The Glamour of Grammar

INTRODUCTION

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Embrace grammar as powerful and purposeful.

My first rock 'n' roll record, a heavy 78 rpm vinyl disk, was "Hound Dog" by Elvis Presley. Most of the adults I knew thought that rock was "the devil's music," the pathway to moral degeneracy and juvenile delinquency. Even worse, they thought it would screw up our grammar. When they heard the King growl "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," the grown-ups would holler: "There ain't no such word as 'ain't.'" Not to mention that double negative: "Well, if you ain't nothin', then you must be somethin'."

Back then, our parents and teachers subscribed to the school of grammar we all learned in, well, grammar school. They framed grammar as a strict set of rules we must master in order to use language "correctly." I did not know it then, but this school of grammar had a name. It was called prescriptive because it prescribed proper ways to use the English language.

I was an eighth grader at St. Aidan School in 1961, the year Webster's Third included the word ain't—without disapproval—for the first time. The conservators of language were outraged, denouncing the dictionary as a glorification of ignorance, and its editors as "permissive." But the Webster's team was doing nothing more or less than taking note of the way people actually used the language. These lexicographers were members of the descriptive school because they described the language used in spoken and written English.

More than a half century later, the grammar wars rage on, with the prescribers and describers professing antagonistic visions of what constitutes grammar, how it is learned, and how it should be taught. It is in this contentious context that I offer for your consideration The Glamour of Grammar.

If you are holding this book in your hands, it means that the English language lives inside you. That is a wonderful gift, one that many of you learned from the cradle, one that will grow with you until you whisper "Rosebud" or whatever your final word happens to be. But you have an even greater power at your fingertips. It comes not when your language lives inside you, but when you begin to live inside your language.

To help you live that life, this book invites you to embrace grammar in a special way, not as a set of rules but as a box of tools, strategies that will assist you in making meaning as a reader, writer, or speaker. Living inside the language requires a grammar of purpose, a grammar of effect, a grammar of intent. This type of grammar puts language into action. It doesn't shout at you, "No, no, no," but gives you a little push and says, "Go, go, go." This type of grammar enables us to practice the three behaviors that mark us as literate human beings: it helps us write with power, read with a critical eye, and talk about how meaning is made.

These reflections lead me to the purpose of this book's fabulous title, The Glamour of Grammar. At first glance, the phrase must seem oxymoronic, as paradoxical as a sequined pocket protector. Was there ever in the popular imagination a word less glamorous than grammar? But what if I were to tell you that at one time in the history of our language, grammar and glamour were the same word? Need proof? Let's consult the Oxford English Dictionary.

The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved from grammar through an ancient association between learning and enchantment. There was a time when grammar described not just language knowledge but all forms of learning, which in a less scientific age included things like magic, alchemy, astrology, even witchcraft.

Evan Morris, editor and publisher of "The Word Detective," leads us through the maze:

"Glamour" and "Grammar" are essentially the same word. In classical Greek and Latin, "grammar" (from the Greek "grammatikos," meaning "of letters") covered the whole of arts and letters, i.e., high knowledge in general. In the Middle Ages, "grammar" was generally used to mean "learning," which at the time included, at least in the popular imagination, a knowledge of magic. The narrowing of "grammar" to mean "the rules of language" was a much later development, first focusing on Latin, and only in the 17th century extended to the study of English and other languages.

Meanwhile, "grammar" had percolated into Scottish English (as "gramarye"), where an "l" was substituted for an "r" and the word eventually became "glamour," used to mean specifically knowledge of magic and spells.

Even though the association between grammar and glamour is surprising, it's not hard to find a trail of connections leading to modern usage. In popular gothic stories detailing the misadventures of witches and vampires, the word glamor (without a u)—as both a noun and a verb—describes a magic spell that puts someone in a trance or makes a person forget. When we see a glamorous movie star walking down a red carpet, don't we sometimes hear the words magical, alluring, and enchanting?

The word grammar has taken a bit of a nosedive since the days when some tipsy scholar north of Hadrian's Wall mixed up his r's with his l's. Today grammar connotes everything unglamorous: absentminded professors; fussy schoolteachers; British grammazons with binding names like Lynne Truss; nagging perfectionists; pedantic correctionists; high-school students asleep at their desks, stalactites of drool hanging from their lips. Long lost from grammar are associations with power, magic, enchantment, and mystical energy.

I've written The Glamour of Grammar so that you can feel that energy and put it to use. You will be guided by the broadest definition of grammar possible, used here to include pronunciation, spelling, punctuation, syntax, usage, lexicography, etymology, language history, diction, semantics, rhetoric, literature, and poetics. Words and definitions that now seem strange to you will become familiar and practical.

I've organized the grammar tools into these simple parts, extending from the subatomic level of language to the meta-physical:

Part One. Words: These tools deal with the smallest units of meaning: sounds, letters, symbols, words that help turn thought into language. You'll discover that no distinction is too small, that parts of speech can cross-dress, and that language is a source of limitless creativity.

Part Two. Points: To work together, words need help. They need connecting words, and they need punctuation. All methods of punctuation point the way for the reader, gathering, linking, separating, and emphasizing what truly matters. These marks are more than squiggles on the page. They are the ligaments of meaning and purpose.

Part Three. Standards: To make meaning with clarity and consistency, users of language lean on conventions, sets of informal agreements about what constitutes proper and improper usage. Violations of these are often perceived as errors. But to describe these standards as "rules" is to underestimate their value. As "tools" they offer strategic options for the speaker, reader, and writer.

Part Four. Meaning: Most human beings are born with the capacity to create an infinite number of sentences, each with the potential to capture meaning in a powerful way. While the number of sentences may be limitless, their forms are limited enough so that we can master them and influence how meaning is made and how it is experienced in the minds of an audience.

Part Five. Purpose: The tools of language, it turns out, are morally neutral, which is to say that good people can use them for good effects, and bad people can use them to lie, exploit, even to enslave. Living inside the language enables you to use grammar with a mission, to embrace ways of reading, writing, and speaking that inspire virtues such as justice, empathy, and courage.

With its practical and purposeful approach, The Glamour of Grammar tries to make grammar useful and memorable. Every little lesson in this book points to an immediate application. A feature called "Keepsakes" ends each chapter, reviewing the most important points in ways that can be saved, savored, and remembered, and offering a few fun exercises. Why learn grammar if you're not going to use it with intent? Why spell except to symbolize spoken words and avoid distracting the reader? Why punctuate except to point the reader toward pace, emphasis, and meaning? Why learn to identify subjects and verbs unless you can join them to achieve a specific effect?

I hope that this rhetorical grammar will help you grow in confidence and understanding so that you can master the rules, turn them into tools, and use those tools to break the rules with a purpose. On the inside, language will feel like muscle, not magic. I hope you will come to identify with my enthusiasm (a word that once meant "to have God in you"), just as I identify with lovers of the language such as Bryan A. Garner, author and editor of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, who in my opinion is an apostle of a grammar of intent:

The reality I care about most is that some people will want to use the language well. They want to write effectively; they want to speak effectively. They want their language to be graceful at times and powerful at times. They want to understand how to use words well, how to manipulate sentences, and how to move about in the language without seeming to flail. They want good grammar, but they want more: they want rhetoric in the traditional sense. That is, they want to use the language deftly so that it's fit for their purposes. [my emphasis]

That paragraph makes the perfect distinction between rules and tools. It helps me understand that my interests in the technical aspects of language extend beyond simple correctness. I want to use these tools for effect, to help the reader learn, laugh, cringe, and turn the page.

For the lover of language, lessons come from everywhere, as British novelist and scholar David Lodge describes: "That is why a novelist… must have a very keen ear for other people's words… and why he cannot afford to cut himself off from low, vulgar, debased language; why nothing linguistic is alien to him, from theological treatises to backs of cornflakes packets, from the language of the barrack room to the language of, say, academic conferences." I got that message, even at age eight, when my teacher was Elvis Presley. By age thirteen, I was buried in hagiography and pornography; treatises on politics and stories about vampires; holy cards and baseball cards; scholarly books and comic books; the highest and the lowest our culture had to offer. I was living inside the English language.