🚀 go-pugleaf

 For the record, the following append from last week was mine.  I neglected to s
 it.  I would like to add that I believe we do our students a disservice
 if we simply mark errors in their papers and mark them as error-makers,
 but I also think we fail them if we simply ignore the places in their texts
 where their "errors" -- should I say "unintended unconventionalities"? --
 dull or distort their meanings.  But because I believe that meaning
 is more than conventional, I have to go further.  I think that everyone
 has something "original" to say, and the right to say it -- but, paradoxically,
 one can only convey one's new ideas to another person by somehow speaking
 that person's language and understanding that person's conventions.

 Jim Oldham

 In the third line above, I have left unrevised an ambiguous pronoun.  I think
 that my readers will be able to understand me, but many of them will pause
 there.  I don't think that the ability to see this "error" is purely

----- original message follows -----

 As a despicable liberal, I think I can see both sides of this.
 I am sympathetic to the "revolutionary critique" of grammar as dismissable
 artifact of the ruling class, but I wonder how far true revolutionaries
 would go in their critique.  Presumably it is not simply "purism" to which
 one objects, but rather any "pointing" at form over expression.
 Is there any moment at which grammar has a function for a speaker?
 Is that skill always learned outside any classroom and within one's own
 local "discourse community"?  Is there any overlap between rhetoric and
 grammar?  Is not rhetoric itself a kind of grammar?  Ultimately,
 in the hands of an exploiter, what knowledge cannot be exploited?

 I am not optimistic enough to believe we will ever reach, as a whole
 society, any satisfactory resolution to the fear that when we teach,
 we cripple.  It is a sad thing to see such highly rational creatures
 so afraid of their own reason, yet so eager to dissect themselves with it.
 Still, it becomes obvious that we are at that point -- our just dessert.

 Less pessimistically, I can ask another question, this one honestly
 "rhetorical":  If all languages (or dialects?) are of the same
 "value," why should we adopt any other version(s) as normative or "better"?
 The "current traditional" grammar has at least the advantage of
 being some kind of "lingua franca," however stodgy it is in the face
 of live innovations.

 Finally, turning away from the precipice for a moment, I will say that
 I don't believe in teaching grammar in place of writing -- but do hope
 that grammarians will find a place for themselves in the academy,
 nice and safe from flying bullets.  Maybe they will even find
 a way to make learning grammar fun, easy, innocent, and useful.
 Then we will know that the perfect food processor is right around
 the corner.