The mystery that writing is!

Of course, I had no idea about writing until the first term of graduate school.  I am, therefore, sympathetic towards students, in particular, who are yet to figure out how to write, especially in their own voice.  It takes time to learn to write, and then to learn to write in one's own style.

One of the many things that I had to learn right in that first term of that first year was about numbers.  Sometimes they were written out as words. Sometimes as numerals.  Nobody gave me an explanation; I observed the patterns in the publications and then decided on a practice.

Not until today did I learn something deeper about the numerals versus words when it comes to conveying numbers in the written form: "Numerals jump off the page; numbers written as words lie on the page and don’t interrupt the flow." That makes complete sense now that I think about it.  More so now in the world of electronic screen reading where we skim through paragraphs, the numbers do call our attention and essentially interrupt the flow.

But, this is also a stylistic issue; it is intended "for readers who have the leisure to savor what they read."  Ah, yes.

Over the years, I have also come to understand that writing involves a lot of re-writing.  Over and over and over again.  I routinely tell students this, but nobody seems to pay attention.  But then even academic (published) writing often comes across as if the author did not care to re-write.

If we’re speaking of a larger, more overarching mistake that writers make, it’s not taking the time to read their work aloud as they’re refining and editing it. If they did, they might easily find all sorts of errors and infelicities that they could themselves solve

Infelicities. 

I would never have worked that word into that sentence, in conveying that idea, because my vocabulary is limited.  Not that I don't know what infelicities means.  Knowing what a word means is one thing, but to know how and when to use it is different.

Two decades ago, back in California, I had writing instructors assist me in conveying to my classes the importance of writing.  One of them reminded students to be cautious when using the thesaurus in order to use big and fancy words that students often think make their papers more sophisticated.  One of the many examples that she gave was this: Consider the sentence, "their successful marriage was built on a solid foundation of love and understanding."  Basement is a synonym for foundation.  Imagine a marriage built on a basement of love!

It has been almost 32 (or thirty-two) years since that first writing experience in graduate school.  I am continuing to learn to write.

Those cunning linguists!

In my early years of teaching, which was back in California, it did not take me much time to understand that students in my classes needed to learn how to write at the college level.  But, I could not spend all my class time teaching them about writing, nor did I have the ability to explain to the class how to write well.

I, therefore, did the smartest thing ever: I sought help from the English Department. As I have noted here, Kim loaned me one of her teaching assistants for 30 minutes each week for about six weeks.  One of those was Rebecca.  Once, over lunch, we talked about books, and to this day I am pleasantly flummoxed by her response to the my question on the book that she was reading.  It was about grammar!  Yes, it was about grammar. No kidding!

David Shulman gives me an idea of why those linguistics folks love to explore grammar.  He writes about the grammar in Tamil, which makes it interesting even for blokes like me.  Shulman then proceeds to write about the beauty of the language by using the example of the word undayirukka (உண்டாயிருக்கா) which means "to be or become pregnant."

I had no idea about any of these until now!

Of course, Shulman's book is not merely about grammar.  It is a biography of Tamil.

So, about this old language with a rich past and apparently a beautiful grammar too, well, where did it come from?

Shulman writes that "speakers of Dravidian languages were in place in south India, and perhaps also farther north, in the first millennium B.C."  But, it is all a mystery.  "We do not know when Dravidian language first penetrated the subcontinent; there may be a link to the Iron Age cultures of the southern megaliths, or even to the far more ancient world of Neolithic pastoralists."

But, so much is clear: Tamil's grammar paved the way for its poetry.

One of the many examples that Shulman uses in order to convey the richness and beauty of the language is one from the Sangam period.  The anthologies from this period "are broadly sorted into two thematic categories: akam or “the interior,” consisting of love poems, and puram or “the exterior,” a more diverse group, including martial eulogy, public praise, and worldly wisdom."  Here is one (translation by A.K. Ramanujan):

Of course, the akam and puram duality "can only be artificially kept apart."

A seemingly outer being like the beloved, or the god, is so deeply twined into the poet's own in-ness that we soon give up on identifying any out-ness at all.  The Tamil cosmos has no external boundary.

That is profound.

The is the point of this post

It wasn't until I came to the US for graduate school did I know that I was not using "the" when I had to, and was overusing it when I didn't need to.  It ain't easy to learn English as a second language!

It goes back to the Tamil language that was, as we used to say in the old country, my mother tongue.

Even with that usage--"mother tongue"--I recall this hilarious incident from my elementary school days.  Our math teacher--the maths master, as we said then--was a quirky, funny, old man.  Well, he seemed old to us when we were kids and, for all I know, perhaps he was the age I am now!  "PK Master" was how we referred to him.

PK Master would suddenly ask a student something interesting while seemingly looking at another.  And, at the same time tap yet another on the head with a long ruler that he always seemed to have in his hand.  We knew that we always had to be on the alert in his class.  Every once in a while, he would intentionally make a mistake in the problem he would have worked out on the blackboard in order to check whether we were merely copying things down or if we were thinking for ourselves.

One of our old classroom buildings

Where was I?  Yes, the mother tongue. So, one rainy day PK Master was walking around while we were trying to solve the problems he had assigned when he asked one of the girls, Madhulika, what her mother tongue was.

I bet she was petrified as much as any of us were whenever PK Master asked us anything; she blurted out, "it is pink."

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you would have blurted out even worse things, I tell ya!

Anyway, English is a funny language to learn, with its rules that make no sense.  One of the rules that apparently I hadn't mastered was about "the."  When to use it and how to use it.

For instance, if one were to think in Tamil a statement "நான் லைப்ரரிக்கு போறேன் " and then translate that into English, the translation would be "I am going to library."  Note that the translation does not include "the."

We have to systematically learn to add "the" and say in English "I am going to the library."  Once we pick up such bad habits, well, it takes a lot of effort to unlearn the incorrect ways and learn the correct ones.  I wonder why the English teachers back in my school never pointed this out to me; can't blame them when there were forty kids in the class, eh!

As I started re-learning the English language as a graduate student, I spotted this craziness in all kinds of casual contexts too, not merely in grad school work.  One of the instances in which the "the" issue came up was about the Philippines.

My apartment-mate's father was working in the Philippines at that time--with the Asian Development Bank.  He was also a Tamil.  I noticed that the country was "the Philippines" when a bunch of us Tamil folks spoke in English. But, it was "Philippines" if we spoke in Tamil--there was no "the" there.

So, what is "the" deal with the Philippines?  Here is Wikipedia to "the" rescue:

The official name of the Philippines has changed several times in the course of its history. During the Philippine Revolution, the Malolos Congress proclaimed the establishment of the República Filipina or the Philippine Republic. From the period of the Spanish–American War (1898) and the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) until the Commonwealth period (1935–1946), American colonial authorities referred to the country as the Philippine Islands, a translation of the Spanish name.^[25] Since the end of World War II, the official name of the country has been the Republic of the Philippines. Philippines has steadily gained currency as the common name since being the name used in Article VI of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, with or without the definite article.^[35]

It is not because of the bizarre grammar rules in English, but all because of Spanish?  Oh the crap! ;)

Grammar is not as sweet as chocolate is? Whom cares!

Get ready to spend more, if you love chocolate, appears to be the advice from the Wall Street Journal:

Doesn't surprise me one bit; people in the old country have always had one heck of a sweet tooth, and with better transport and refrigeration chocolate becomes way easier to sell to a rapidly growing middle class.

"Emerging-market demand is the principle reason behind the steady and consistent rise that we've seen in the cocoa market," said Sterling Smith, a futures specialist at Citigroup in Chicago.

Read that quote again.

Did you?

Notice something that troubled you, like it was some stale nut in a chocolate bar?  (BTW, if you ever gift me chocolate, make sure it is plain and simple chocolate, without nuts or fruits!)

Did you spot that it was "principle" when it should have been "principal"?

Principal derives by way of French from the Latin term principalis, meaning “first in importance.” In English, it initially referred to a ruler, but the word also came to be associated with an amount of money on which interest is paid, because that sum is first in terms of priority and the interest (one hopes) is a relative small amount.
...
Principle, by contrast, though it was originally merely a spelling variant, came to mean “proposition or truth,” and later “law of nature” and “rule of conduct.” And, unlike principal, it does not serve as an adjective except in the form of principled.

Assuming that I am indeed on the correct side of the grammar accounting ledger, if we have problems with a language that is the lingua franca of the future, too, then, well, whom who cares, eh!

What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be “whom”. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.

It's not only whom that might disappear but perhaps the apostrophe too?

A battle is being waged over the apostrophe, and the names of two of the online factions—the Apostrophe Protection Society and Kill the Apostrophe—suggest an extremism usually reserved for blood, rather than ink or pixels. The former, founded by a retired British copy editor, provides a gentle guide to deploying the apostrophe. “It is indeed a threatened species!” the site warns, a little preciously. The Web site Kill the Apostrophe, meanwhile, argues that the mark “serves only to annoy those who know how it is supposed to be used and to confuse those who dont.”

So, in the very near future, chocolate-devouring English speakers of the world wont (hehe) be able to understand that awesome joke about "eats shoots and leaves" I guess.

What?  You dont (hehe) know the joke?

[A panda] goes into a bar, asks for a ham sandwich, eats it and then takes out a revolver and fires it into the air. When the publican asks him what on earth he is doing, he throws a book on to the bar and growls: 'This is a badly punctuated wildlife manual. Look me up.' The barman flicks through the book and, under the relevant entry, reads: 'PANDA. Large, black-and-white, bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

I am in good company!

When I was a kid, the elders often appreciatively commented about the quality of writing in the newspaper that we subscribed to--The Hindu.  After coming to the US, however, I have always been shocked at the atrocious grammar there and wonder whether it was the case even back then, or whether the quality has really deteriorated over the years.

Here in the US, I have often commented to students about the wonderful writing styles in the New Yorker and The Economist.  But, recently, I have been noticing grammar issues in The Economist.  A few weeks ago, I even wrote a sarcastic letter to the editor:

Dear Editor:
I reckon the distinguished newspaper loves the word reckon so much that it reckoned it would make for an interesting reading by using four reckons in the Saudi America piece--two of those reckons in consecutive sentences in the same paragraph.
Who woulda reckoned that!
Sincerely

Of course, the magazine newspaper did not publish that letter.  If they had, you, dear reader, would have known about it by now!

Why write about some old story today?  Glad you asked.

I picked up the mail and the latest issue was in.  On the cover was the image of India's most powerful bachelor (ok, married but living separately.)  Over dinner, I read that lead article, and then glanced through the pages and ended up reading this piece on digital disruption on the farm.  Not really a new story, but a neat commentary that ties a few pieces together.  Which is when my brain caught a spelling mistake.  Do you see what I saw?

Yes, I checked the online version.  Thankfully, that error does not show up there.

Wait, are you still searching for the error?  Tsk, tsk! And I  thought the readers of this blog were incredibly smart people! ;)  Oh well, there is more to life than grammar, right?

BTW, don't even attempt to poin out the writhing problems that you find alot in this blog.  Their not paying me fur this ;)

Grammar is the spinach between the front teeth!

At the lunch break while on a field trip during the conference, we got to our respective packets that we had picked up beforehand.  Mine was, of course, a vegetarian lunch.  As tasty as that wrap was, it also had quite a bit of greens and sprouts.

Houston, we have a problem!

When I am in the public, I prefer to avoid greens and sprouts for a simple reason--they tend to get stuck between the teeth. Especially the front teeth.  I sometimes jokingly advice students that they ought to avoid spinach at any working lunch because if they talked with a spinach growth on their teeth, then the audience will only be fixated on that ugly green thing and ignore the message.  There is also a distinct possibility that their entire presentation will be discredited.

All because of a green!

So, there I was, hungry as one can be, and devouring the vegetarian wrap, and wondering whether I was running into potential trouble.  As the field trip resumed, I remarked to the only other vegetarian-lunch participant that the only hassle with the tasty wrap was about the greens.

"Oh, show me your teeth and I will check" she volunteered.  And she certified me ok.

Perhaps people stay married only for the reason that a spousal obligation is to point out the spinach. Perhaps in a coded way such that when the wife smiles at her husband and taps on her tooth, the husband knows exactly where he needs to clean up.

Anyway, I didn't have to worry anymore.  Well, except that an incisor, which suffered a trauma after a high school punching incident, is turning yellower by the day and now I was left to wonder what she made of that yellowing tooth.  It is a no-win situation! ;)

Over the couple of days, I attended plenty of presentations.  Grammar errors in the presentation slides stood out like spinach in the front teeth.   Simple mistakes like "here" for "hear" and "censes" where it ought to have been "census."  Maybe I am cursed in that my eyes directly zoom into those errors and stay put.  As much as I consciously drag my eyes away from the annoying spinach, soon they pick up a broccoli somewhere else!

Of course, I give plenty for other eyes and ears.  As I joke with students, I am even capable of messing up pronouncing my own name.  Little do they know that I am not joking!  I can only wonder about the metaphorical spinach and broccoli in me when I was up front.  I am sure I offered a lot--after all, I am a vegetarian, mostly! ;)

Warms the cockles of my heart? WTF!

Yep, lots of hair in September 2002!

It is now eleven years since I joined this university.  Time flies when having fun!

When the summer ends, the annual ritual at any university includes a back-to-school address by the president.  In my early years, I made the mistake of attending those events and speeches.  Now, I know better, I think.

The president during those first three years was from Tennessee and not only spoke with a very different accent, but also used idioms and phrases that were new to me.  During his meandering address one year, he said something about how it warmed the cockles of his heart.

"What of his heart?" was my thought.

One of the advantages I have as very Indian looking and sounding fellow is that I can easily admit to not knowing any damn thing about the English language.  Plus, there are always people around who think they have to educate me; yes, I am being sarcastic!  Sometimes, faking ignorance is also my way of escaping from conversations in which I don't want to participate.  After all, only people who know me know how familiar I am with Americana!

Anyway, I was really lost with this cockles of my heart thing.  I asked a colleague who was seated next to me.  Unlike me, he was a "real American," if you know what I mean.  Well, he didn't know either.

Now, keep in mind that this was before the days of smartphones.  So, no googling while sitting in an auditorium, waiting for the whole damn thing to end.

The address finally ended.

As with practically every university, ours too has a tradition of lunch for faculty and staff after this event. Yes, those early years I went to that communal breaking of bread, until I figured out that the community existed only for the true believers, and I am not one.

I was waiting in the long line behind a Spanish language professor.  Another "real American."  An older colleague--she has retired--who was always gentle and humble.  The few times our paths crossed, we always stopped to chat.

Anyway, it was, after all, idle small talk time.  I asked her what the president meant by "cockles of my heart."

It stumped her.  It was one of those idioms that she had grown up with, she said, and that it meant an emotion of one being truly happy and content with whatever had happened.  But, otherwise, she was at a loss to explain what a cockle was and, therefore, what it meant to warm one's cockles.

Isn't that the case with many things we say and do?  We continue with some practices because, well, that is how it was.  We don't always pause to inquire about whatever it is that we believe in, or say, or do.  We often continue along the same rut that people before us traversed.

Thus, way back somebody came up with an expression of "warms the cockles of my heart" to mean contented happiness, and soon those string of words came to mean that sentiment without the users knowing what a cockle was.  Soon that rut becomes deeper and deeper and it gets difficult to even claw one's way out of it.

I suppose it will be fair to say that I have been trying to stay away from various ruts of life ever since my high school years.  Thus, after exploring what a cockle is and what that idiom meant, I decided that it was an awful rut that was not worth traversing.

Are you still wondering what a cockle is and how it fits into that phrase?  Let me tell you this much: we will all be better off with plain speaking.  As I often remind students, just tell me what you want to tell me and do not hide behind fancy-shmancy words.

If that doesn't satisfy you, well, google it yourself; I don't want to be held responsible for pushing you into that rut--you can fall into it yourself!

American English kicks French butts. Kicks British butts too. Amurica rulz!

I have to remember to keep the grammar Nazi inside me well under control as I begin to grade the final papers.  After all, rmmbr, we r in txtn wrld. prblms w grmmr n sntnces n englsh can luk like polish! lynne truss goin crzy.

At least, we don't do this at our university at graduation; wait, do we?

I don't understand it either!

English rules now, and one awesome aspect of the language is that if enough people mess up the grammar then the mess becomes the norm.  I love it and hate it at the same time ;)

The phenomenal adaptability the language, in addition to this reason (!), means that it now reigns supreme as the language of commerce and science.  Even the French have no option but to use it.  Ha!  And that too American English (ht), not the stiffer British one.  Ha, ha!

Everyone in the world - except Dutch and Scandinavian footballers - learns American English because it is today’s lingua franca. It’s the principal means for disseminating ideas and getting work, as Latin used to be. As Luc Ferry of Le Figaro, writing approvingly of the new French legislation, noted last week: ‘Si Descartes n’avait pas écrit en latin, come le feront encore après lui Leibniz ou Spinoza, il n’aurait jamais été lu dans le monde entier.’ People stopped using French when that country went into decline and lost influence in the nineteenth century, and it was the same story for British English in the twentieth. But neither language has disappeared, and neither is ‘threatened’ by American English. It’s also worth remembering that as America declines, so will its influence and the importance of its language. No empire lasts for ever.

The American empire ain't declining no time soon, buddy! Yo, Amurica rulz! ;)

Life is not about the grammar issues

Before you get any incorrect ideas and leap to conclusions, let me make it clear: spellings matter; watch out for the comma, which can kill a person; and, yes, make the writing look sophisticated by using semicolons!

However, let us not get carried away.  There is more to life than grammar. A lot more.  Way more.

When I was a kid, one relative who never failed to impress me was my father's uncle.  In conversations we always referred to him as RM.  Like all of us, he was also a mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the ugly.  RM was sharp. Quick witted. And well read.  He didn't keep up with the modern science and literature, yes.  But, he knew what he had studied during his younger days.

A rather argumentative and cantankerous man he was.  (Now you know there might be a biological reason, too, for my fascination for The Argumentative Indian!)  Mostly irreligious, and definitely irreverent too.  The religious rarely dared to pick an argument with him not merely because he was good at arguing but, and more importantly, because he would recite from memory verses from any number of religious texts and proceed on to interpreting them.

One that made an early impression on me was the way he presented to the young me how Bhjaja Govindam came about.  Now, thanks to the information technology, I am able to simply link to that Wikipedia entry.  The Wikipedia note says the same that RM told me a long time ago.  That devotional, philosophical, and poetic work, the story goes, was Sankara's reaction when he came across a Sanskrit professor teaching the finer points of grammar to his students.  Sankara observed:

Bhajagovindam bhajagovindam
Govindam bhaja muudhamate
Sampraapte sannihite kaale
Nahi nahi rakshati dukrijnkarane.          Translation:
Worship Govinda, Worship Govinda,
Worship Govinda. Oh fool!
Rules of Grammar will not save you
At the time of your death.

RM was often annoyed that those reciting this didn't even pause to understand what it meant and, thus, I have often heard him talk about dukrijnkarane. The audience would get nervous, while I sat there enjoying the show.

We draw our own lessons from what we experience in life.  In my case, I fell in love with the idea that there is a lot more to life than the small stuff that we are so fascinated with.  That there are much larger issues that we needed to understand.  I didn't care for the religious "Govindam" bottom line that Sankara preached, but I appreciated that dukrijnkarane as a metaphor for the ultimately trivial stuff that don't matter at all.

Graduate school and the research activities that professors and students engaged in often reminded me of this dukrijnkarane approach.  Instead of grammar, it was about some minutiae.  I didn't refer to such research as dukrijnkarane; after all, I was an in alien culture.  So, I made fun of research in the field of economic development as nothing but a fixation on "the productivity of left-handed female labor in the cotton textile mills of who-cares-where."

I felt convinced that modern day academic research was nothing but a variation of that Sanskrit professor being monomaniacal about dukrijnkarane.

Whether in intellectual pursuits, or in life, I understand that there is a lot more to it than the fine details we worry about.  Yes, those details matter, like how the comma does.  But, it is not about the comma, right?  And that we forget.

It was always easy to get RM going on such issues.  He loved them.  He seemed to draw energy from making life miserable for others by bringing up such topics.

He was also the first one I really knew who grew a beard.  Well, sometimes he grew one, and at other times he was clean-shaven.  Once, in his bearded phase, while assisting somebody else at a food charity event of sorts, he was asked to be in-charge when the other person left.  RM being RM, he decided to play a practical joke; he sat there like a holy man--he had the beard, the looks, and the erudition after all.  When people came, he made the appropriate comments and soon had collected donations from the passers by by offering his profound words of wisdom!

Now, I am at an age that probably RM was when I began to interact with him as a kid.  My beard, unlike his, is always well-trimmed.  I suspect that my beard is why people pay attention to me even the little bit they do.  Ask yourself: if you were a student in my classes, or a newspaper reader scanning through my op-ed, would you think I had any gravitas if I looked like this?:

yes, me, in summer 2012.
http://sriramkhe.blogspot.com/2012/07/so-why-havent-bald-men-gone-extinct.html

With all the pontification that I do, I can easily imagine that I, too, can sit at a place, make appropriate comments and, in the process, earn more money than I currently do now.  I am not that far away from the place where something like that actually happened, after all.

There is a demand for a false prophet like RM, even if only for those few minutes, or a lot more such RMs because innately we humans are always driven to understanding the mystery that life is.  We intuitively feel that there is a lot more to life than whatever dukrijnkarane we pursue.  We want to make sense of that larger issues.  We then seek people who, we think and believe, might have the answer.  Or, at least, show us the path towards that.

But, the search for that master is futile.  Nobody knows.  It is up to us individually to understand that life is not about the fine points of grammar.  In a way, that is what I tell students, without going into all this philosophy talk.  When I tell them that a course they take with me is not really about the course alone, and that education is not merely about the letter-grade and diploma alone, I know that I am implicitly hoping that they would engage in a self-driven inquiry into what they understand the big picture to be.

Perhaps it was six years ago that I went to Sengottai to say hi to RM.  It was our last interaction.  He was anything but that person he was when younger when he made a serious impression on me. RM spoke so softly that I had to strain to catch his words.  In my Americanized way, I tried telling RM how much I appreciated him.  I held his bony arms with the skin that was dry and wrinkled.  I am not sure whether my expressions crossed across the cultures.

I like to imagine that as RM neared his last few breaths, he knew really, really well that life is not about dukrijnkarane.

A few months ago, when my mother saw a recent photo of mine, she couldn't stop commenting on how much I look like RM.  Am not sure whether it is a case of we see what we want to see, or whether there is more of a resemblance.  The beard helps, for sure :)

Did the budget "affect" or "effect" you? Should you care?

Forget the fiscal cliff.  We need to worry about the grammar gorge!

Yesterday, as is a part of my typical routine, I scanned the Statesman Journal when I came across the headline that caught my attention only because of the grammar issue, and I grabbed a screen shot:

Curiosity being my middle name, I wondered whether the editors might have realized that they, too, had "affect" and "effect" messed up.  Surprise, surprise, ... a corrected headline in place!

For some reason, the screen shot this time is warped; bad grammar = good shot?

Of course, I, too, am no good with the grammar.  But, hey, that doesn't stop me from pointing fingers :)

The mystery that is called English grammar

A few years ago, back in California, I requested the English department folks to loan me a graduate student for 30 minutes every week.  The idea was that this student would remind students in my class about the basics of writing, and then as the term progressed, I would pass along to the graduate student problem-patterns in writing-related issues in the assignments, who would then use those real examples in the 30-minute session.

I went this route because as much as I emphasized the importance of writing, I was almost always at a loss when it came to explaining to students why something didn't quite feel correct.  There was one particular occasion when a student raised her hand in class and asked for the difference between "affect" and "effect" because I had crossed out her usage of "affect" and written there that she should have used "effect" instead.

I had no clue how to answer that question.  I was stumped.  I told the class that I merely had a feel for it after all the years of working with the language, and that they had to take it up with the writing folks.

Which is how I ended up asking my colleague, Kim, for a loan, so to speak.  Through her, I worked with quite a few grad students over the two years or so.  They helped me out with the in-class discussions every term.  One of them, Rebecca, said she loved the language so much that her favorite night time readings were typically books on English grammar!

I am sure students who are experiencing me as an instructor for the first time soon find out that I will bug them, bug the crap out of them, about learning to write.  I remind them that there is a long way to go, for me too.

Grammar issues like this, for instance, when punctuation kills :)

Another common error that we often run into:

That same site has this humorous explanation about "affect" and "effect"

It is not that I am a grammar-Nazi, but, ... :)

The closing of the American mind, through students' diction & grammar

A few years ago, soon after I moved to Oregon, I got an appreciatory email from a student.  But, I simply could not broadcast that email because the student had erroneously written there how much he "had taken for granite" the things I did and said.

Such errors are no mere slip, like how me might end up with the word "pubic" when we meant "public."  These errors are way more than mere laugh lines and are indicative of something seriously wrong.  A selective listing of errors in this essay might make you smile and chuckle, but should simultaneously worry you.

To their credit, students are often frank when it comes to admitting their shortcomings and attitude problems. Like the guy who owned up to doing "halfhazard work." Or the one who admitted that he wasn't smart enough to go to an "Ivory League school." Another lamented not being astute enough to follow the lecture on "Taco Bell's Canon" in music-appreciation class.

Given the ivory tower of higher education, well, Ivory League School sounds right to me :)

All the more important then Allan Bloom's work becomes.  Sean Collins writes that Allan Bloom and his seminal work cannot be simply pigeonholed; the debate has become that way only because the left and the right are both being selective in how they (ab)use The Closing of the American Mind.  Bloom, he writes, wants to:

uphold liberal education, and yet our modern notion of such an education was the product of the Enlightenment, of which he is highly suspicious.

That, in a nutshell, has been my complex relationship with higher education. 

Collins further notes:

Bloom writes that openness is an essential feature of the academy: ‘The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the non-instrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt.’ However, over time openness was transformed into a mindless relativism: ‘Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.’ If the university preaches that all truths are relative, what’s the point of searching for truth? Openness, ironically, leads to the ‘closing’ of the American mind. 

The closing of the mind gets reflected even in the casual attitudes we adopt when students do not display the levels of thinking and writing.   Perhaps we are taking higher education "for granite" :(

These made me laugh today :)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Oh the pubic, er, public ... Typo is a witch, er, bitch :)

A while ago, I had blogged about how it took me a while to figure out--way back in high school--that the new hair that was growing was not "public" hair but "pubic" hair ... and, therefore, how I am always on guard when I have to use the word "public" because you accidentally miss the "l" and the whole world will have a good laugh ...

Shall we say, mistakes were made at the prestigious University of Texas' ... well, check it out :) (ht)

 Click here for more of my grammar-related posts.

WTF is a semicolon, eh! "Death to high school English"

No, it is not about my high school English teacher, who on two occasions slapped the life out of me for no reason at all.  Nor is it about how he knocked up the attendant in the chemistry lab and, as a result, married her.  Oh, it is definitely not about his embezzlement later on, for which he and his wife were fired.  (editor: anything else you have to publicly trash him? Awshutupalready!  editor: why all the fretting and fuming; what is this post about then? will you shut up so that I can get to it?)

My students know all too well that I want them to focus on the mechanics of writing, even though I am not a language instructor teaching them how to write.  I typically refer them to George Orwell's fantastic essay on how related writing and thinking are.

While I am not one of those grammarian colleagues I had in California, who said her favorite bedtime readings were books about the art and craft of writing, I am always fascinated by discussions on this topic.  And sometimes I actually do understand them!  A few years ago, when Lynne Truss' book came out, I quickly purchased for myself a copy and was so close to making it a required reading for one of my courses until a colleague pointed out that students might not easily relate to the British examples and language that Truss discusses.  I was, like, er, WTF :)

Which is why it has been a good Saturday morning--I read two commentaries that deal with different aspects of the English language and grammar.

In this essay in Salon, from where I have borrowed the quote in the title of this post, the author notes:

after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I've begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.
For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

One more reason to wonder if college is for everybody, and if college, then what exactly do we want students to get from that experience.  Oh well ... a discussion for another day, I suppose.

Anyway, the author finds out from the English teacher at a large school district on what exactly is going on in high schools these days:

"It's very hard to get a lot of teachers to teach those things, especially grammar. We have such a need to engage students. There's such an emphasis on keeping student enthusiasm going and getting them to want to actively participate. When you start talking about grammar, it's like asking them to eat their vegetables, and no one wants to ask them to do that. They prefer class discussion, which is great but to a certain degree, goes off into the wind."

So, then even this foreign-born geography faculty ends up teaching grammar?  Why do we emphasize writing, and why don't students want to learn it?

When I ask her why she thinks there's such resistance to prioritizing and teaching writing, given its numerous applications, given its overlap with critical thinking skills, analytical skills, basic communication skills, she hesitates for a moment, then answers in three words: "It's not fun."
True, but then, teaching (and for that matter, learning) isn't always fun. Changing my kid's dirty diapers isn't fun. Dragging my fat ass onto a treadmill isn't fun. Helping my grandmother "fix" her computer isn't fun. Sometimes we do things not because they're fun but because they're important.

Oh well ...

And even when do get students who are careful about grammar, grammarians make it difficult for us and we have to worry about where to put that damned question mark in the quote--inside the quotation marks or outside?  And today I find out there is something called "logical punctuation" that sounds more of an oxymoron than anything else :) 

the British way simply makes more sense. Indeed, since at least the 1960s a common designation for that style has been "logical punctuation."

British and logical? You got to be kidding!  And in a language in which, as Bernard Shaw pointed out, "ghoti" can be pronounced as "fish"?  Hey, notice that I placed the question mark after the quotes? Haha!

Change in the grammar rules of the English language

Grammar can be fun. Really. It was, in 1934! Really?

ht

Joke of the day :-)

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class one day.

"In English", he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A loud voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Pretty cool, eh! From The Telegraph, via aldaily.com

When to use 'fewer' rather than 'less'?

It looks like there are grammar vigilantes all over the world!

"Tesco is changing its checkout signs after coming under criticism from linguists for using "less" rather than "fewer"" says the BBC .... and
"Tesco is replacing its current "10 items or less" fast-track checkout notices with signs saying "Up to 10 items"."

The Plain English Campaign has a simple rule of thumb to help everyone: less means "not as much," whereas fewer means "not as many".

Do correct spellings matter at all? not? nought?

A few items as follow-up to my earlier blog on the English language:

In Arizona, "Two self-anointed "grammar vigilantes" who toured the nation removing typos from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon." These guys ought to have known better; after all, the British are still wondering why our spelling of "honor" is acceptable :-)

Speaking of the British, maybe the grammar vigilantes ought to have listened to the British academic who says that we should welcome these typos as variations in spellings. According to this report in the Times, "Instead of complaining about the state of education as he corrects the same spelling mistakes in undergraduate essays year after year, Ken Smith, a criminologist at Bucks New University, has a much simpler solution. “Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem, or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such.”

My first thought was, "why is a criminologist advising us about grammar?" But, the Arizona "grammar vigilantes" make it clear that obsessing with spellings can make criminals out of us. So, maybe this British criminologist was on to something :-)

Anyway, this grammarian/criminologist managed to create quite a stir throughout the world. Apparently it became a serious debate in India, as this pro and counter arguments show. And one writer opines that Indian students are better in English than the English are.

All because of spelling?