Re: Grammar Books

[Sarah Stegall <stegall -at- TERAYON -dot- COM>]

"Higgins, Lisa" wrote:
>
> I honestly don't understand why this is such an emotional issue. Every time
> it comes up, people get attacked personally. That's inappropriate and
> uncalled for.
>

Words are magic. They define the world for us.  Of course the rules that
define how we arrange those dangerous and powerful words (especially
words like "format" and "erase") are fraught with issues of their own.
No wonder things get emotional.  Words can kill you: call a black man a
"nigger" or a white supremacist a "honky" and see what happens.


> If we can't write like it's second nature, if we don't have
> the common sense to use simple logic rather than a bunch of arbitrary rules
> in our work, frankly, I don't think we do have much value as writers.

Applause, applause.  And yet, how do we learn to "write like it's second
nature"? (Note use of punctuation OUTSIDE quotation marks.) I learned to
write by reading voraciously.  I write like the writers I read when I
was growing up, and I punctuate according to the same unconscious
"rules".  If my sentence doesn't look like one I would have run across
in a book, alarm bells go off in my head.  Yet if we take it one step
farther back, what I was reading was the product of another writer's and
an editor's series of decisions about grammar and usage.  In effect, I
learned to "write like it's second nature" by the highly unnatural
process of being taught by good editors at Dell and Ballantine and
Berkeley Books and Houghton-Mifflin.  Which begs the question--who
taught *them*?

> We go back and forth on this all the time, but I have yet to see a coherent
> explanation of the value of some of the silly rules English teachers cling
> to so jealously.

I was forced to confront the same issue recently when dealing with an
engineer who persisted in telling me that 'backup' was a verb, as in
"Here is how you backup your files." He was not raised in the US and had
no allegiance for any arbitrary rule of English that could not be
substantiated by logical argument.  I told him that "back up" is a verb,
not "backup", because one might conceivably conjugate the verb form.  It
is incorrect to say "I backupped my files"; the correct form is "I
backed up my files", which requires that the modifier (up) be separated
from the verb it modifies.  At which point he backed (past tense of "to
back") down (adverb/direct object).

> Why exactly is it not OK to split an infinitive?

You can't split an infinitive in Latin or Greek, which is where our
rules came from.  It's not possible, because of the form of the verb.
One cannot split an infinitive in language derived mostly from Latin,
because verbs consist of ONE word (French "parler" = to speak, for
example), whereas in English most verbs consist of two words (English
"to speak" = parler, par example).  I think what happened was that, when
we were codifying our grammar rules back in the 18th century,
grammarians knew Latin and Greek very well, and simply transferred the
rules that fit that language to English. In that sense, a "rule" was
more descriptive than prescriptive; it described the way the language
worked, as opposed to how someone thought the English how she should be
spoke.

Why can't
> I end a sentence in a preposition?

Beats me.

Our business is to communicate clearly
> and effectively. It is absolutely not to 'defend' our language from those
> who rightfully own it.

See? Now we're talking ownership.  I knew this would get political. :D


Language evolves and changes and becomes better
> suited to its task in the process. We should be really happy about that.

Evolution is fine, except that it means you lose earlier bioforms (or
language forms) behind. Written works last longer than people do
(witness Sophocles), which means we must take extra care to see that our
descendants can still read and understand what we wrote.  We don't have
to ossify English into a dead language like Latin or Akkadian (which
survived only as court languages precisely to overcome language
barriers), but we can make darn sure our works are not as impenetrable
to our descendants as say, Chaucer in the original is to many lay
readers today.

On the other hand, future generations probably won't give a damn about a
manual written for a PDP-11.  *shrug*
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sarah Stegall                       Senior Technical Writer
stegall -at- terayon -dot- com           Terayon Communication Systems

"I love being a writer, what I can't stand is the paperwork."
   -- Peter DeVries

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