I HAVE been following the one-sided correspondence about grammar these past two weeks with great interest. I say one-sided because all of the writers seem to be Prescriptivists who put the grammatical cart before the horse. That is, they see grammar as a pre-existing set of rules which must be followed if one is to speak or write "good" English.
Modern grammatical research is Descriptivist: it records how people actually speak and write our living and changing tongue.This is not to say that there are no rules: if I say "Man bites dog" it clearly means the human assaults the canine.
Those who would impose the rules of a dead language like Latin on English ignore the fact that a Latin speaker could write "Bites dog man" or several other formulations without changing the sense of the sentence, because of the peculiarities of Latin. Early English could do the same: "Dog bites man" could refect the sense mentioned, but modern English relies on word order, not word endings.
The rules of grammar are fluid in a living language and we should celebrate this fact. That need not prevent us from enjoyable hypocrisy at others' use of language: when watching the quiz show Pointless, I often hope that contestants who begin every sentence with 'so' ("So, I am a GP") will lose.
Charlie Friel,
5 Golf View, Clydebank.
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