Happy National Grammar Day!
You’re expecting a discourse about imperatives, interrogatives, absolute modifiers, and object complements, right?
You won’t be getting it here. Truth to tell, I struggle with some of that terminology. (Just now I had to look up “absolute modifiers” – it’s a term I’d never heard before. Turns out it refers to words like unique and pregnant that can’t be modified. You can’t be very unique, sort of pregnant, or kind of dead.)
Lots of people believe that what’s wrong with writers today is their lack of grammatical knowledge. If you share their views, you believe that everyone should spend a lot of time in school labeling parts of speech and underlining various kinds of words and phrases in workbooks (or, if you’re trendy, on a computer screen).
I’m not one of those people. I draw a sharp distinction between grammar (the rules and terminology that construct a language) and usage (the rules that people follow when they write and speak).
I vote for usage.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Just yesterday in the newspaper someone wrote that he “felt badly” about something that had happened to him. Wrong: It should be “felt bad.”
If you’re a grammarian, you’d go into a discourse about the differences between copulative and transitive verbs, and you’d explain that a predicate adjective rather than an adverb was needed in that sentence.
Shucks. Wouldn’t it be much simpler to note that educated people tend to say “felt bad”? Is all that grammatical baggage really necessary?
When I press the brake pedal on my car, I don’t think about the stopping process involving pedal, brake pads, and tires. I think about good driving practices.
Going back to the prohibition against “very unique” and “sort of pregnant”: I knew that already. Why impose a clunky discourse about “absolute modifiers”? Why do we have to complicate something simple?
So…have a great time celebrating National Grammar Day today. But while you’re at it, please raise a glass in honor of usage too.
