THE SCARY SCIENCE: LINGUISTICS!!!!!!!!
DON’T END A SENTENCE WITH A PREPOSITION!!!!!
NEVER USE “I” IN AN ESSAY!!!!!!!!
DON’T SPLIT INFINITIVES!!!!
These old guidelines are obviously not the way we either speak or write, so what use are they? Steven Pinker calls them Old Wives’ Tales. Yet we have to have some kind of rules for our language, don’t we? Maybe not. One 5th grade teacher told me that she was told she would be fired if she insisted on teaching grammar. I have been similarly instructed, on the basis that grammar supposedly cannot be taught to large groups.
As Wittgenstein wrote, “…the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of language.” In other words, if you want to get an idea from your own head into somebody else’s, there has to be a set of agreed upon protocols and rules for expressing our ideas so other people can understand them. The problem is that teachers don’t know how to teach grammar’s protocols and rules, so they don’t teach it at all.
If there aren’t any rules then it’s a free-for-all out there. Self-expression degenerates into “Write what you feel.” That’s what high school teachers are telling their students these days, and the students are confused, maybe even more confused than their teachers.
Linguistics deals with deeper, more basic concepts, not with rules. It helps us understand how language is constructed, how meaning is made, and the many roles languages plays in our lives; yet it sounds so daunting, with its “generational grammar” and “syntactic trees” and whatnot. Linguists have talked to other linguists to the exclusion of everyone else for long enough. We need to adapt the science of linguistics to the classroom.
That is what this blog is all about.
Beautifully said. I love the Wittgenstein quote. I had the same experience of being warned, by a minor State Department bureaucrat, NOT to discuss grammar in a workshop in Africa on reporting, even as a minor subtheme. In an art workshop, would you never discuss tools? The jerk. (He probably was afraid of the evaluations his little program would receive.)