Step up to the Grammar Table

On a September day in 2018, Ellen Jovin left her apartment in Manhattan and went to the street outside the 72nd Street subway station to set up a folding table and a sign identifying it as the Grammar Table, inviting questions, comments, and complaints, along with opportunities to vent. 

Public interest proved so strong that she and her husband, Brandt, took the Grammar Table around the country--to forty-seven states, Covid isolation thwarting their plan to make all fifty. Her exchanges with ordinary citizens over grammar and usage are now summed up in Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian (Mariner Books, 374 pages, $26.99). 

People, she discovered, are curious about grammar, ill-informed and uncertain about grammar, and sometimes dogmatic about grammar, occasionally giving her the Grammar Side Eye despite the presence on the table of references such as the Chicago Manual of Style and Garner's Modern English Usage to buttress her explanations.

Her fifty brief chapters cover nearly all the issues that commonly come up, and her explanations are clear and reliable. There's a great deal on punctuation: the common comma, the mysterious semicolon, the intrusive apostrophe. She finds it helpful to answer inquiries by making a chart to illustrate the differences of effect (noun and verb) and affect (verb and noun) or to write out the conjugations of lie and lay. She herself usually tries to write around singular they, but acknowledges that it has been widespread in English since Alfred burned the cakes. 

But the richness of the book comes from the people, who are straightforward about their perplexities and grateful for explanation. There's the man in Annapolis who doesn't care for swearing but is delighted to be informed that the technical term for inserting one of them in the middle of another word is infix. There are the two young men drunk at noonday in Decatur, Alabama, who occupy much of an afternoon on a variety of topics. There are people all over the country who say that they are bad at grammar, that they always hated grammar, that they are afraid of being mocked for their grammar. 

So much of people's uncertainties about grammar and usage rise from bad pedagogy. Many of the things that people think they know about grammar and usage, Ms. Jovin writes, are half-remembered "things you were told when your shoe size was changing annually." There are the perpetual zombie rules about not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions. She says, "Prohibitions from childhood, unfortunately, are like grass stains on white pants; they resist efforts to scrub them away." 

But over and over in this delightful book, the light dawns with the offer of a concise explanation, and the recipient relishes a sense of greater understanding and mastery over their own language, of possession. In a world where writing about English usage can reflect a sense of an embattled elite surrounded by rabble, this book relishes our common humanity, our understanding that our language is what we collectively make of it. It is refreshing to see. People love language.

Not all questions about usage can be readily resolved. A recurring point in the book, for example, is people's comfort with, or discomfort with, the object pronoun me used as a subject, the subject pronoun I used as an object, and the reflexive pronoun myself stuck in where it doesn't belong. Ms. Jovin's counsel about these matters should stay with us: "It's going to continue in spite of our wishes, so it's important to achieve a sense of inner peace about it." 

Classic yard care

 Taking advantage of a break in the brutal summer heat, I cut the grass this morning in the appropriate classical manner, boustrophedon, mowing across the yard and then turning in the opposite direction.

We have the word because of the way the Greeks plowed their fields. A Greek farmer directed his ox, bous, across the field and then made it turn, strephein, and plow a furrow in the opposite direction, alternating until it was time to call it a day. 

The work of the ox informed writing and reading as well in the classical world, with texts running left to right and then right to left. Imagine mastering Latin, with lines of all-caps text (majuscule) running in alternate directions, with no punctuation and no spaces between words. And you thought the Wordle was a challenge. 

The Greek ox also turns up in a couple of places in English. 

Bucolic, "pastoral" or "rural," derives from boukolos, "herdsman."

And bulimia was coined from bous plus limos, "hunger," thus the appetite of an ox. 

The movement of the ox also turns up in English. In Greek drama, the chorus performing choral odes moved first from right to left on the stage, the strophe, then reversed and moved from the left to the right, the antistrophe. Strophe in English is a term for a pattern of lines in poetry, similar to a stanza. 

The white man's burden

 A wooden box of family papers holds the receipt for the property taxes my great-great-grandfather, John Early, paid to Fleming County, Kentucky, in 1852: $12.30 for 210 acres of land, four horses or mules, and four slaves. So the family farm on which I grew up, where my grandfather, Lucien Lundy Early, lived as a gentleman farmer, was inherited wealth built in part on the unpaid labor of enslaved persons. 

The elementary school I attended was segregated until I was in the fifth grade. 

My parents never made disparaging remarks about Black people, but the one time they visited Baltimore, my mother told me that my father had been troubled by the behavior of Black people on the train. She did not specify, and I did not press for details, because race is something that white people are not comfortable talking about. 

The church I attend, Memorial Episcopal in Bolton Hill, was founded by slaveholders just as the Civil War was about to break out, and it was a segregated congregation until 1969. 1969! (We have been trying to do better.) 

My own history was much on my mind this week as I read Baynard Woods's Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness (Legacy Lit, 2022, 338 pages). It is an unflinching, unsparing account.

Growing up in South Carolina, a descendant of families who owned scores of enslaved people, he rebelled against the middle-class values of his parents and their unspoken, unacknowledged racism. 

His account is a series of discoveries, about himself and about his family. He looks back on his youthful rebellion, recognizing in retrospect that young white men, in their egotism and entitlement, get to misbehave. Their misbehavior is expected and tolerated; penalties, if any are light. They are protected in a way that young Black men cannot expect. 

He confronts his parents on their genteel racism--they are nice people; they don't hate Black people; they just can't acknowledge that they have benefited from their whiteness. He looks into his family's past, probing for details of his great-grandfather's participation in the assassination of a Black county commissioner in 1871. 

He lives in Baltimore, a daily witness to the residue of racism in housing, education, and employment. 

And though after a tumultuous youth he earned college degrees and became a writer--recently as co-author of I Got a Monster, an excellent book on the Gun Trace Task Force scandal--he cannot live comfortably in the entitlements of whiteness. He will stand up to white supremacy, identifying and opposing its manifestations. He will try to find ways to make reparations.

And because he cannot and will not deny his family, his inheritance, his history, and his whiteness, he  styles himself Baynard Woods. He is who he is and was, but he will mark his heritage and his privilege on his name.

Now, mind you, this is not wallowing in liberal white guilt, though some will dismiss this book to avoid confronting the truths in it. This is a clear-eyed attempt to understand the dominance of white culture and one's place in it, and I think that few will have the courage to match Baynard's self-examination. 

I'll leave you with a passage I copied out, and you can decide whether it describes the world you know: "This was the way white men rolled, I was learning--at war with the world, until you start to lose. Then at war with women. ..."

Yes, you can, and you may

An online discussion group recently rehashed the ancient can/may distinction* with several participants stoutly holding to it. As it happens, I was reading something on the same point in Lane Green's excellent Talk on the Wild Side.**

He refers to Arnold Zwicky's distinction between the Normal, the dialect or variety of dialects we learn from childhood by listening to or speaking with other people, and the Formal, the dialect we learn through reading, writing, and schooling. Can is Normal; may is Formal. And it is a mistake to think that Formal is somehow more correct than Normal. 

But wait. As spoken and written American English have become steadily more conversational over the past century, can/may has eroded. Here's Bryan Garner: "Although only an insufferable precisian would insist on observing the distinction in informal speech or writing ... it's often advisable to distinguish between the two." But there's more. Educated speakers regularly say "can't I" rather than "mayn't I," "can't" rather than "may not." And "because may is a more polite way of asking for permission, a fussy insistence on using it can give the writing a prissy tone."

Lane Green moves from can/may to the deeper issue of how badly classrooms have handled language instruction. "When children are suddenly told that what they know their parents and nearly everyone else says, and what they have been saying all their lives thus far, is 'wrong,' there is a disconnect between the child's native competence and the new idea of an invisible but Platonically correct language out there. ..." 

The way they are taught grammar leads to humiliation, and they learn that "grammar is a set of rules for torturing your natural sentences into an unnatural form that will satisfy a teacher." 

We wind up with adults who are twitchy about the way they use their own language, apprehensive about being embarrassed. And the ones who were given no formal instruction in grammar after the defects of the traditional approach were recognized are no better off. That's why often when I am introduced to someone and say that I am an editor, they say, "I guess I'd better watch my language," and I have to suppress the impulse to murmur, "Too late." 

Until we get books on language for students and the general reader informed by linguistics rather than ill-informed pedantry, the best we can try to do is to insist that the Formal is something to learn for particular purposes and the Normal is just swell. 

*An explanation for readers who said "Huh?": Many of us who are still above the turf were taught in childhood that can expresses ability, may permission or authorization. Thus a child asking "Can I?" gets the fish eye from a teacher and must recast it as "May I." 

**Published in 2018. (I've fallen behind.) 

Our whitewashed textbooks

Jim Johnson, who taught American history during my junior year at Fleming County High School, sought to enliven the class one day by setting up a debate on whether the Mexican War was justified. Knowing that I was both a talker and an avid reader of history, he assigned me to take the contrary view. 

It was indisputable that the Polk administration sent troops into disputed territory as a provocative act and that when Mexico responded the United States claimed justification to fight a brief war against a weaker nation, the result being an enormous land grab, and I said so. (That view was shared by an obscure member of the U.S. House of Representatives named Abraham Lincoln. Had I known it at the time, I would have used it.)

When the class voted, the decision was overwhelming and inevitable: The war was justified. 

The reason the vote was inevitable is that American history as taught in public schools is not history but patriotic propaganda. What can be discerned through the dull stodge of the textbooks* is that we used to have problems: slavery, you know, but that's all over; a civil war, but there were heroes on both sides; sad about the Indians, but they were in the way. And all those problems have been resolved in the steady forward march of American greatness. 

This is why The 1619 Project, which I have been reading, is so unsettling to people who were taught that kind of history. But we knew all the things it recounts. We knew that the Constitution was set up to ensure that a minority of voters in the slave states would get disproportionate weight in the House of Representatives and veto power in the Senate. We knew about lynchings and the violence against protesters during the civil rights movement. We knew that school segregation persisted into living memory. We knew that the federal government, cities, and business interests collaborated to keep Black residents in inferior housing. 

The other side of our history is also true. The Founders gave us a secular republic informed by the Enlightenment values expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, values strengthened by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and by the 19th. And we have always had people strong enough to stand up for those principles and point out how we fall short of them. 

We hold those two views of our history in tension, because there is substance in each of them. Benjamin Franklin said that the Constitution gives us a republic, if we can keep it. As we mark the anniversary of our national independence, one way to keep the Republic is to maintain a clear-eyed view of our history, both the promise and the failures of the promise, like adults. 

* Frances Fitzgerald's America Revised from 1979 presents a thoroughgoing explanation of why history textbooks have always been manipulated for ideological reasons. (And are consequently bland and dull.)