English grammar does make sense

Geoff Pullum’s new book, The Truth About English Grammar, is a stylish and witty introduction to English grammar as it ought to be understood. Most of what is taught to schoolchildren about grammar is nonsense, as he demonstrates, and here he offers general readers a modern description of how our language puts sentences together, freed from the straitjacket of Latin grammar wrongfully imposed on it for the last few centuries.

Did you have to learn how to conjugate verbs? I did. Six tenses, 1st/2nd/3rd person, singular/plural, 36 in all. Nope. Regular English verbs have four forms—walk, walks, walking, walked. Irregular verbs have five—take, takes, taking, took, taken. And be, all alone among English verbs, has eight—be; am, is, are, was, were; being; been.

Pullum is a named co-author, with Rodney Huddleston, of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, published in 2002. I bought myself a copy for Christmas one year, all 1,860 pages (and I actually read hundreds of them).

CamGEL describes English as it is actually spoken and written by competent speakers, using the methods developed by linguists over several decades to document unfamiliar languages. As a grad student in linguistics, I took a course in “field methods.” The TA was a native speaker of Oromo (an Afroasiatic language spoken in Ethiopia). We could ask her “How do you say…” questions, and we had to use her answers to construct a model of the Oromo language.

Though the CamGEL authors are not only familiar with English, but authoritatively knowledgeable about it, they have a similar goal: A description of the English language that is accurate, clear, and free of preconceptions about what it should be like.

Pullum aims to use modern insights about the structure of English syntax as a framework for the extensive, but commonly subconscious, knowledge fluent speakers have of their own language.

Our Oromo informant was quite surprised by some of the things we discovered about her language, which she knew and used but had never noticed.

Though grammar properly refers solely to how a language makes sentences, Pullum adds chapters on mythical grammar errors, spelling and punctuation, and style. “Far too many alleged ‘grammatical errors’ aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.” Pullum says that one such mythical error can be accurately dated.

“The dumbest myth in the whole history of the English language is the cockamamie notion that something might be wrong with having a sentence or a phrase with a preposition stranded at the end. We actually know who perpetrated this nonsense. John Dryden—a poet, translator; playwright, essayist, and literary critic—published an essay in 1762 defending his critical views on the work of his fellow writers. Dryden observed sniffily that Ben Johnson had written a line ending in from, and commented that “putting a preposition in the end of a sentence” was “a common fault with him.”

Dryden was so influential that “his eccentric observation stuck,” Pullum observes. “To this day there are English teachers who believe students should be taught not to use perfectly acceptable sentences like No one knew what she was talking about.

As someone said (it wasn’t Churchill, though), “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.”

I already knew from reading Pullum on the linguistics blog Language Log that he has a deliciously snarky turn of phrase.

Among Pullum’s “disrecommendations” in the section on further reading is Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” He writes, “Hordes of English teachers have been singing its praises for three-quarters of a century. It is full of sanctimonious virtue signaling, dishonestly cherry-picked examples, and dumb advice about writing that no one follows, like that you should never use any familiar phrase, and of course that you should never use the passive (when his own essay uses the passive far more than most writing in English does). My advice: Don’t even read it, but if an English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.”

If you left school convinced that grammar lessons made no sense, well, you were right. Here you will find a version that does make sense, one you can use to improve your own writing.

And you will also be better prepared to defend yourself from grammar Nazis who really don’t know what they’re talking about.