As Mr. Loughner has tried to explain it in Web postings, English grammar is not merely usage that enjoys common acceptance. Rather, it is nothing less than a government conspiracy to control people’s minds. Perhaps more bizarre, even potentially troubling, is that he is not the only one out there clinging to this belief. Some grammarians say they hear it more often than you may think.
“It is completely off the wall,” said Patricia T. O’Conner, the author of several books on grammar, including “Woe Is I.”
“But I’m not actually that surprised,” said Ms. O’Conner, who also writes a blog, grammarphobia.com, with her husband, Stewart Kellerman. “I get mail once in a while from people who believe that it’s wrong to try to reinforce good English because it’s some kind of mind-control plot, and English teachers are at the bottom of this. For anyone to say that subject and verb should agree, for example, is an infringement of your freedoms, and you have a God-given right to speak and use whichever words you want, which of course you do.
“But they see it as some sort of plot to standardize people’s minds and make everyone robotically the same.”
[snip]
Ben Zimmer, the “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine, said he, too, had received letters talking of a “grand conspiracy.” He got them, in particular, when he was editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.
“When people are confronted with linguistic authority of various kinds, whether it’s dictionaries or grammar books, the more conspiratorially minded may use that as evidence of some grand scheme, or something where people are pulling the strings behind the scenes and using language to do that,” Mr. Zimmer said.
Subjects and Verbs as Evil Plot
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 13, 2011
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How do such people feel about learning the grammar of a foreign language (or of a computer language, for that matter)? Perhaps the conspiracy is world wide, and even deeper than we think.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to know whether people with paranoid schizophrenia in other countries focus on grammar, math, the government, etc.
ReplyDeleteGiven that these people often feel that something outside of themselves is controlling them (e.g. voices), I'm guessing the church or the government comes up pretty often.
But I don't know.
I would love to know whether there is any correlation between this line of thinking and the decline in formal, explicit grammar instruction.
ReplyDeleteIt would seem so easy to think that grammatical rules are edicts from on high if you don't understand them.
grammar instruction is different from grammatical analysis instruction. I hold rather firmly to the belief that native speakers don't need grammar instruction but analysing grammar is a different matter entirely.
ReplyDeleteGrammatical rules are edicts from a Nash equilibrium -- a weak evolutionary stable strategy, to be exact.
I learned a lot when I had to teach a computer language compiler course. In school I always wanted GCAR (Get Correct Answer Regardless) and RMM (Read My Mind) instructions.
ReplyDeleteWhen calculators first came out, there were the HP devotees (Postfix or Reverse Polish Notation) and the TI supporters (Infix). Those who loved postfix had a certain personality type. (Plus a lot more money.) Typically, to solve an infix notation problem, you first convert it (internally) to a postfix form.
Perhaps parsing in English is going away because they don't like the idea that it can be translated into a specific algorithm.
I watched Jared Loughner's "genocide school" video this week.
ReplyDeleteI was struck by the fact that his grammar seemed to be perfectly normal, while the words he put into the sentence slots weren't.
Listening to him narrate his tour of the campus, I was constantly drawn up short when a sentence that sounded perfectly routine ended up being about currency or grammar control or some such.
I'm thinking that grammar and semantics must be almost completely separate - or separable - inside the brain...
I would love to know whether there is any correlation between this line of thinking and the decline in formal, explicit grammar instruction.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting question.
"I'm thinking that grammar and semantics must be almost completely separate - or separable - inside the brain..."
ReplyDeleteIndeed they are, and schizophrenics are found to have abnormal syntax with abnormal semantics (indicative of a "thought disorder"), just as you observed in Loughner's speech.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16005388
I should have written "*normal* syntax with abnormal semantics"
ReplyDelete