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> > > The rules give you something to go
> > > back to, and they provide a necessary inertia against
> > > the vagaries and ephemera of popular usage.
>
> This is a comforting thought, but the comfort is mostly an
> illusion.
Note that that was Gene's comforting thought, not mine.
It's not grammar, but it's a rule that the nesting of
"> > >" symbols tells you something about who-wrote-what
in an ongoing thread. In this case, you broke that rule
and effectively misattributed a statement. I'm as prone
as anybody to that goof, so normally I wouldn't bother
to mention it, but here it's a neat encapsulation of
how a simple rule about order and placement conveys
useful information... until it is ignored or otherwise
subverted. (I'm drawing a parallel here to the niggling
little rules of grammar and "proper" usage.)
> The rules
> are only slightly less vague or ephemeral than popular usage.
> Nor am I aware of
> any case in which presecriptive grammar had the least effect
> on whether a
> popular usage was accepted into the language or not.
Beggin' yer pardon, yer lordship, but 'ow would you know if
you met one? Millions of people don't all decide to post
on their personal web sites that they've decided to stop
employing some fad usage, because it's lost its cute or its
cool factor and has no ongoing value (to them) to give it
staying power.
Instead, they just quietly and individually drift away from
something that wasn't really working for them. Maybe they,
or people they respect, see and recognize a few examples
where the "proper" usage turns out to have more utility
than the fad usage. None of them has any reason to seek
out Bruce to inform him as to why they dropped a certain
usage. So, Bruce doesn't know what led to long-term
acceptance or rejection in most cases... or does he?
> At any rate, the problem with the rules is that they tend to
> be a distraction
> from the business of writing well. If you need any proof that
> we have a cultural
> neurosis about grammar, just consider how the smallest
> grammatical question on
> this list can generate dozens of e-mail, while discussions
> about the best way to
> structure writing are relativelly rare.
Well, every time you write yet another drearily conforming
sentence, you undermine that point. Can we safely assume
that even outside this list -- away from this audience --
you (like me and most of the rest of us) persist in writing
according to those rules? Whether you've internalized
them, rather than laboriously looking them up, is not
the issue, but some other people might need to look up
rules or ask "gurus" until they too can internalize the
rules that most of us grew into. My point is that they
have an incentive to do so, and that that incentive --
good communication -- is valid.
> Grammar is fine, in its place. But it has assume a
> grotesquely exaggerated
> importance in most of our minds. As a result, our knowledge
> and application of
> writing technique suffers.
Do you have examples of suffering writing technique
from somebody who has ever indulged in a grammar/usage
thread on this list... or on CEL, or wherever?
We probably SHOULD be talking more about those other
aspects, if for no other reason than that most of us
already *do* have grammar and "proper" usage fairly
well internalized by now. But I don't fault anybody
who brings up a grammatical or usage or ILF ("it looks
funny") point, nor do I fault those who are interested
in punting it around for a while. I just expect to
see more of it on CEL than here. Strangely, that's what
I find. :-)
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