English as a Something Language

Well, we're still without a camera, but I thought I'd at least attempt to keep our (3) loyal followers up-to-date with all of our exotic, excruciatingly interesting, amazingly exciting adventures!

I must be in an adjectivial mode. BTW: I think I just made that word up, but that's just the type of crazy, seat-of-the-pants excitement you get around here!!!!!!

Enough, enough of the English grammar.

You know that no one EVER uses English grammar after they're out of school... or so goes the rumor among English grammar-burdened farmboys in north-central Arkansas.
I envision those poor, weary farmboys hunched over with stacks of dependent clauses piled on their backs, their knees creaking under the weight of those lazy, useless clauses that can't take care of themselves. Nonetheless, the Arkansas farmboys try so desperately to teach them how to stand alone like the well-behaved, independent clauses grazing peacefully in the pasture.
Being a farmboy or -- the macho, older brother term -- ranch hand is taxing enough without the never-ending burden of your mother shoveling heaping loads of adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions into your wheelbarrow, while those pesky active and passive voices are constantly yelling at you. No wonder the desire for English grammar falls so quickly to the manure pile. It's not really necessary. It's far more effective to just grunt and point, right!

(Did anyone catch my split infinitive? I bet those grammar-hating farmboys didn't!)

By and large, my children speak the southern version of English language properly, probably from hearing it spoken properly by most of their relatives. Interestingly enough, they have somehow developed a Pavlovian flinch associated with them daring to use the word "ain't". I can't figure where that came from.

I guess by now y'all might have picked up the idea that they aren't very fond of studying grammar, English or otherwise. I, on the other hand, adore it. I come by it honestly, from my dear Mother, the queen of English Grammar. She and I -- and probably both of my sisters -- thoroughly enjoyed James Kilpatrick's newspaper column entitled "The Writer's Art". The column took sloppy writers to task in an extremely humorous way, but alas, only those who paid attention to their grammar lessons were able to delight in Mr. Kilpatrick's sly, grammatical wit.

(If you didn't pay attention when learning punctuation, you didn't remember that you need to put quotation marks around the title of a newspaper article, didya?)

The English language is a wonderful creation. I'm not so naive to think that everyone is going to love English grammar or that they'll even need to use it as an integral part of their lives. However, if you can't understand rudimentary sentence structure, you're going to have a really hard time deciphering complicated sentence structure in the Word of God. If there was ever a reason to take grammar seriously, this would be it. My grammatically proper mother taught me this eye-opening truth, and I'm so thankful I caught hold of it. God does all things well, even the things we might not like or do well, and He has a reason for everything he created... mosquitos, cockroaches, rats, English grammar, etc.

Those Arkansas farmboys are still plowing through their seemingly endless rows of prepositional phrases needing to be set off with parentheses and making sure the subjects and verbs are in agreement, all the while carrying those lazy dependent clauses around.

Now if we could just keep those active and passive voices quiet!

Katie the English Grammar Lady

Grammar Discaimer: I know for a fact that there are sentences ending with prepositions, possibly dangling participles and probably many more grammatical no-no's in this post. However, I chose to write this so it would be pleasantly readable to all who managed to make it to the ever-lovin' end. Please forgive me, and please don't tell Mr. Kilpatrick!