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Grammar-clast It finally dawned on me that when a young child makes a mistake in grammar, he probably isn't. It's the mature people who are making the mistake. We know that English is evolving. Yet atavistic rules persist. And there are adults who ferociously cling to them and deride others—children, immigrants, subcultures—who don't. To demonstrate the fix English users are in: Nouns don't change when they move from the subject side of a sentence to the object side... John bit the dog. The dog bit John. ,,,yet pronouns still do. He bit the dog. The dog bit him. This is the logic behind the frustrating "who" vs "whom". At least, "who" is winning out. I bet, pretty soon, we'll be able to say, "The dog bit he". Why must we have subject-verb agreement? "He walk the road" communicates just as well as "He walks the road" without the extraneous phoneme. How much more time does it take to learn such a language? What effect do inconsistencies have on our thinking patterns? How many people are victimized by feelings of superiority or inferiority over their language usage? A glimpse at other viable languages with different structures can be insightful—the more alien, the better. Look at American Sign Language, Mandarin, Esperanto (an artificial language based on European languages that has discarded some, but not all, unnecessary features that those languages possess). Successful communication should be the standard for "properness"—not your hoary grammar teacher. So, get in the habit of asking yourself: Do it communicate successfully if I say it this way? The child that says "I doed it" is saying it in the smartest, bestest way. Grownups just need the audacity to follow in his footsteps. Copyright 2003 by John A. Eyon |
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