Grammar in These Changing Times

I was thinking recently of how much I've let go of in the field of grammar. I can count on my fingers (no toes needed) the grammar mistakes that can still get me going. Partly this is because my own failing memory (we'll call it memory in order to avoid calling it something else) has made me forget what I once knew. And partly it's because I no longer care the way I used to.

 

So what do I still care about? I care about its and it's.

Lie and lay. In a recent Toronto Star crossword (a poor excuse for a crossword, I admit, but there it is in my lap, so I solve it), the clue was "recline", the answer had three letters. To recline = to lie, right? So I wrote in l-i-e. But for the first time in my experience, the crossword developer made an egregious error, since the word that fit was "lay", not "lie". ReclineD, he could have clued us. Then it would have been correct to use "lay." But no. When the crossword puzzle maker sets ungrammatical clues, the end (of something, anyway) must be near.

 

Homonyms, particularly led. L-e-d, past tense of to lead. (All roads lead to Rome, but mine led me down the garden path.) The confusion here is with the metal "lead", a noun, which is spelled l-e-a-d but pronounced like l-e-d. Oh, I know English is difficult. And I know—lordy, do I know—the children aren't being taught grammar—nor were their teachers during their own school days 30 years ago, so the very possibility of a universal return to teaching grammar in the curriculum has disappeared. It is only the elite private schools that now teach these basics, and this will further and forever distinguish these kids from the hoi polloi.

 

I recently saw a comment about the decline in educational standards. These changes, deliberately implemented some 50 years ago, have led (l-e-d) to an ignorant electorate, helping to ensure the rise of such politicians as Donald Drumph. To be generous, I'll attribute it to the law of unforeseen, unintended consequences.

 

It's a depressing scenario. And I'm obviously contributing to it by dropping my own standards. On the weekend I heard both my grandsons (19 and 12, respectively), say "me and him went out" or "me and Paul set up a new screen." I didn't say a word.

On another occasion a granddaughter said something was "one of the only" somethings. Would you listen to yourself, I wanted to say? But again, I didn't say a word.

 

Do I really want to interrupt one of those rare conversations in order to point out mistakes? Since grammar is not being taught in schools, whole concepts (for example, the idea of subject and object) are foreign to the children. It is only through family conversation that they will learn to speak well, as their parents and grandparents speak. Maybe I should have interrupted those conversations after all.

 

 

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