Teaching Thursday

A good friend made a comment to me recently about language. She said of a professional friend of hers, "How could he have a college degree and still use poor grammar?" Grammar, strangely enough, is not a matter of education, it's a matter of the home.

A professor friend of mine, years ago, told me that if you want to speak properly, you have to choose the right parents. Instantly, I thought back to my own parents who spoke impeccably. My father was a word artist and my mother tagged along. I thought about their parents. My mother's father was an engineer for the State of New York, and my grandmother was a Chemistry teacher. My father's father was a police officer who rose to Deputy Commissioner of New York City, and my grandmother was the daughter of immigrants who spoke seven languages. Back one generation, you run into lots of immigrants who really had to struggle with English. My father's grandparents owned the lofts that made Brooks Brother's clothes and one was a furrier. All these people used language as a necessary tool in communication and moving up the social ladder.

In my family, there came to be money and position, and there better be good grammar, because grammar and manners were much more important than either money or position. I was reared to understand that it was a duty to learn to speak the language as flawlessly as possible, because one could distinguish your family by the way you presented yourself in public. If you "Couldn't speak the 'King's English' then you might as well be the hired help." And speaking of hired help, one was ALWAYS ALWAYS gracious to anyone working in a capacity of service NO MATTER WHAT, and no matter how they spoke. But you didn't copy them...

As I grew up, we moved quite a lot. As a Californian, I struggled with "There's eighteen reasons why." And as I moved east, I began to hear really poor grammar for the first time. "Where is it at?" I heard "ain't" for the first time and people using double negatives. I began to ask questions because it sounded so strange to me. I began to really look at our language and try to understand it simply because that is what my family did.

English is an interesting language. We have tenses unlike Chinese and some of the more primitive languages. We can also un double the negatives to make sense of what someone is saying. We can interpret because of the language not in spite of it.

Today, in a world where the classes are mixed, you hear a lot of language oops and being in college won't change poor grammar unless you make the effort. What your parents give you as "language skills" will probably stay with you because language is sound, and what you grow up hearing will always seem to be correct simply because it is so familiar.

Why bother? Who cares? Isn't it a snob gig... it is and it isn't. If you consider language to be your primary communication skill, then you need to ask yourself if your communication with other people matters and to what skill or level? For whom does communication not matter? Is anyone exempt? Is it OK to say, "I don't speak properly because..." I can't think of an ending to that sentence that isn't poor.

From an understanding of history and psychology, traditionally, people who didn't speak properly usually didn't read well orally, and had less ability to understand what they read on an intellectual level. These people had a diminished vocabulary, couldn't put a sentence together on paper... but it all fit together. Historically, undereducated people didn't need vast vocabularies, didn't need to use language for more than their daily lives, so it didn't matter.

Today, it matters getting the job you want, in keeping the job you want, in teaching your own children, and in presenting yourself to the world on a different plain. Does a company want an executive to present himself by saying things like, "I have went there before?" Companies will interview for a whole day for jobs of importance, and communication skills matter a lot. In fields like education, there are those who "get" the degree and never read another book. There are those who can't read another book because they simply don't have the vocabulary to do so, so the education ends with the diploma and a certain relief that there is a lot of grade inflation, and yes ANYONE can get a college degree if he or she sits long enough.

So how does language change for the poor user? First by listening to it, and then by really hearing it. Language is very closely related to music. When you write, there is a balance and a lilt and you can hear it if you listen. When you read aloud, there should be a music to every line. The music begins, it is either short like staccato, or long like a violin stroke; it has ups and downs, it has a beginning and an end, and the good reader keeps the listeners spell bound by the words presented in the best of communication.

Good grammar flows from rules, so you don't always feel as if you have to go back and re-write what someone said. The rules are not that hard to understand if you listen. Asking questions of what you hear and say is a good practice. Can I "went?" No. I can "go," I can "have been," but I can't "went." The best thing to do is to listen and think and form new good habits one at a time.

Education is an internal thing not an external thing. Some of the best educated people in the world never stepped foot on a college campus. And some of the least educated people teach on a college campus. The ability to be educated is the ability to understand. It takes a certain kind of personality not time in the classroom.