Traditional Grammar Ain’t Popular

A few weeks ago, I had one of those notorious two-martini lunches in New York with a couple of very bright young women--editors for their respective publishing houses--and we got to discussing English grammar. These two women, both in their 20s and both college graduates, deeply regretted that they had never had a chance to study traditional grammar. They were sure they’d missed out on something quite important--most particularly important for editors. I couldn’t agree more.

They were young enough to be baffled as to why grammar seemed almost suddenly to have dropped out of the standard curriculum. I think that, as is almost always the case, the reasons were many and complex. First of all came the awareness--hardly earthshaking--that the rules of grammar, so long revered by good English teachers, were not engraved on stone tablets and presented to us from on high. With that revelation came a vast chorus of relieved sighs. No one need any longer feel guilty about “Him an’ me are gonna write a book,” or “We was robbed.” Even better than that, those English teachers who had never learned anything about traditional grammar had no problem teaching it, since it didn’t matter none anyways.

That was just the thin end of the wedge. In time some serious thinkers--philosophers, theorists, call them what you will--got into the act and concluded that traditional grammar was, in any case, far too simplistic. It didn’t really describe language as language actually works. They were right, of course. “We was robbed” is perfectly understandable to the point of being absolutely unmistakable. To say that it is “not good English” is therefore to presume that there are inherent standards in English that make one unmistakably clear way of stating a fact somehow better than another equally clear way of stating the same fact.

My own feeling is that there are proper and improper ways of saying the same thing; but you’ll notice that I said, “my own feeling is that,” knowing that if I made the flat, categorical statement, “There are proper and improper ways of saying the same thing,” I might have to defend my assertion against some barbarian whose debating skills could be quite lethal.

A more serious problem arises in the true shortcomings of traditional grammar. A statement like “Jack and Jill went up the hill” poses few problems: Jack (proper noun) and (conjunction) Jill (proper noun) went (past tense of intransitive verb to go ) up (adverb) the (definite article) hill (noun). “Jack and Jill” (subject) “went up the hill” (predicate). Fairly simple. Given the time, patience and memory of how it’s done, we could even diagram the sentence.

Try applying the same treatment to “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We run into a problem immediately. What is that there there? My Random House says it’s a “pron. (used to introduce a sentence or clause in which the verb comes before its subject or has no complement): There is no hope . Not quite so simple. I wouldn’t have pegged the there as a pronoun, but it might as well be. “Chambers Twentieth Century” says of this species of there , “ adv . . . . used . . . (unstressed) without any meaning of its own to allow the subject to follow the predicate, and also in corresponding interrogative sentences, etc.”

It’s understandable that a teen-ager might have a bit of trouble with that “there,” since even the lexicographers don’t entirely agree (pron.? adv.?), and “there” is only the first word in that fairly complex sentence. I’d say of that line that “more things” (subject), and “are in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (predicate); but I wouldn’t be surprised if even that modest treatment opened a can of worms. It could be the start of a very high-pitched rap session.

There’s no doubt about it: Trying to sort out certain grammatical structures is like trying to train a litter of frisky puppies to line up straight. So, along came a school, or perhaps several schools, of philosophers and theorists who developed something called “new grammar.” An excellent book by Arn and Charlene Tibbetts called “What’s Happening to American English?” (Scribner’s) tells us that the “new grammar” was touted as a pure science: the scientific study of language. The Tibbettses mention that one writer had praised “the laws of the science that studies all speech--linguistics.” And, “Another new grammarian remarked that an ‘ideal’ grammar should be ‘logically defensible in the same way that a chemical analysis is logically defensible.’ ”

Some people just love the scientific method and yearn to apply it to everything. It doesn’t always work, I’m happy to say. According to the Tibbettses, “. . . new grammar, when tried in the schools, failed miserably.” In the wake of this miserable failure lay the wreckage of most courses in English grammar of whatever stripe.

I had some friends in school who didn’t do particularly well in grammar, but I never knew anyone who didn’t gain something positive from its study. I think we’ve deprived young America of a precious intellectual discipline: old-fashioned grammar.