially, you don’t feel necessary to rub elbows with those folks, verdad? Class, you know… And that is perhaps the real ghost in this machine. Class and prejudice. But that, my little ones, is another story. Remember this… if you don’t mind: If we indoctrinate a person in an elaborate set of fixed beliefs, we are ensuring his early obsolescence. The alternative is to provide instruments of continuous change and growth. Then we will have fashioned a system that provides for its own continuous renewal more in the spirit of our great democracy.  |
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