"BIG GIRL" GRAMMAR

In spite of all the fuss about “post-modern” and “sub-text” and seeing a culture from inside its speech and thought, most people have never mastered simple grammar.  It’s a lot easier and more relevant to ordinary life than computer code or learning the assumptions of an on-line game, but the last time I tried to teach in 2003, the only teacher in the building who knew anything at all about grammar was the teacher of French.

If you say “diagramming” in polite groups, a shudder will run around the room.  Why is this?  I think it is partly because grammar is confused with “usage” which is class-tied, propriety-based, and usually conveyed as scolding.  It is seen as a hindrance to “writing” which is a matter of pouring out one’s guts and passions onto paper, a practice which soon turns messy and can lead to writer's block.

I was fortunate to have a bow-legged red-headed Irishwoman, Agnes Carter, for 8th grade English -- back in the day when Portland, OR, was considered a model of white-gloved boring gray life.  I DID wear white gloves and a hat downtown, even when I was nine.  It seemed like proper dressing-up.  In the many decades since then I have NEVER thrown a dildo up to dangle from powerlines, even though in some jobs I was interacting with an underclass that mixed sex with violence, animals with humans.

Miss Carter made us memorize two lists of small but crucial words: one was the prepositions and one was the linking verbs.  I mean, her former students can recite them in their sleep:  be, am, is, are, was, were been, have, has, had, do, does, did, could, would, should, must, might.

She taught us to dissect a sentence as systematically as a hawk eating a rodent:  first tear out the guts (verbs), then find the muscles (prepositional, participial, gerunds, appositives), discard the skin (adverbs and adjectives) and then swallow the head (subject, object, indirect object).  It will be neat and bloodless.

But then the school year ended.  In college everyone kept talking about rhetoric and semantics and linguistics -- always ICK, er, IC.  I never could get a grip on it until decades later I found a book about “rhetorical grammar.”  Suddenly I knew what Richard Stern and Peter Matthiessen always talked about: the arrangement of sentences into elegant sense.  This is not relevant to some kinds of writing, but it was information that I’d needed myself.  Stern used to get exasperated and tell me my sentences were inside out.  Now I see that he meant I was not presenting the information and relationships that a close reader needs in the order that they need it.  Instead, I was writing down the elements as they occurred to me, sometimes leaving holes, because I knew what I meant.

The missing information, the part of grammar after the 8th grade, was the ability to convert prepositions to appositives or even to a single adjective, to  swap participles for dependent clauses, to condense, transform, remove, and augment the order and relationship of whole phrases.  THAT’s what makes an author able to control a sentence.  

It can take you to high places.

But it is dependent on good thinking.  Sentences get snarled because of not being sure what it is that’s being said.  Which is the most important part of the argument?  What sensory metaphor controls all the rest?  Where does the logic sequence start and end?

Knowing grammar on this level does not mean obsessing about obeying the rules.  There are no rules on the order of “i after e” or where to put commas.  The only rule or guide is the goal of the specific writing -- is it intelligible, does it convey the feeling?  It’s perfectly possible and legitimate to just write everyoldwhichway until getting to clarity of thought.  Revising is the thing to do, but you can't revise unless you write SOMETHING down.

You know webbing?  It's a form of diagramming but not about grammar -- about ideas.    

There’s no need to obsess over the rules.  It’s more like bird-watching.  When you learn to recognize one, then you see them all the time.  A noun clause is not harder to recognize than a robin, but identifying one is partly knowing the place they're likely to be -- you won’t see a robin swimming or down a hole.  But if you’re using the metaphor of birds on the line, an idea that’s going around due to Anne LaMott’s book of that name, then it matters what order they perch in.  (Remember that a preposition without an object becomes an adverb.)   

Adjectives in all their forms: words, prepositional phrases, participles and subordinate clauses, come just before the noun they modify.  (Modify: add more characteristics so as to be more specific.)  Appositives come just after the noun they modify because they are basically restatements of the same thing.  Gerunds act like nouns.

Adverbs in every form: words, prepositional phrases, participles and subordinate clauses can come anywhere in a sentence except for adverbs that modify adjectives -- then they act like adjectives.  (They are usually “intensifiers” like “very.”)

Just ignore this information until you get so you can “see” and “hear” (written language is always derived from spoken language) the words, prepositional phrases, participles, subordinate clauses.  Just do what comes naturally because you already know this stuff -- it’s just not conscious.  There's an awkward phase when you make a transition from the instinctive to the deliberate.

The biggest mistake school-minded people make is that schools only teach the conscious, but brains are mostly subconscious.  Got that?  MOSTLY SUBCONSCIOUS !!  This means that good teachers are simply revealing to you what you already know.

But don’t mislead yourself into believing that introspection is the key to reality and that your own subjective speculations and feelings are any kind of reality.  Nor are they unique.  If your time and place are the same as someone else’s, your construction of reality is likely to be similar.  If you are unique, you will need to work at grammar a little more to get your ideas across, because words can wander all over the landscape.

Diagramming chess strategy

Our formal culture, derived from English school talk heavily influenced by Latin, is nothing at all like street and neighborhood talk.  Even our informal writing is cautious, over-genteel, full of qualifiers and modifiers to the point of confusion, and often it's passive.  If you see a sentence that begins with “there,” kill it.  If you see the adjective “beautiful” trample it underfoot.  If you see the adverb “very”, wring its neck.  If you feel it's necessary, ignore this advice.

In junior high I loved diagramming as though it were crossword puzzles.  I could see the relationships between the words, what should dangle from what, but I didn’t know what to do about it.  The fancier, more elegant, game is chess, structuring interaction, patterning sentences, getting the birds arranged on the line.  But there are flaws: chess is adversarial.  Grammar is not.

More another time.

CALLING OUT WRITING IS AN ACT OF LOVE

Obama's speech script

No one can really teach writing.  One “evokes” it.  One is a “writing-caller.”  One doesn’t say,  “do it this way” but rather considers possibilities.  The criterion that matters is NOT correctness but rather what it -- in turn -- calls out of the reader.  It could be dismay.  It might be admiration.  Maybe undying love.

I like to mix languages, which is a little risky, but most of my early vocabulary came from reading and puzzling out the meaning via context.  I pronounced words in peculiar ways. I wasn’t always old enough with enough knowledge to understand.  Anya Seton  (Ernest Thompson Seton’s daughter) wrote historical novels about mad passionate love affairs that were read in a social atmosphere that would never tolerate the kind of explicit stuff that’s in my ladylike cousins’ beloved historical time-traveler novel series, "Highlander".  (The author is a biologist and uses her knowledge!)  So Seton had to do a bit of metaphorical suggesting:  the hero carries off his red-headed prize to the bed-chamber.  The next morning she has strange red marks on her breasts.  I figured they were bed bug bites.  Castles are so unsanitary.

The real secret to writing is that it’s not about the words:  it’s about the thinking and envisioning and sort of mental diagramming that comes ahead of time, accumulating until it really NEEDS to come out.  It’s the “foreplay.”  It’s the teasing.  It’s the engaging with the subject matter.  And always keeping an eye out for the voyeur who is trying to understand -- you can make it tough for them or easy for them.  Depends on the audience.  The audience -- maybe an invented one -- shouldn’t have control, but on the other hand, a really good reader can pull things up through the writer that were always spooled in his or her guts, waiting for the right understander.

Grammar is only a tool.  Few kids old enough to attend any level of school have NOT internalized the basics or we couldn’t understand them.  Nouns are names, verbs are actions -- that’s the coupling that everything else revolves around.  Adjectives stick to the fronts of nouns in English, the backs of nouns in other languages.  Adverbs can go anyplace.  Move ‘em around -- see what happens.  Phrases and clauses obey the same rules.  Memorize the prepositions -- it’s sort of fun.   

Because of working on the computer instead of the typewriter, I bold all the names of people the first time I use them in a post, because I know that some people will be wanting to google the name or check it some other way and it will be easier for their eye to find again if it’s bold.  I italicize titles for something like the same reason.  But I also like to use it to separate fact from fiction, thoughts and quotes, like that.  All tools.  Underlining, colored fonts.  I would love to have a computer tool that would let me insert automatically triggered music -- I know it exists: I just don’t want to take the time and money to find it and learn it.  I’m a lazy writer in some ways.  I just link.  But then I could go cross-media.

Publishing is nothing but a capital investment in writing, backed up with an advertising and distributing mechanism.  It’s just money.  The idea that publishing is an indicator of worthiness is dead now.  Only in the “sticks” like around here do people knee-jerk say,  “Oh, you write?  Well, are you published?”  They mean,  “Is it safe for me to admire?”

But writing shouldn’t be safe, nor should any other kind of media.  Media is about the edge, the growth, the possibility, the potential.  What comes AFTER tablets?  Every kid in the Browning Public Schools on the Blackfeet rez is now issued a tablet.  I hope it doesn’t turn out like the “green” children’s networking computers in Africa given to the kids for free:  the adults stole them.  You don’t have to spell or even keyboard on a tablet.  You can dictate into it, listen to it, draw with it, take photos, compose music.  Speech is a way of capturing and conveying what is happening in the mind and then writing is another level away from that.  Other media are more sensory, more invested with emotion, more immediate.  No media can ever be as powerful as face-to-face hands-on with another person, the vocabulary of touch.

Nevertheless, writing can give precision, it can hold something still for long enough to study it, research it. analyze it.  Proper tools for proper goals, improper tools for improper goals.  Propriety is situational; the protocols for one time and place won’t work in another.  We admire the creator who can explore that -- joining the minuet or throwing a bomb into a mob, as wanted -- maybe as needed.

Censorship is a strange practice if you ask me.  Why prevent people from seeing things they won’t understand anyway?  Why narrow their understanding of what humans can do and be?  Why assume that children should not know about death and sex or the suffering of other children other places?  Surely these days they already know.  What does it do to the censors who sit there and watch, read, think about all the forbidden subjects?   If it has no evil and corrupting effect on them, what makes them so much more able to handle it?  On the other hand, maybe they have become evil and corrupt from watching all this -- can they prove otherwise?

And yet, as a small child who normally had her questions answered, there were things I couldn’t figure out that took on a menacing shadow because adults were disturbed.  My father took me -- maybe three years old -- with him to the wool buying warehouse where he worked.  I had to pee but there were no women working there, no women’s bathroom.  My father took me into the communal bathroom while one of the other men guarded the door.  The row of urinals (the tall kind), so sculptural, so stinky, seized my imagination.  What were they?  Did they have something to do with the sheep?  Everyone pretended they didn’t know what I was talking about.  I dreamt about urinals.  Maybe they were an art form!

Rez kids have a thousand half-understood things shadowing them.  Unexpected reactions, glimpsed tableaus, misunderstood scenes in movies, song lyrics that make no sense.  I’ve been watching “Deadwood,” which I do not admire or even like, but it does have that hallucinatory quality of being half-understood, sometimes deadly and other times slapstick.  (Milch tells his actors to be “operatic,” but then admits he’s never attended an opera.) They didn’t dare take on Native Americans but the Chinese trope does just as well.  Also, whores, though they never even hint at MSM.  (No one says “gay” anymore.  Try to keep up.)  Shakespeare understood all this very well, even fancy language, MSM, cross-dressing, obsession, addiction and all that other fascinating plot material.  No censorship until the Victorian middle class suddenly decided Shakespeare was an icon of education.  The only reason the Bible escaped was that they rarely read it.

Writing that explains all that, writing that denies all that, writing that makes you feel a little strange, writing that confirms exactly what you’ve always believed -- everything has its place on a page, a screen, someone’s back fence, the side of an abandoned warehouse.  Maybe one’s own arm.  

Lately, in a world where men are garlanded with tattoos, the most eloquent writing I’ve seen was simply a straight black line drawn with a ruler down the inside of a young man’s arm, a geometry, a simple principle, written on living human truth.  Not exactly secret, but we don’t normally see the entire length of the underside of a young muscular arm.  I look at that strict plumb black line again and again, “reading” it.  I’ve fallen in love with it.

KIKA, KIKA!! WAIT NOW!!

Yoda says,  "Interested I am."

As a former English teacher, I assure you that we teach grammar all wrong.  We think of it as a rote memorization problem so my high school classes would parrot that a noun “is a person-place-or-thing.”  It certainly is not.  A noun is a WORD that is a name.  Grammar is the name of the pattern structure of any language.  Every language has a pattern structure, which is a thinking and analysis skill that people learn about the time they learn to walk.  How hard can it be if a toddler can learn it?  The only thing hard about it is that it’s unconscious so one literally doesn’t know what one is doing.

Getting things that are unconscious up to where they can be thought about is one of life’s valuable skills, esp. in a situation where one is in a culture that’s changing.  Because the changing is often a mess and confusing.  One major change right now is going from conventional print to texting and images.  A lot of what adults learned in school -- under pressure -- is now being replaced and they are offended, at least partly because it’s hard to understand that after all that work, there’s nothing to do with it except patronize other people.  

Anyway, communication has become political, dividing traditionalists and polylingual people, old generations and new generations, people who use jargon like computer terminology, people who are literal (a thing is a thing) and people who love metaphors.  When I watch English movies that are not the “Great Classics,” I have to work to catch their slang, sometimes part-for-the-whole and sometimes rhyme.  It’s great fun if you can keep up, but sometimes I surrender.

Diagramming sentences is not like doing crossword puzzles.  It is more like taking a machine apart to see how it works.  Unless the diagram shows you how the sentence could be made clearer, it’s useless.  Not that it isn’t helpful to do a little bit of memorizing: my students (as I did long ago) memorized the helping verbs and the prepositions, two excellent clues to how the sentence engine operates.

At the recent workshop on Issksiniip some attention was paid to the importance of learning to speak Blackfeet.  One of the problems is that it’s not a written language -- Hebrew was revived from being entirely dead because it was written.  Not only that, it was a religious language, so preserved with respect.  Learning a spoken language means that you have to speak it, which means that it is the task of a community that speaks together.  One of the ways Blackfeet is preserved is as prayer spoken at community events, so even in Western movies (which often has the Indians speaking Blackfeet because they learn it on the set from the stunt riders who are Blackfeet) there is religious language.  The books about Code Talkers fascinates us all, but we forget that they had to speak metaphorically, since there is no Navajo word for sharks and so on.

When I came to Browning in the Sixties, Peter Red Horn and his mom would interface with white people by producing little vocabulary lists and also by praying for occasions.  It was brave of them, because the missionary and government practice of suppressing the culture by suppressing the language (which they had used earlier on immigrants who didn’t speak English) had been so harsh that most the of the People felt it was just too dangerous.  It was considered backwards, hopeless, and hiding in the past.  But then it began to turn around, partly because of G.R. McLaughlin and Terry Sherburne presenting it alongside French classes in the high school with the help of Marvin Weatherwax’s mother.  Partly because of the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop, not because they taught the language, but because they valued freedom and culture of every kind.  But most of all it was the Piegan Institute and the organizing of Cuts Wood Immersion School that turned everything around.  Now many people know Blackfeet words at least.  Students, especially the youngest, have become fluent speakers again.

Few know the people who first converted oral language into written words and then analyzed them to figure out the grammar.  “Montana, 1911: a Professor and his Wife Among the Blackfeet” is the journal of a summer written by Wilhelmina Maria Uhlenbeck-Melchior.  Her husband, C. C. Uhlenbeck, would get the old-timers to tell him stories in Blackfeet that he struggled to understand and write down.  Then that evening, in the tent where they lived, he would try to recite them back in Blackfeet to whomever was interested.  It was a difficult life, recorded in a Dutch journal so not available to most Americans until Mary Eggermont-Molenar translated it.  She would not have known about it except for conversation about the Plains Indian Cultural Survival School in Calgary with Charles Fidler, a descendant of Peter Fidler, the first white man known to have seen Chief Mountain.  This book is an excellent introduction to the whole concept of anthropological study of language, which at that time was a salvage operation.

Donald Frantz (http://people.uleth.ca/~frantz/) is on the faculty at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.  His two books, “Blackfoot Dictionary” and “Blackfoot Grammar” show up in many used book sources, because people set out to learn the language, thinking it will be similar enough to English to just concentrate on the names of things, but then it turns out this isn’t true.  As Frantz himself says. “Grammar analysis concentrated on describing word formation, which is much more complicated than that of most languages. Most significant here is the fact that verbs are made up of parts that carry meanings usually carried by separate words in English. For example, "I will not be able to try to go to find you" would be expressed by one word in Blackfoot (kimátaakohkottsssáakotoohkoonoohpa). And of course the inflectional system of verbs and nouns required extensive periods of analysis.”  That means little bits were added to the main “stem words” to modify their meaning.

Frantz is not so well-known in the States, though I myself use his dictionaries all the time.  In part he scares secular people off because he learned the language in order to translate the Bible.  They are afraid of proselytizing even in a different language.  I would love to have a conversation with him about how he translated the spiritual concepts of the Blackfeet into the Euro-Xian concepts.  Of course, the indigenous People of the Blackfoot Nation in Canada have been a precious reservoir of ceremony and language.

Iksista’pssi, according to Frantz, means “a spirit that wanders”; Iksiiyisi means “contact with the earth while moving in a parabolic path”, maybe swinging down like a hawk to catch a ground squirrel.  Iksaii’taki means to be challenged by a task that must be finished.  Issk can mean “a pail” or it can mean “long ago.”  What I love about languages is that they are so suggestive, a poetry, a system of images.  I love it when they are fluid, moving as though they were traveling across a landscape -- which, of course, they are.  

I don’t care about correctness.  I do care about clarity, which is the real purpose of grammar, and about saying things well, with style, but that doesn’t mean being stuffy.  It just means being thoughtful about what’s really being said.  Iksaii’taki.

WRITING, GRAMMAR AND LITURGY

Now and then I consider “teaching” or “coaching” or “tutoring” writing.  Sort of a “share the wealth” idea.  I have to use so many quotes because I realize how out of sync I am with the culture.  I don’t even mean the same thing by “writing,” much less “good writing.”   These days one writes to sell and that means writing to order, as patterned as a pie.  Then, of course, the publishers will tell you that it is a status thing: good writing means being a “published writer,” sort of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Once I was asked to judge a high school speech contest and completely bolixed up the process because my idea of a good speech was so different from what was being taught and so counter to the expectations of the sponsors.  I thought originality, intelligence and passion should count more than anything else.  They did not.  

A related problem is that so many people think that teaching is something imposed on a yielding but passive student, rather than an energetic pursuit BY the student with the teacher panting to keep up.  At the same time students prize their own personal ideas so much that they resent any kind of judgment from the teacher as a denial of their identity and possibly an affront to their religious position.  They will not accept discipline (I mean self-control, not punishment) or alternatives.  Most of them are dominated by the group to which they belong, whether demographic or through some kind of affinity or simply income level.  This has been deadly for some groups, since the circle of people who are willing to be consumers gets tighter and tighter.  There seems to be a sociopolitical complex arising as a monster from what was once well-intentioned “creativity” and “independence” and “self-respect.” 

Among the ordinarily resisted disciplines is that of grammar.  In some ways I’m not surprised because grammar is taught as an end when it is simply a means to clarity.  In fact, most people confuse grammar and standard usage -- not saying “ain’t” is not a matter of grammar -- it’s usage.  Using a double negative IS bad grammar if you’re speaking English.  Usage is convention within a community.   Grammar is the structural pattern of the sentences that guides the sense.  Unless one can at will change a participle to a prepositional phrase, a gerund to a noun-adjective combination, keep parallel structure and connect participles to their antecedents, the poor reader may have to reread and reread to get sense out of the passage. 

Nowadays we get forced out of one set of “writing” conventions into another because of technology, adding signals to conventional punctuation.  A good example is the automated formatting of print on an eReader, which can make hash of such elements as lines, stanzas and verses in poetry.  Many poets now use a slash mark to end a line.  If the program is nimble enough and one’s techie chops are up to it, colored fonts, completely different fonts, strange  alphabets, drawings, videos and even music can be introduced.  This is hard to teach -- standards are not worked out yet -- and it’s way too complex for a conformity-based culture (like ours) to support so far.  We sit scratching our heads.  But the kids, maybe through games and maybe through music, ARE willing to exert themselves to learn in those contexts.  Does it follow that we should use games and music to teach writing?  I hope not.  But surely teachers can learn. 

Teachers study students in order to bridge the subject with the students.  But it is not lesson plans nor standardized tests that make it happen.  The main instrument is the personhood of the teacher.  I was just looking at the website of a self-declared writer who in fact teaches English at the college level and writes about it on her website.   Her writing is full of high school level errors.  Does she compensate for this with insight, analysis, tenderness, epiphanies or bravery?  Who says she should?  I can’t tell you who she is without giving you her name and that would expose her too much.  She’s a Westerner, runs with the right crowd, and is beautiful.  She evidently does not believe in proofing.  No one seems to mind.

A teaching friend finds it unnerving that his students demand all the time,  “what must I do to get an A?”  -- “what do you want from me?”  As though they were whores bargaining a price.  They have no sense of possibility, no intentions of their own except to get certified for prosperity.  What enormous irony this is, since no one can teach prosperity -- it’s like the Holy Ghost, totally dependent on forces way beyond one’s transcript.  But they have no sense of irony either, because irony bounces off reality and they have no commonsense grip on reality.  Learning can be fun and learning together should be intimate, but in our culture fun is frivolity and intimacy is sex. 

What’s to be done?  No need to do anything.  This problem is self-correcting, painful as correction may be, maybe like an economic “correction.”  No government, institution or even family can keep people from learning.  The world is different enough now that the original plan of universal county/state tax-supported education for citizenship and literacy is not working.  The schools have become the tools of corporations -- but they were always meant to make us factory workers.  Mega-cities are pyramidal puzzles.

It may be that the new schools will be online or take libraries as their nucleus.  Here you go:  http://www.youtube.com/education.  Maybe charter schools,  Churches?  Writing is really about thinking and thinking is about what matters in the world which is feeling.  How do you teach that to people?

Somehow I stumbled onto a path into the future.  In seminary for my thesis I was reading Suzanne Langer, who spent a lot of time thinking about what she called “felt concepts.”  They are the things that are pre-verbal, subverbal, even subconscious, inhabitants of dreams.  Today we would say they were the sensory elements that compose thinking and identity.  This is the level kids seem to be on, especially the ones worldwide who have escaped all formal schooling, who do not sit at desks, but spend their days foraging for food and their nights hiding from predators.  The gizmos that are only Gameboys to our suburban kids, smartphones to our professionals, are spaceships for those kids, a leap into hyperdrive where they can actually show us what they know through video, painting, song and dance, the eloquence of the senses calling us.  

That’s liturgy, NOT writing.  It precedes and underlies writing, but many people writing today do not have this level of being in their lives.  It has been replaced by media.  In the meantime, if anyone wants to know how the little teeter-totter of the sentence works and how meaning dangles from it in dependent clauses like a chandelier, a mobile, a candleabra -- I could show you.  It’s not the most important thing, but it’s useful.

MODIFIERS (MERRY SCRIBBLER)

Once a person can dependably identify the noun-verb combination in a sentence (noting as an aside that a verb can be a sentence all by itself -- as in a command -- but a noun, not so much) then attention turns to the modifications to that central “hinge” or “engine.” It’s still important to know a wide range of nouns and verbs with specific connotations and associations, in particular the verbs, but much of the essence of style and clarity is in the modifiers.

Modifiers of nouns answer the questions:
What kind?
What size?
Which one?
How many?
Whose?

Modifiers of verbs answer the questions:
Where?
How much or to what degree?
When?
In what manner?

Almost more importantly, in English one-word (adjective) modifiers of nouns always have to come just in front of the noun they modify. It’s the opposite in romance languages like French or Spanish -- they give you the big concept and then modify it with the adjectives: “house -- big, white, porched, and dirty.” In English one must keep all the adjectives in mind until coming to the noun: “a big, white, dirty, porched dog.”

One-word adverbs can come almost anywhere and it is often by moving the adverb around that one can improve clarity. It helps to think in terms of what the reader needs to know first.
“Lately I’ve felt lazy.”
“I’ve felt lazy lately.”
“I’ve lately felt lazy.”
“I’ve felt lately lazy.”
Some of these arrangements have a kind of arcane feeling, some emphasize the laziness and others seem to say it’s not usual.

The next step is that prepositional phrases can be either adjectives or adverbs. Adjective prepositional phrases always come AFTER the noun they modify, but again the adverb prepositional phrases can go anywhere. They answer the same questions as one-word modifiers.
“In the morning we’ll go.”
“We’ll go in the morning.”
“We will in the morning go.”
Breaking a verb phrase by putting a modifier in the middle of it (the verb here being “will go”) is usually a no-no, but can be right if it’s meant to give emphasis or to track a speaker’s train of thought.

So now one has to stop and learn by heart the prepositions, because a prepostional phrase is a set of words that always begins with a preposition and ends with a noun. There might or might not be modifiers ahead of this noun. My position when teaching high school was always that a preposition without a noun is an adverb, so I suppose one could maintain the reverse: that a preposition is an adverb with an object.

in, into, to, by, for, at, up, upon, of, off, above, beside, beneath, before, around, down, beyond, past, between, behind ... I can’t say these automatically anymore. Maybe part of the reason is that once one grasps the concept of a prepositional phrase, they stick out of the sentence as a whole. In my classroom I used to have a poster of pigs trying to climb in, into, to, by, around, down, beyond . . . You get the idea. Prepositional pigs.

One of the most helpful exercises for beginning grammarians is to mark off the prepositional phrases by coloring or bracketing or underlining. In fact, with modern fiber tips, I think it’s very useful to use assigned colors to the parts of speech and regularly mark up sentences on printed out worksheets. I’ll post some on merryscribbler.blogspot.com. It’s useful to take sentences out of books or even to write down sentences heard on the radio and mark them up. There’s one NPR news person who drives me crazy because she’s in the habit of asking a question, then adding to the original sentence one prepositional phrase after another -- the listener can’t tell when the question is going to end. “Mr. X, did you enjoy going to this country in this season by yourself in a Land Rover with a contract for a book from a noted New York publisher for the third time?”

As a rule of style, if one values the concise, one should press towards reducing prepositional phrases to one-word modifiers and modifiers to vivid nouns or verbs.
“The horse went along the trail with its inclines.” or

“Along the trail with its inclines the horse went.” (The horse doesn’t have inclines so the prepositional phrase has to to with the trail.)
“The horse went along the steep trail.” or

“Along the steep trail the horse went.” Not so tricky since there is only one prepositional phrase to move.

“The horse scrambled.”
Note that the differences are in feeling tone more than in meaning. One can play with ambiguity this way -- more or less? Which serves the purpose?

This kind of grammar thinking is a lot more fun and a lot more useful than categorizing words according to some Latinate system.

TEACHIN' ENGLISH ON A REZ

When I signed up to be an English teacher, I thought I’d be teaching stories and grammar, which I took to mean sentence diagramming -- which I love, taking it to be a kind of architecture of language. Alas, I discovered that what everyone else thought was “English” was simply conformity to standard usage, achieved by browbeating and repetition, which is why so many people hate English. Of course, on a reservation one had the added twist that “English” was the language the people were FORCED to speak while they were beaten for speaking Blackfeet, considered to be a language of rebellion, quite apart from “having no grammar at all” -- which simply meant that English speakers couldn’t tell when Blackfeet was spoken properly from when it wasn’t. The view that Blackfeet was the language of rebellion became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

German speakers have a headstart with Blackfeet because, like German, it often uses words that add particles to refine the meaning. It’s “agglutinative.” (In fact, it’s even “gutteral” sounding to an English ear because, like German, the words include sounds made in the back of the mouth and with the glottis (that little thing that dangles down in the middle). At a certain point in history the sounds of the English language moved to the front of the mouth -- as in the speech exercise: “the tip of the tongue, the lips and the teeth.” This was understood to be more elite for some reason. (The Scots, who kept back-of-the-throat sounds, are likely to disagree.) If you say to an Indian that his language is “gutteral” he is likely to think you mean it is “of the gutter” and to become very angry, the same as those infamous Black students who got their teacher fired for using the word “niggardly.” (It’s a Scandinavian word meaning “stingy,” and the Scots would like you to know that they are not necessarily niggardly either, but simply natural conservers.)

The big thing with the grammar of English language is the subject/verb engine at the center, which diagramming makes clear. Everything is appended to this relationship through the use of modifiers and conjunctions. Since there are some words that are nearly always verbs, the verbs of being which are also often “linking verbs” that form verb phrases, it helps to learn these little verbs by heart:
be, am, is, are, was, were, been
have, has, had
do, does, did
shall, will
may, can
must, might
could, would, should.

This is the alphabet of verbs as taught by Agnes Carter at Vernon Grade School in Portland, Oregon, in the Forties and Fifties. This litany serves as a password among certain persons. It’s a code for cracking sentences. There are a few others, which I’ll get to later.

Once in a whlle grammar will help solve a usage problem, but not often and not usually the kind that many people worry about. Things like the difference between “whom” and “who,” for instance. (“Whom” is objective, when the word is the object of a verb or preposition, while “who” is subjective, either the subject of the sentence or a “predicate word” which is a synonym for the subject and thus is following “be, am, is, are, was, were or been.”

Markers for social class, ethnic origin and education are now all scrambled up. People say “ain’t” knowing that you know they know better. Some will even defend it as merely archaic rather than improper. People speak “ebonics” as a political matter. Some have gone so far as to learn to speak Blackfeet. Usage is like clothing: one must fit the occasion, one can go around shabby with rips and stains, one can mis-button one’s shirt and leave one’s zipper down, one can relax “en deshabille” or one can dress snappy -- a little more stylish and polished than anyone else. Much depends on whether one is responding to necessity, distraction, sarcasm or pride.

But if you get too far out of line with grammar, no one can understand what you’re saying. “With hammer the” means nothing. Words must be in the right order and that order is dictated by grammar, because where the word is in the sentence tells you at least part of what it means. Luckily, we all (or most of us) learn grammar when we’re toddlers without the slightest consciousness of what we are doing. Part of the difficulty of addressing the subject in school is that everyone already knows their grammar and, like the centipede who started to think about which foot came next and ended up lying on his back in the ditch waving all the feet in the air, becoming conscious of an unconscious skill is all very awkward and leads to a lot of blunders at first.

At Heart Butte Star Wars came along at just the right time for several reasons, but one of the most amusing ones was Yoda’s grammar, which was rather Celtic. “Angry I am!” he exclaimed instead of “I am angry!” because he was in the habit of putting his predicate words ahead of both subject and verb. The seventh grade so enjoyed “talking like Yoda.” That took a little of the sting out of grammar.

Spike Jones’ old song about “Get out of here with that... thumpety-thump” -- the thumping standing in for the object of a preposition -- was also helpful. “Get out of here with that xertypootwap!” makes grammatical sense, even if you’ve never in your life ever heard of a xertypootwap! (One needs to be on the alert for euphemisms, though, given the seventh grade mind. Saying to someone, “Fern YOU!” is likely to make trouble.)

I do not endorse the elaboration of grammar into a major political structuralist argument, but it does seem obvious to me that we organize our sentences around the presumption that there are things (nouns) and what things do or are (verbs) and that a bit of reflection about how they “work” is very helpful when it comes to clarifying both sentences and thought.

Originally, I’d planned to confine these reflections to merryscribbler.blogspot.com, but now I’m thinking I’ll put some of the issues on this blog and keep the other blog alive mostly for the posting of exercises. Reflecting I am, while I type this rumpety-tum.