Glenn ford
What’s a Participle?
One student out of fifteen — mostly valedictorians, I’m told — in my Honors seminar knew. Our schools do not teach the systematic analysis of English semantics and syntax, what used to be called “grammar”. They do teach what now is called grammar, meaning a grab bag of rules, usually mistaken and never organized into a coherent system, which students learn to follow as docilely as they learn to write five-paragraph essays, with a vague opening, three ho-hum body shots, and a recapitulatory conclusion. Respectively.
Anyway, Steve’s post below has made me think of the six stupidest “grammatical” things our schools teach. Some of these slide from grammar into style, but since my students are but slenderly acquainted with either one, it hardly matters here how we characterize them:
1. Never begin a sentence with “but”. When they tell me they’ve been so advised, I open up the King James Bible at random, glance at the page, and read. “If it’s good enough for Almighty God,” I say, “it had damned well better be good enough for a high school English teacher.” It is the preferred method in English prose of making the quick adversative shift.
2. Never begin a sentence with “because.” When our retiring linguist heard about this rule, she gaped in incomprehension. That’s what my daughter tells me, who was in the class. What can you say about it? It betrays an utter incapacity to understand how sentences are put together in English. Because teachers do not know what a subordinate clause is, they do not teach their students what a subordinate clause is. And because they have no clear way to explain what a sentence fragment is, and because immature writers will sometimes begin a fragment with “because,” they say — you get it.
3. Avoid the passive voice. This rule would be fine, except for two things: neither the teachers nor the students know what the passive voice is; and the passive voice is often quite useful. My students are under the impression that any verb with an “is” or an “are” in it is passive. If ever they had to learn about the middle voice, they’d take ill.
4. Never use the pronoun “I” in an essay.
5. Never use the informal “you,” meaning “one”.
6. Never use the same word more than twice in a row. Imagine Lincoln revising the Gettysburg Address, that government of the people, for society, and by the general population, should not perish from the face of the earth.
But the real grammatical mistakes my students make have no name for them. I’m still talking about the valedictorians here. I suppose “improper predication” would do as well as any. They use words in ways that are impossible not only in English, but sometimes in any conceivable language. They get away with it, too, because their teachers, including college professors, do likewise.
Related posts: Ncaa championship game start time, London tipton, Cbs5, Waycross georgia, Music 2008