A linguistical missonary

I recall vividly Ian telling me that grammar was lost on students at UMass. I think that was a gross exaggeration but he was a non-fiction editor and the other disciplines tended to write for him more than me (I was fiction).

His complaint then was that following the word “and” 90% of the population would put a comma where it evidently didn’t belong.

Let me first state that if you’ve read anything of mine, you’d realize grammar wasn’t my forte, and not that there’s any reason to be sloppy with grammar but its on the other side of the discipline from where I stood. While English and its focused study has countless fractured off shoots there remains, for the purposes of this commentary, two sides; the Grammarians, and the Linguists.

To catch up to speed those who may have chosen a more exciting path than to labor through the doldrums of the English study, for all intents and purposes, the two should look like this (with regard to belief):

Grammarian – A set an unwavering, cast-iron laws has been created for the construction of words, sentences, and language. These rules are not to be broken. Changes are to be deliberated on at great length and are required to come before large bodies of fellow grammarians. (this body is generally vigilante, and has no real authority to speak of)

Linguists – Those who feel that language is created by the people, not handed to us from some higher power, or Titan-like god of yesteryear. Words are words because of use, and popularity determines what language is. While its never been said to me one way or the other, I believe that linguists can assert that a word may fall out of use, but I would suspect they think that words never die.

But my position in all of this, which I should have likely gotten to in the first place is, that while linguists have no commentary on grammar, and of course grammarians do, there should be an understanding and sympathetic approach to grammar once the rules have been firmly understood.

Again I should come to my point. I was reading a passage in the book I’m currently in the middle of and they were citing a letter from 1892. As they were in Chicago, far from the academic northeast, rules were cast to hell and anything went. I started reading it how best I thought it intended but ultimately I could see in this letter the difference between grammatical ruling, and a sort of theatric dialogue, something that was written as it was said, or at least with that aim.

I started to read words like a musician might jazz notes; with an understanding of the rules and an intention to ignore them. I started to hear the Baptist Ministers, adding pauses and lingering on syllables that might otherwise be ignored but the classically trained liturgist (or pianist as the metaphor goes) and saw in this understanding, the true fruition of what English could become. The notion that words had more personality than the stodgy, clinical Times New Roman might display them as gave reading a far more power effect. In reading in a manner, as one might here a narrator in a Ken Burns film, we are able to retain information and citation in far greater capacity. We no longer had to settle for what characters thought, but in a fashion, why they thought, and where their rationale and philosophy might rest.

In any given sentence, there is a feeling in a word or two, and several other words surrounding that feeling to elicit a reaction, to prove a point and to convey a message; emphasis is the courier of that emotion. It is here that we realize reading is little more than understanding concepts on a page and how to stop, or pause over them like a tour bus driver, letting those who stand in awe of the architecture around each corner that a city has to offer, the bucolic beauty the ocean becomes as backdrop , or the local flaws of culture that give the buildings a feeling, and like tourists, as we pass over these concepts at certain rates of speed, with certain weighs of emphasis, here we are snapping photos so that our memory may recall the understanding of dreams realized or yet imagined.