In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck.
Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists.
Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.
He will expect you to learn some new terms for categories, such as determinative, a class that includes the definite and indefinite articles; this and that, sometimes called demonstratives; words such as all, any, both, each, either, every, few, many, no, several, and some; and all the numbers, a category he calls "gigantic." A determinative generally precedes a noun, but sometimes can stand alone, as in "Some like it hot."
He says our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned, standing directly in front of a noun. But words like down and up, traditionally identified as adverbs, actually function as prepositions. Adverbs, he explains, can precede verbs, but you can't revise "My horse fell down" to "My horse down fell."
The section on mythical grammar errors, dear to my heart, includes the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, stranded prepositions (what they were looking at), singular they, and more. Read the section on passive clauses and you will be immune to the error that any construction including a form of to be or an auxiliary verb (yes, some people think that) is a passive construction.
His thoroughgoing treatment of nouns and noun phrases, of the various classes of verbs, and of clauses, is more intricately detailed than I can expect to treat effectively in the space of a blog post; there is a lot of meat there. There are useful sections on spelling and punctuation, and he offers succinct advice on prose style that you will find much more helpful than Strunk and White.
It is sixty years since Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Craig instructed me, and now I clearly have more to learn. Maybe you too?
