Letter:
“I am appalled that your style guide author David Marsh advocates dispensing with elements of grammar that have been sacrosanct among the educated classes for centuries. His disregard for rules on split infinitives, the subjunctive tense or ending a sentence with a preposition made my blood boil. Is the grammar of today’s schoolchildren, already so influenced by the need to keep their missives down to a paltry 140 characters, not bad enough, that he should encourage such sloppiness by recommending a dumbing-down of our beautiful language? Whatever next? Would he be so bold as to suggest we no longer use words such as referenda or formulae? Why not go the whole hog and say there is no difference between less and fewer?”
(Tristán White, external examiner, University of London, published in The Guardian).
There is a difference between accepting into a language new words derived from other cultures (something which has gone on in the English language for centuries), and getting sloppy about grammar, allowing it to become a free-for-all. Grammar is like the scaffolding of an evolving building – without it the building would collapse. There are good reasons for rules about grammar and most of them have to do with making sentences comprehensible and avoiding misunderstandings. The same people who think that encouraging immigrants to keep their own language and not learn English, are now at work trying to dismantle English itself. Relativistic claptrap!
Epicurus would undoubtedly have said that you have no nation and no community without a common language. “Anything goes” goes nowhere!
Yes! This: “There are good reasons for rules about grammar and most of them have to do with making sentences comprehensible and avoiding misunderstandings.”
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I’d go even further. The “rules” that govern any human creation whether it’s languages, or banks, or armies, or churches, or art and literature– anything:
(1) humans have to be COMPREHENSIBLE to each other;
(2) “AVOID MISUNDERSTANDINGS” which end up in bloody conflict.
Speaking of grammar, I’ve never been absolutely sure when to use “that” or “which.”
Born in London I always used “which” regardless,, but am told that in America the rules are thus : ” I went to the school that my father attended” and “I went to a good school, which taught me grammar.”
Is this right?
Any grammar experts out there?