a little context, first:
- i'm something of a grammarophile, whether i like it or not. i'd prefer it to be "anne fadiman and family parsing menus" rather than of the "lynn truss making fun of endangered species" variety. i would like to believe that i hold no personal grudge against perpetrators of grammar crime, nor do i want a uniform code of grammar conduct. these, imo, clear me of being a grammar fascist of any kind. u guys can tell me if i'm wrong.
- recently someone spotted an ungrammaticism (is that a word?) in this blog, and pointed it out to me. i was shocked because i didn't know that grammar rule, and was rather appalled by it (apparently the possessive form of it isn't it's but its. can someone explain to me why this is so?) and i've been unnecesarily hot and bothered about this ever since. whyyy whyyy etc.
- this grew out of a letter/email i wrote to someone to explain why i, rather nastily, corrected grammar on someone's facebook page. apart from the apology, i hope to expunge all personal reference.
there's a reason for grammar, and that's comprehensibility. apart from that, i guess grammar has its own beauty, its own rightness that u get an idea as u go along. and that's what i was arguing for, in the fry post. that laissez faire doesn't work because it introduces ugliness.
grammar nazis object to stray apostrophes, partial sentences and gerunds/conjunctions. none of which are my enemies, and i don't mind them. i stand by the it's/its debate on principle; i don't think it's uglifies the language, i don't see why it shouldn't exist, and i am therefore appalled by the rule's existence. until i can find a way to reconcile that with how i understand english grammar (which is something one feels thru one's fingers, not thru some higher cognition) i will continue to hold by that.
what i said in the second paragraph is what i meant. and i hold by that as well. there are usages that are ugly. and those ought not be grammatical, even if seemingly they are. one's appreciation of beauty/ugliness in usage comes from experience of whatever it is that one knows, the rules that u come to understand not because they were taught u when u were in furth standard, but because u've been thinking/writing/speaking in this english all ur life.
when those rules are bent, it has to be done with finesse, by someone who can sense the ebbs and flows and knows that this thing, this possibly mutant monster that he's creating by mixing metaphors/inverting syntax/bubbling cauldrons is something that would be a tudor rose and not a minotaur. when that doesn't happen, it's not pretty for the reader, and that's all i'm objecting to. it's the reason i don't write, because i don't know whether the "lyricism" of the sentence above is twee or incredibly profound.
and in a related theme, there are levels of grammar crimes. there's verb agreement which is easy enugh to spot, and the only kind that naturally sets my teeth on edge. the hanging gerund, the don't start with because, rule etc are somewher in that hazy middle ground between syntax and style and it's there that things fall apart mostly for grammar nazis. the apostrophe crime in general i notice but don't point out, except when it makes things funny.
i'm sorry. this isn't something we should be arguing about at all, because it's relatively unimportant. but u're seeing double standards where i can't, and i swear i'm not explaining this to u out of pique or whatever; i just think this is worth writing about. believe me, my english education is mostly informal (with apologies to any of my english teachers who may chance upon this) and so i could be completely wrong about some of these things. and i'd be glad for u to point out those (and any grammatical errors as well) in this post or any other.
ps: when i was ten, i was convinced that the word was lucridous. i argued for half an hour with my cousins, who were moved to much merriment by this. thereafter, each time i stumble upon ludicrous, i roll "lucridous" over my tongue, and agree with myself over and over again that it's a relaly awful sounding word, and how could i think this was it. this story doesn't have an ending, but i present it to u as a gift, nevertheless.
and because i think it's worth writing about, this blog.
