Grammar Couples

• 
  
  English grammar was knocked into our heads — sometimes literally — by stern teachers who wouldn't stand for metaphors being mixed or conjunctions being tossed about loosely.
  
• We had our proud possession of Wren and Martin with a red cover.

I have a faded copy with pages falling.Some argue that the single cause of the falling standards of the English language in India is that no one uses Wren & Martin anymore.

My friend ,83,always feels miserable whenever some one talks against strict adherence to grammar rules.
Should we really care if the spellings change, if grammar is thrown out of the window and non-English words creep into the language at an alarming rate? Should we wag our collective fingers at our children for mangling the language in their emails, text messages, and essays?

The language used in emails, texts, blogs, or tweets may be cool, but it cannot replace formal, grammatically correct language.

Here is a conversation between a boy and a girl.
"You get high quotation marks for that one," he smiles, "even if I think you're being rather subjunctive and moody about all this. I so admire your figure of speech that I would like to predicate my life on yours." So he gets himself into an indicative mood and says, "It would be appreciated by me if you would be married to me
Are you being passive aggressive?" she asks interrogatively
"That's quite a compliment," she blushes -- and gives him appositivresponse
At the ceremonies they exchange wedding vowels about the compound subject of marriage.
Throughout their marriage, their structure is perfectly parallel and their verbs never disagree with their subjects.
After many a linking verve, comma splice and interjection, they conceive the perfect parent thesis. Then come some missing periods and powerful contractions, and into the world is born their beautiful little boy.They know it is a boy because of its dangling participle!"

On reading the above passage , I am reminded of a poem'Grammarian's Funeral written by Robert Browning.
The grammarian lived nameless in pursuit of mastering his studies with perfection focussing it on Greek Grammar.He sacrificed his youth and health for the sake of Grammar.He thought that his grammar would give him true understanding of life..
The question is whether it is better to live the life or understand one's life.The two cannot be simultaneous.Experiencing a moment is totally different from contemplating about it.The grammarian solely devoted his life in the study of Grammar and lost his health and life.


Grammar has been a "headache" for many employees.a student - not only in English language but also in vernacular languages like Sanskrit, Tamizh, and Hindi. Tamizh Ilakkanam and Panini sutras are tough nuts. In the ancient times, pure sanskrit was used by learned persons, while others spoke "praakrit" version of sanskrit.

Hindi grammar is peculiar because of 'Ne' prayoga.

For a utilitarian, a language is a vehicle of one's thoughts and ideas, for a purist a language is a divine concept not to be sacrileged!

In office life, Grammar had its own part.Some of the senior officers in 1960 belonged to the cadre of Robrt browning.

In dept of banking operations and Development , we have long struggled unnecessarily on correct usages of expressions with serious doubts and "corrections" on edited versions of Inspection reports and special notes - whether "a large number of" is singular or plural and should therefore use a plural or singular verb," A number of instances" with similar dilemmas," none of the borrowers".....etc etc..One Chief Officer always used "data" as singular and insisted that it is singular, dismissing the versions of the most authentic English dictionaries or even Fowler's use of English Language or other British Government publications like use and abuse of English, Good English, Better English and Best English series. Fowler says that English language is constantly evolving and changing and he seems to be right. In the Victorian era, Fowler would have been excommunicated!

But once a Joint Chief Officer who was very particular about English language usages in office notes and reports, sent back the draft note sent by me duly corrected by him with an addition of at least a dozen commas at various places. I rounded off the commas which in my view were not necessary and sent a copy of Fowler's Book with the flag mark on the page on which Fowler has criticised the use of superfluous commas (even if justified by the standards of King's or Queen's English). He had the good sense to delete those rounded off commas and send back the note!!

There had been occasions when we had issued a central office approved Inspection Report to the bank concerned ,without carrying out (deliberately) the "correction" suggested by Central Office. We had later on to explain to our Central office why those corrections were not carried out by us because those corrections were incorrect! One was "The whereabouts of the borrowers is not known" corrected by Central Office "replace "are" for "is" - we had to quote Fowler to justify the use of singular verb, in our reply!!


There is always a tendency to degrade grammar and set aside its importance saying that we need not be very particular about grammatical construction unless we take special courses in language.For others it is said that they should read a lot, write a lot without caring for grammar rules.As the vocabulary improves and correct usages are learnt, automatically grammar will get set even without knowing technical terms in Grammar
My father ,being an English teacher ensured that our summer holidays were spent on doing exercises in Wren and Martin.My son and grandson write very good flawless English, though they do not know much of Grammar rules.
Here comes in handy the episode in the life of Narayana Bhattathri who wrote Naraayaneeyam. ..
Poonthanam, another great poet who wrote in Malayalam, had also come there to worship Krishna. One day he took some of his Malayalam poems to Bhattathiri to correct them but was dismissed with the haughty remark that Poonthanam had no knowledge of Sanskrit and that he didn't know the correct meaning of even Malayalam words and grammar and that the construction of verses was very poor.Poonthanam went back dejected.
Lord Guruvayurappan appeared in Bhattathri's dream and said that he preferred Poonthanam's Bhakthi to Bhattathri 's vibhakthi, that is grammatical knowledge. Narayanabhattathri realised that it was a blow to his haughtiness and apologized to Poonthanam .
I leave it friends to conclude what Lord Krishna suggested.
ramasala

 

Dear Viswa,

Time is not far off for such approvals.Even if something goes wrong,the CBI officials also will do the investigation in the same language.The newspapers releasing the information may do the same thing. What will happen to IL snippets?Perhaps Viswa will take up the job of decoding to make the people understand what is going on around. I will be enjoying the fum from whichever world I am.
ramasala

 

Dear Shri Thyagarajan,
Thank you for your interesting response. I enjoyed your pathetic experience with a grammar tiger.I read your response thrice.Very thoughtful response.

My father was a famous English teacher,specially his grammar classes were popular in Tiruchy St. Joseph's. He was a teacher between 1910 -1947 in a regular school,( St.Joseph's) and had worked full time in a Tutorial college from 1947 to 1980.( His responsibility was to conduct marriage of his six daughters and three of his elder brother, who had no job)He could address any gathering of 500 people without mike.Such powerful was his voice.He was a jury in many cases and many judges used to seek his opinion while drafting judgement.He passed away in 1982 at the age of 94.

In those metriculation days, 50% the questions were in English grammar.Parsing was a question for 15 marks, just like vigraha vakayam in sanskrit.They would give a sentence containing 8 words.You have to explain what each word represents grammatically.In addition to subject,predicate and object, the words would be past perfect,gerund, adjective compliment, incomplete predication, participles etc etc..In summer holidays, Appa never left us unless we completed one complete exercise in Wren and Martin.Amma would have kept an assignment of breaking black urad dhal,Each daughter would have a quota of two big measures ( irandu periya padi) daily and we had to make 200 big sheaths out of coconut leaves for making roof for big thatched house,as labour for making sheaths ( keetru mudaithal) was very costly.Making of baskets out of plastic wires in later ages was nothing compared to non-leaking sheath making.In fact we were afraid as summer vacation approached because of the tight schedules.

I still remember a sentence he gave with four 'had' side by side,purposely omitting the comma and asked me whether that sentence was correct or not and how as a class 9 student, I blinked for a while and gave a partially correct answer.
The sentence was "All the faith he *had had had had* no effect on the outcome of his life.".

I said, " the sentence is grammatically correct ,but it is a wrong usage.
The first two'had had' relating to the subject already show past perfect tense and it should be followed only by a past tense and not past perfect tense.So there should be only three 'had' in the sentence..My father patted me on my back and continued.
"What you say is correct. "
However he talked about an exception. In the above sentence, the person having the faith and the person receiving the effect are one and the same .In this case you have to use only three 'had',two relating to the subject and one as actual verb.
But suppose my father had given this explanation to various people and the people listening to it had no impact, then we can say,
The teachings or preachings he had had ,had had no
impact on listeners.
The instruction I had had ,had no impact on me.Unless we note the difference between the above two sentences, we are likely to miss the grammatical intention.
Usages are evolving day by day and grammatical accuracy alone may not matter.

Till date , I had no occasion to discuss this with any one else for the past 65 years, until I recd Shri Thyagarajan's message. You can understand, how rare this usage is.
My children are very good in English, but they would run away if I start talking anything about my father and his authority on English Grammar.

ramasala

 

Dear Hariji,
Thank you for your response.I agree with you. Language is essentially a means of communication. Purity on grammar is only secondary.
ramasala