I was taught that using tools is what distinguishes humans from the rest of the primates. Then one day, someone photographed a chimp using a straw to lure ants out of the ground, and a debate was ignited. To my mind, there was never a doubt. It wasn’t tools in general that made humans special; it was a specific tool—language. Sure, animals have their “languages,” and Koko, the famous gorilla, is said to have had a vocabulary of over a thousand signs, but such examples don’t begin to match the communicative scope and subtlety of human language.
Just consider. We can name tens of thousands of things, concrete and abstract. They can be the agents and objects of tens of thousands of actions. Both agents and actions can be described in precise and exhaustive detail. So I can point out how gracefully the quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, and you can tell me that a big, bushy bumblebee is buzzing beside my blue bell-bottoms. But that is scarcely the beginning. I can tell you that the fox’s jump is in progress—he is jumping. Or that he jumped yesterday. Or started to jump a second ago and just landed. Or will jump tomorrow. Or will have jumped by the time you turn around. Or would have jumped if the dog hadn’t been barking. Or could have soared over the dog if he had been wearing a jet pack. And so on. Can you imagine how valuable this tool is to a social animal—one that hunts in groups, that plans and gives directions, that speculates “what if,” that describes real things not presently seen and imaginary things that inhabit myth and folklore? And this is just the domain of spoken language. It has an appendage, written language, which underpins all of civilization!
There’s a catch, though. Just as language has the power to communicate ideas, it has the power to miscommunicate them. With only good intentions, I can befuddle you with non sequiturs, cloud our discourse with ambiguities, and leave you wondering who did what, when, and to whom. I can toss off subjects without predicates and predicates without subjects, and off you’d go to tell someone else the exact opposite of what I thought I had said. Such mishaps are common. Most often, they just waste our time, but sometimes they do real harm. Of course, this hazard hasn’t gone unnoticed, not with the integrity of our precious tool at stake. So humankind has invented a way to talk about language and keep it effective. It’s called grammar, the whetstone of language—a tool for a tool.
Perhaps you believe, as many do, that grammar is merely a kind of etiquette, a set of rules practiced by the genteel and sophisticated among us. You couldn’t be more mistaken. The ability to talk about the elements and structure of language is essential to studying law, drafting legislation, advocating for a cause, drafting a business proposal, writing persuasively, writing a narrative, criticizing literature, writing how-to books, writing textbooks, explaining difficult concepts, and teaching foreign languages. If we lacked this ability, how would we identify problems like the lack of subject-verb agreement, confusing syntax, unclear antecedents, misplaced modifiers, passive constructions with ambiguous agents, or disunities of topic and tense? How would we be able to recommend remedial changes like using stronger verbs, switching to the active voice, simplifying tenses, varying short sentences with periodic ones, and improving logical transitions with conjunctive adverbs. In fact, how would we be able to revise anything? Without grammar, we’d truly find ourselves in a Tower of Babel, even if we all spoke the same language!
One of the things I find fascinating about grammar is its linkage with trust. You see, our dependence on language is so profound that if we meet someone who abuses language—someone whose knowledge of grammar is poor—we mistrust that person. Imagine that your daughter’s boyfriend takes you aside and says, “Sally and me are in love, and we want to get married.” How likely are you to reply, “You have my blessing, son”? Or suppose you saw our president say on TV, “I know relations between our governments is good.” (An actual Bushism.) Wouldn’t a wee voice in your head ask, “Can I trust a man who holds language in such low regard?” There’s nothing that will cause someone to be reappraised faster than a grammatical gaffe.
I recently heard a distressing story about a teacher of Language Arts. She reportedly said, “There’s no good reason to teach grammar. In fact, a study has shown that it actually frustrates students. It inhibits their ability to write creatively.” I have no doubt that grammar does indeed slow them up. Whenever we write, we craft an idea so that it will arrive in another mind in exactly the way we intend it to. This is no mean trick, and without a grammatical foundation, it’s next to impossible. If students wrote only in diaries, then I’d agree: teaching grammar would be unnecessary. But if they ever want to share their thoughts with others, they had better learn grammar.
It strikes me as odd that a teacher of Language Arts would miss the obvious fallacy in the “study.” Surely her reluctance to teach grammar comes from somewhere else. Perhaps she’s saying, “I don’t understand grammar very well myself” or “I just don’t know how to teach grammar.” I think it’s probably the latter. Grammar is an abstract subject, as is much of science and all of math. Our teachers aren’t very good at teaching abstractions, and in short order the teachers’ “I can’t teach it” becomes the students’ “I don’t want to learn it.”
The Scratching Post 