 Warning: This is a grammar post. Yep, a whole post about grammar. Ok, now that everyone's stopped reading except for my brother, fiancé, and parents, I would like to say a few (hundred) words about grammar and some of my greatest grammar pet peeves. When I was in 1st - 5th grade, the school I went to did not teach grammar (yeah, the school from this story -- shocking, right?). I remember one day on the playground in fifth grade I had said "none of us is...," and two bullies (known more for stealing my snacks and coat than for their interest in grammar) ganged up on me, saying I was wrong and it should be "none are." I told them it's "none is" because it's really "not one is," and they didn't believe me, so I told them to go ask a teacher, thinking that would settle it. Of course, they asked the science teacher, who said they were right and I was wrong. So I told them to ask the language arts teacher, who again said they were right and I was wrong. Sorry, language arts teacher, but you were wrong. And you should clearly not be teaching kids language arts.
When
I left that school and went to a different school for middle school, I
was the only kid who had no clue how to diagram a sentence. I couldn't
have told you a gerund from a participle or an appositive from a
preposition. I remember taking a pretest in grammar class the first day
of sixth grade and just looking at my sheet feeling like I was living
that nightmare of having a test for a class that I had never attended. I
emerged from middle school loving grammar and with a huge appreciation
for the precision and nuance its mastery could lend to writing.
Unfortunately, based on the grammar I see and hear commonly, I'm pretty
sure my first school was the rule, with my middle school being the
exception.
I am a believer that you learn the rules, and with
that, you learn when they need to be broken. Every once in a while an
omitted comma or an added one changes the dynamics of the sentence, and I
frequently decide that to accurately and smoothly convey exactly what I
mean I want to split an infinitive.... I don't believe in being a
slave to the rules at the expense of flow and clarity. But I also
believe that most grammar rules cannot be broken and have no need to
be broken, and when I'm reading along and see one of the following
errors, I involuntarily cringe and feel like an anvil has just been
thrown onto my page. It's like I always
imagined it must be for all those elves out for a stroll in Treasure
Mountain when all of a sudden "BAM" you grab one with a net to make
them give you riddles.... No?... Did I just lose anyone still sticking
around who didn't play The Learning Company video games when they were little? Ok then, I guess this last part is just for me....
So, some of my biggest grammar pet peeves, the apparent lack of teaching of which I do not understand:
1. "I"
2. Possessive formation of a word ending in S.
People
really hate " 's" -- almost as much as they hate "me." If the noun
isn't plural, then even if it ends with an "s" you have to add that
extra "s" after the apostrophe. "Laertes's class's cats' food
smelled bad." (Not that anyone names their kid Laertes these days, but I
saw a lot of that one in reviews of Hamlet -- not related to his class
having cats, though.) "Laertes' " would be the plural possessive of a bunch of things called a laerte. Same if it's someone's last name that ends in "s."
Whether it makes a "z" sound or an "s" sound, you still need the extra
"s" to turn it possessive as long as it's singular. Oh and while we're
on the topic of possessives... none of these is a possessive, and you don't get bonus points for bonus apostrophes:
3. Posts about grammar that are wrong. (Hint: #5.... Not all words ending in "ing" are gerunds....)
So if I've made mistakes (not counting the infinitives I so frequently love to callously split), please do let me know.
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Monday, May 23, 2016
Grammar Rules
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