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If I Were the King of Grammar…
What a great topic for this month’s group writing. The first thing I thought to write on was, “If I were a rich man…” Unfortunately, my wife told me it had already been done.
I had to think of something else. I have general handyman skills, but I’ve never done fine carpentry work. I would love to have those sorts of skills. “If I were a carpenter…” And then my wife said that had also been done before.
Well, then I thought, I’ve always wanted to dance. But…
Well, it seems like there are a whole lot of people out there writing songs in the subjunctive mood. Now, of course, everyone on Ricochet knows about the subjunctive mood, as well as the English language’s other moods: indicative, interrogative, imperative, injunctive, optative, and potential.
I have a confession to make: I never learned about moods in an English grammar class. When I was going to school, it seems like we never finished getting through the textbooks. Maybe my peers were just more disruptive than most, and it meant we went through the information more slowly than planned. Or maybe the plan was bad and no class was getting through the whole thing. Of course, it wasn’t just grammar books that were never finished. I never had a history class that got to or past World War II. And I’m not that old. Before the first day I had darkened the door of a school building, we had had more than twenty years of history since WWII. Well, it wasn’t like I was going to read the rest of the school books in my spare time over the summer, either. I had too much to do over the summer. I was a kid. I had to whine about being bored. Do you know how much time that takes? You don’t have enough time to do that if you’re reading a grammar book.
No, the first time I heard of the subjunctive mood, it wasn’t spelled that way. It was «le subjonctif». I learned about moods in high school French class. It left me wondering what else I didn’t know about English grammar. How come nobody had ever told me about this stuff before? It really put me into a mood that was more grumpy than subjunctive. There I was, Wile E. Coyote, Super-Genius High-School Student, and I had never heard of grammar moods before. I do declare!
If I were Grammar King, I would ensure everyone knew all the beautiful grammar things we have in our languages. Languages are complex emergent creations. Nobody sat down one day and said, “Dudes, what we really need is a subjunctive mood in our grammar.” No, it emerged out of the practice of peoples’ trying to communicate long ago. And this is a tool in the toolbox of our language. We have subtle ways of indicating moods through word choices. I would have everyone know such facets of the beautiful gem that is our grammar.
How about you, my Ricochet friends? Was there anything in school that you seemed to miss learning when you should have? Perhaps something you stumbled across later?
Published in Group Writing
I forgot to insert a link to @kentforrester‘s name just to see if he’s awake.
This is part of Group Writing. @cliffordbrown will say more about that further down the comments, but since I am posting this so late in the day, I thought I should mention it.
I didn’t really learn English grammar till I studied NT Greek in undergrad.
But I think I learned good commas from reading The Far Side.
Learning other languages often fills in the gaps in our educations.
Did I miss or abuse a comma up yonder? I wrote all of this rather quickly as I was running out of September First to post it.
I never read Silas Marner.
I graduated HS in ’93 and we didn’t get past WWII either. There was stuff in the book about Korea and Vietnam, but were we to have covered that at the same pace, it would have taken us all summer. Anybody else have the same experience?
I did, but it was about forty years ago.
I’m pretty sure American History ended with Teddy Roosevelt getting shot while giving a speech running as the Bullmoose party candidate.
I know we made it past WWII because of Richard Nixon, Red Hunter and SALT.
Yep.
Also from The Wizard of Oz.
According to The New York Times, American History ended in 1619. Yay – now there’s no reason to learn any other dates or events!
Those New Yorkers must be really slow if that’s as far as they got in history.
That AP history class is the only one. We were on a read a chapter and take a test every three days pace.
In college my calc textbook ran out before the class did. The professor was borrowing a text from a friend of his, which wasn’t finished yet. He ended up hurriedly writing out an extra chapter or two.
Yeah, in fact the Dutch still haven’t “stolen” Manhattan from the Indians as far as they’re concerned.
That was immediately what I thought of.
Is there a word for this? You learn another language and find that it has things that you always wished your language had?
That’s not quite what happened here. English always had moods. I just didn’t know about them until I studied French.
However, I would bet German has a word for what you are describing. (Grammatikelement Neid?)
Whatever you missed in school, don’t be shy, step up and join the conversation this month, playing off September’s theme “If I was a —, I would —.”
Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
Grammar?
Never heard of it, eh?
Some kind of Republican actor, isn’t he?
I thought she was the one who hung out with Gramper.
My favorite* grammar joke:
A businessman arriving in Boston for a convention found that his first evening was free, and he decided to go find a good seafood restaurant that served scrod, a Massachusetts specialty. Getting into a taxi, he asked the cab driver, “Do you know where I can get scrod around here?” “Sure,” said the cabdriver. “I know a few places… but I can tell you it’s not often I hear someone use the third-person pluperfect indicative anymore!”
*also possibly my only grammar joke.
I discover things every day that I wish I had studied when younger. The ability to become interested, to have enough knowledge links to find instant new contexts for new things is the ultimate gift of a good education.
When I became a teacher I discovered (while imitating them) that the best teachers I had always seemed to be trying to share something they loved. It was less about my duty to learn it than the duty they imposed on themselves to find ways to share this bit of truth, this insight, this valuable lesson to others. Each class was a sustained invitation, not a hierarchical rote factory.
I got into teaching by accident as a temp teaching an English class to 1oth grade boys. I thought the existing plan sucked so I scrapped it. Instead, the semester-long mission was to learn how to write a paragraph. [Note: I would likely flunk my class these days as these elderly rambles issue forth…].
The topics were simple then sometimes bizarre but mostly in response to selections that amused me or pithy things I think everyone should read. Topics of a more personal nature were not permitted until later when some skill was demonstrated. Of particular importance was the wisdom of Samuel Johnson:
In other words, don’t distort the entire piece just to keep the phrase or bon mot you just fell in love with but which does not really belong. I once had a brief mock funeral ceremony for such an item I red-lined out of a paragraph of which the writer was terribly proud. I followed that hurtful act with congratulations because, grasshopper, learning how to make that sacrifice for the higher purpose of making your point means you are now a writer.
But I have digressed–heck, my whole life sometimes feels like a digression.
I learned about moods in Latin class. That sort of thing makes more sense with an inflected language. English grammar seems rather arbitrary by comparison. I recall a small group of us making mock translations of the Gallic Wars because things like the ablative absolute seemed so foreign, gibberish like: “Caesar, having been about to be struck with the eggplant once thrown mightily might indeed be loving his horse but will have had more joy but for….” and so forth. But I do understand the subjunctive mood.
Digressions are necessary. They keep us awake and attentive, waiting for the next one.
Without them, we’d be communicating in outline form, and knowledge would die having been killed by us to stop the tedium. :-)
There’s an art to using them, and good writers and speakers have perfected it. :-)
Digression may be the only thing between us and Amazon’s artificial intelligence bots taking over the world. :-)
That and inherent associative memory.
Humans can be reminded of things that aren’t the same, but are useful. That is tough to program.
Please someone (since I’m at work and can’t take the time), please link to Weird Al’s grammar song. Thanks in advance!