One of my favourite grammar memories involves beer and a sharpie. My best girlfriend and I were at our local, drinking $2 pitchers of Bud Light on a Friday after work. We both noticed that in the bathroom, someone had written, "Where my bitches?". We could not let this travesty pass, so wrote under, "Where's your verb?" to which some genius replied, "Where my bitches at?" It was a magical moment, one we were able to relive every Friday as we voided our bladders of cheap swill.
So this title may seem strange coming from someone who corrects graffiti in dive bars, who studied English at university and has been teaching its finer points for the last 18 years. And even stranger from someone who is required to specifically teach grammar 10 hours a week.
I used to get riled up by the incorrect use of your/you're and the abuse of other homophones. Using "less" before a countable noun once made me batty. I delighted in the uproarious results when the Oxford comma wasn't used. And I cared a great deal when people threw out a flippant "I could care less".
There was a time I could spend hours debating the finer points of grammar such as the subtle difference in meaning between "He likes to dance" and "He likes dancing" or how to add a tag question to "He must have had a good time.".
But then I became an ESL teacher and found that I was overjoyed if a student could use "you're" and "your" at all. A typical exchange with an elementary level student can go something like this:
Me: Who do you live with?
Student: Your family.
Me: You live with my family? (pointing to myself and then pointing to the student) No, your family.
Student: Yes, your family.
And it will go on for ages like a 'Who's on First?' sketch.
Once upon a time in graduate school, I spent hours in a classroom debating the nuances of grammar that matter to about 11 people and then later writing papers about it. I regarded English as both an art and a science and revelled in its complexity and intricacy.
I remember very distinctly the white hot anger I felt when my Thai colleagues had typos on their English grammar tests. I felt it was an injustice to the language and an insult to the English majors. I spoke passionately to them about how careful and thorough they should be when using MY language. As if it were a Faberge egg that would break at the first lack of subject-verb agreement. Every time they forgot or misused the particle in a phrasal verb ("wait me downstairs"; "take care yourself"; "pass away the salt"), I cringed and felt a piece of the egg stab me in the heart.
But over time, though I still enjoyed a grammar challenge, I lightened the hell up (notice my use of a phrasal verb, but what is "the hell"? Not an object. Adverb? Does anyone care?). If I were to get annoyed at every grammar mistake I encountered on a daily basis, I would need therapy (notice my correct use of the subjunctive there). For my own sanity, I had to make the transition from always seeing right and wrong to analysing what is most important to survival in an English speaking country or when dealing with English speakers. Survival rests solely on the ability to communicate and be understood and not necessarily on correctly placing a preposition or even using the correct preposition, for that matter. And let's be honest. English is a difficult language filled with exceptions to most rules. To correct EVERY mistake a student makes in writing or speaking (especially mistakes with grammar points they haven't learned) would be a soul-crusher for them. So at times, I've had to put the Grammar Police badge aside and focus on the fundamentals of the language they need most.
A major difference between Grammar Me now and Grammar Me then is that I no longer see every rule in English grammar as having equal weight. And I no longer feel my blood boil when I see mistakes, especially those that don't impact the overall meaning. I can calmly and coolly point out the error without stabbing the paper with my correcting pen. One topic that carries a lot of weight in speaking and writing is verb tense. Consider the question, "How long you stay in Thailand?". I heard this question a dozen times a week and I always had to go through the long difficult process of extracting the meaning from the nice person who was just trying to have small talk. "Do you mean how long have I stayed in Thailand so far or do you mean how long am I going to stay from this point forward?" It was maddening and I always felt like an asshole afterwards. Or when a student feels they need to maintain the same verb tense throughout a written paragraph. "My sister was born in 1979. Her name was Lisa". What? She's dead? I'm so sorry.
Now don't get me wrong. I do teach all the grammar rules that are appropriate at any given level, of course. At the elementary level, students learn basic verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, correct use of articles, prepositions of place and time, etc. At the more advanced levels, students study more complex grammar like 3rd conditional sentences (If I had known the level of English I would be teaching, I would have never studied for a Masters degree.); negative adverbials (Hardly had I opened the wine, when the dinner started burning.); cleft sentences (What Tom hopes to do is never talk about correct grammar again.); participle clauses (Having arrived late for work smelling of booze, Jack was given a stern verbal warning.); etc. We grammar teachers focus on accuracy and fluency in written and spoken communication fairly equally and do error correction in a variety of ways. Oh, but how I could go on and on about all the little frustrations that come with teaching the minutiae of such a crazy language. I really feel for the students at times. Don't even get me started on pronunciation (which is actually more important than grammar, but that's another post).
I know at least one of the five people who read this will think, "But she's talking about non-native speakers. Those memes are about people who use English as their first and likely only language. If anyone should be able to follow the rules, it's certainly those nimrods." And how true. If you use a sub-standard level of English, people make assumptions about your education and intelligence level. Facebook status updates that are unpunctuated gibberish riddled with errors do bother me. I once would have studied the update and mentally calculated the errors. But you see--now I don't even bother to read them at all. I still feel the pang of annoyance when I see a sign that says, "Your in America. Learn English". And I still get a chuckle when I see one that says, "Sausage's for sale". I still notice every single error (you can't turn it off), but because of what I do on a daily basis, it doesn't make as much of an impact as it once did. So while I can't say, "I couldn't care less", I certainly do care less. And while it hasn't made me more careless, it certainly doesn't entitle me to a Grammar Police badge.
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