Re: Act versus pass (WAS Disp versus App-Which One? ) (slightly OT/rant)

["Dick Margulis" <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

Jo Francis Byrd wrote:


>For some reason I managed to get through grade school and most of high school
>without having a grasp of grammar. I could (and did) speak and write correct
>English, but I couldn't tell you one part of speech from another, or tell you
>WHY it was correct (or incorrect), just knew it was. 

Yes, this is the way it's supposed to work. And it works well if you grow up in a community where people generally speak the same language and use standard diction at least some of the time. That's the "natural" way to learn a language. Embedded in your head is the generative grammar that produces only well-formed utterances. That's what the Whole Language business is based on (that, and a lot of specious reasoning).

But--VERY BIG BUT--all of this depends on the homogeneity and articulateness of the community where you grow up.

My kids grew up in a rural area where the majority of people lived on the farms they grew up on. Perhaps a third of the parents had attended even a community college and probably eighty percent of the adults had never traveled 100 miles from home in their lives. In this backwater, while people were perfectly content to communicate among themselves in the dialect that had evolved there, what "sounded right" to my kids was quite different from what sounds right to me or to you.

We acquire our dialect (including vocabulary, diction, grammar, and pronunciation) primarily between the ages of six and twelve and in the schoolyard, all good parental intentions notwithstanding. This is true worldwide. So unless we want to limit our communication to the village where we grew up, we need some externally applied pressure--in the form of instruction from an English teacher, and tests, and grades, and both negative and positive feedback--to be able to communicate clearly with people from other villages. That's where descriptive and some amount of prescriptive grammar is helpful.



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