Billy K. Baker -- On Grammar Rules and Rulers

The next piece continues my glance into the peculiarities of our language. You probably learned grammar from a strict teacher like the prune-faced spinster, Miss Meanbottom. You remember her, the one who enforced grammar rules with a stout ruler. I can still hear Meanbottom instructing my class: “Every sentence must have a subject and a verb!” And, we murmured: “Or else.” The rules she promulgated were first published in 1615 by Rev. Alphonso T. Pinchtnose, after he spent a night drinking Screech, a strong tea made of bitter almonds and alum. The rules of grammar, he said, came to him in a vision, on twelve clay tablets carried by an angel. He admitted to guessing about the angel since it was obscured by an image of burning chickens. They—the rules, not the chickens—were to be obeyed precisely, exactly, and stringently. (Pinchtnose’s hobby was redundancy.) He said failure to obey would result in an eternity in Hell, where you’d sit interminably in school amongst a thousand ungrateful, disinterested, fidgety students forced to hear over and over again that a preposition is something you simply may not end a sentence with. More recently, the rules of grammar were dealt with by that well-known devil worshipper, Lou Senneasy, after he spent a night drinking absinthe, a beverage he claimed made the heart grow fonder. (Originality was never one of Senneasy’s strong suits.) Anyway, his treatise disposed of grammar rules in its first sentence. “I ask you, dude, who cares about grammer, anyway? So what if you don’t know the difference between ‘complement’ and ‘compliment’ or ‘further’ and ‘farther?’ Listen, schmuck, you don’t even have to spell rite. The only thing you peasants need to know is that nothing you have to say deserves more than 280 characters. LMAO.” [For those unfamiliar, LMAO, stands for Laughing My Ass Off.] Personally, I think grammar rules are supposed to be somewhat flexible, to be situation dependent, akin to guideposts for cross-country skiing … as opposed to those for bobsledding. In skiing, guideposts mark a safe path yet allow prudent explorations off-trail. In bobsledding, they are barriers demanding strict adherence—leave their confines and you’ll likely crash and burn. Oops! Make that “crash and freeze.”       Never miss the local news -- read more on The Fallon Post home page. If you enjoy The Fallon Post, please support our effort to provide local, independent news and make a contribution today.  Your contribution makes possible this online news source for all things Fallon.