Word: grammar
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Examinations: The opinion seemed split with half agreeing that they were hard and unfair, while the other group contests that they were close to average. The first few exams naturally stressed grammar while the later one were devoted in a large part to prepared and sight translations. The marking was considered almost unanimously fair...
Claremont's 38 students present a wide range of problems-from the "homusicku" (homesick) Japanese boy who cannot eat fried eggs, to the Indian who refuses to shower in the nude ("I shall wear my swim suit"). For such students, Claremont found that drills on grammar and pronunciation were beside the point. "In six weeks," says Dean Emmett Thompson, "we've got to give them a complete course in Americana...
Unfortunately, .says Professor Thomas Pyles of the University of Florida, the average educated American has mastered the rules of grammar, and his speech is "frequently dry, dull, tedious, overprecise . . ." In a new book called Words and Ways of American English (Random House; $3.50), Pyles argues that American speech is much too prissy. It long ago shunned the rough & tumble language of the farm, and it also discarded the "careless elegance" of the 18th century drawing room. Instead it adopted "the tortured precision prescribed by the grammarians who served as arbiters of language for the 'new men' created...
...certain degree, says Pyles, this was true of Britain. But America, "with its ideologically classless society and its idealistically highfalutin notions of equality, was particularly receptive to such ideas. One of the implications of prescriptive grammar is that anyone may talk and write as well as anyone else provided he follows the prescriptions laid down by the authority. Good usage was no longer the prerogative of a hereditary aristocracy; the grammarians had put it within the reach of every...
Wayne University's Professor (of English) Donald J. Lloyd has long believed that Americans are too busy thinking about their grammar to learn how to write. They are possessed of a demon, "a mania for correctness," writes Professor Lloyd in the current issue of the American Scholar. "Our spelling must be 'correct'-even if the words are ill-chosen; our 'usage' must be 'correct'-even though any possible substitute expression, however crude, would be perfectly clear; our punctuation must be 'correct'-even though practices surge and change with the passing...