"Grammarian"
« previous post | next post »
Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also because the issues involved belong to aspects of usage (like orthography and lexical semantics) that are not part of what we call grammar.
But the OED's primary definition for grammarian is
An expert or specialist in grammar; a person who studies, writes about, or teaches grammar. Also more generally: an expert in or student of language; a linguist, a philologist; (formerly also) †a person of great learning (obsolete).
Sometimes (esp. from the 17th to early 19th centuries) somewhat depreciative, implying that a person is pedantic, too focused on minutiae, or overly concerned with rules and conventions.
The depreciative sense is illustrated in an 1806 citation from Henry Kirke White:
All that arithmeticians know, Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach.
Elle Cordoba's hypervillains spar over
Snuck vs. sneaked
Use of passive voice
Dangling modifiers
Split infinitives
Double negatives
Literally meaning "figuratively"
Loss of subjunctive mood
Pluralizing apostrophes
The Oxford comma
"I could care less"
Irregardless
"Beg the question"
"Between you and I"
Parenthetical asides
Bad vs. badly
…all of which have occasioned one or more LLOG posts, though we call the grammarian side prescriptivists (or even more negatively-evaluated terms). I'll spare you the links unless specifically requested.
My impression is that recent uses of the word "grammarian" are depreciative more often than not. For example, from Max Maxfield, "Good-For-Nothing Grammarians", IEEE Journal 12/28/2021:
[O]ne of my back-burner hobby projects is writing a book called Wroting Inglish: The Essential Guide to Writing English for Anyone Who Doesn’t Want to be Thought a Dingbat. […]
As part of writing this little rascal — Max’s Magnum Opus, if I might make so bold — I’ve learned all sorts of things myself, including the fact that I have an innate dislike of grammarians who delight in telling us that we’re doing everything wrong and that the world would be a much better place if we did things their way. Admittedly, these sad fellows, with their stooped shoulders, nervous tremors, and complete lack of personality (which explains why they are so rarely invited to parties) are presented with the unenviable task of attempting to retrofit grammar onto a living, breathing, and constantly evolving language. One might almost feel sorry for them if they weren’t such complete and utter drongos who have caused so much pain and suffering for the rest of us.
More context for the deprecation in Kirke's 1806 poem "On Being Confined To School One Pleasant Morning In Spring":
The morning sun's enchanting rays
Now call forth every songster's praise;
Now the lark, with upward flight,
Gaily ushers in the light;
While wildly warbling from each tree,
The birds sing songs to Liberty.
But for me no songster sings,
For me no joyous lark upsprings;
For I, confined in gloomy school,
Must own the pedant's iron rule,
And far from sylvan shades and bowers,
In durance vile must pass the hours;
There con the scholiast's dreary lines,
Where no bright ray of genius shines,
And close to rugged learning cling,
While laughs around the jocund spring.
How gladly would my soul forego
All that arithmeticians know,
Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach,
Or all that industry can reach,
To taste each morn of all the joys
That with the laughing sun arise;
And unconstrain'd to rove along
The bushy brakes and glens among;
And woo the muse's gentle power
In unfrequented rural bower:
But, ah! such heaven-approaching joys
Will never greet my longing eyes;
Still will they cheat in vision fine,
Yet never but in fancy shine.
Update — it's worth pointing out that there are several different (but overlapping) ways in which "grammarians" can make people dislike them:
- Correction of genuine errors in usage, by teachers or editors or others whose formal role sanctions the intervention, in a context or manner that is perceived as unpleasant
- Correction of genuine errors in usage by people who have no formal basis for intervention
- Attempts to enforce zombie rules (see also here and here), or idiosyncratic personal prejudices, as if they were valid generalizations about usage
By "genuine errors" I mean things like
- (Contextually inappropriate) deviations from spelling conventions
- "Malapropisms" and other genuine misunderstandings of word meaning and usage
There are also things that are not really errors, but will be perceived as such and judged negatively by some readers or hearers, so that interventions are sometimes appropriate. And of course descriptivist linguists sometimes annoy "grammarians" by criticizing the content, context, or mode of their interventions.
All of this is strictly analogous to interventions about dress codes, table manners, personal grooming, and so on.
Philip Taylor said,
November 22, 2024 @ 5:50 am
Well, as you would expect, I find nothing wrong with prescriptivism (nor with proscriptivism, for that matter) since these were the norm when I was at school. But your closing poem remind me of another which I would like to repeat here :
Henry Reed, 1942.
Cheryl Thornett said,
November 22, 2024 @ 7:10 am
Back in the days when I taught English as a second/third/fourth language, I carefully labelled the grammar part of my lesson plans as 'structures', not for the students, who wanted grammar and mostly by that name, but for certain managers and inspectors. In any case, lists of [often] zombie rules don't really help anyone learn how to put expressions together in a way that helps to convey their meaning.
I would advocate teaching children on the basis of 'how to put words together to make your meaning clear' as well, with spelling and punctuation also in service of meaning. Knowing the term 'fronted adverbial' at 11, as mandated by a Conservative education department in the UK, doesn't do that, unless you know how and when it's a good idea to use one or not.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 22, 2024 @ 7:46 am
Another use:
Grammar of Assent
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
John Henry Newman
1870
Julian said,
November 22, 2024 @ 7:56 am
Thank you Philip. Always found that one deeply moving, but I don't know why.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 22, 2024 @ 11:07 am
The poem Philip Taylor quotes is included in the 1952 revised edition of "A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American" (Oscar Williams, ed.), which my father got a copy of as an undergraduate in the late 1950's which then sat on the shelf for several decades until I picked it up as a high school student in the early 1980's and read and reread it rather obsessively. Don't know how many of the 1940's compositions therein have made the cut for inclusion in more recent anthologies, but that's a good poem whose merits have survived the perhaps heavy-handed suggestion of its original wartime context.
Brett said,
November 22, 2024 @ 12:01 pm
It's a very evocative poem, particularly that in the extended contrast of rifle parts to gardens, the first plant Reed mentions is Japonica.
David Morris said,
November 22, 2024 @ 3:30 pm
A commenter on my blog claimed that 'grammarian' should only be used in the depreciative sense. I searched and found a post (here or somewhere else) by Geoffrey Pullum, calling Rodney Huddleston the world's most eminent grammarian. Wikipedia's article on him calls him a linguist and grammarian, but the words 'linguist' and 'grammarian' both link to 'linguistics'.
Steve Morrison said,
November 22, 2024 @ 9:19 pm
Of course, there’s the problem that insisting on limiting the usage of “grammar”/“grammarian” to the correct technical sense is itself a form of prescriptivism.
Chas Belov said,
November 23, 2024 @ 1:50 am
Hmm, technically "stiff grammarians" judges stiff grammarians, not all grammarians. It doesn't exclude the possibility of relaxed grammarians, who would presumably be descriptivists.
Michael Vnuk said,
November 23, 2024 @ 4:11 am
Kirke's poem rhymes 'joys' with 'arise' and also 'eyes', and 'along' with 'among'. I couldn't quickly find any evidence elsewhere of these words rhyming. Kirke seems to have made the effort in the rest of the poem to make the rhymes work, so why not with these words? Or, are there pronunciation variants that I am unaware of?
Andrew Shields said,
November 23, 2024 @ 4:23 am
I thought of this passage from Jane Austen’s “Emma” (1816):
"Such an adventure as this, – a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other? – How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight! – especially with such a groundwork of anticipation as her mind had already made."
Philip Taylor said,
November 23, 2024 @ 5:08 am
Michael — I don't think that pronunciation variants are involved here. Although I am moderately prescriptivist in my approach to poetry, I find that "joys" and "arise" evoke the same pleasurable poetic sensation/reaction/emotion in me as a purer rhyming pair such as "boys" and "annoys".
Andrew Usher said,
November 23, 2024 @ 8:54 am
Actually, the rhymes noted by Michael Vnuk do show something of pronunciation. For the first type, PRICE/CHOICE rhymes are often encountered in old poetry and it is assumed that a merger or near-merger of the two existed in some high-status speech into the 18th c., and of course later in dialects. It may have been just a poetic tradition for Kirke, but a useful one as there are very few usable CHOICE words.
For the latter, along/among, we can be fairly sure a pronunciation variant was involved. 'Among' like 'long' is the etymologically expected outcome (which you can't tell from the spelling) and the current standard unexplainable, as far as I know.
As for the word 'grammarian', I have only even though it to be a neutral descriptor; it can be prescriptive or descriptive, just as with 'grammar'.
RfP said,
November 24, 2024 @ 12:53 am
My family had a handful of phonograph records when I was very young.
My favorite was a musical.
I liked it for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones was that it was about… a scientist.
Some of my favorite lines were from a song called “You Did It,” which is only one out of many songs that I loved from My FairLady.
Here’s a goodish chunk of the lyrics—I’ve highlighted a couple of lines that appreciate grammarians and their kind.
Henry Higgins certainly had his faults, but he was also brilliant in his own way:
JPL said,
November 24, 2024 @ 6:56 pm
"Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit."
Linguists are probably right to feel that the term 'grammarian' in its technical sense belongs to them, but in the case of the "word" 'grammarian' in its ordinary general sense there is nothing that can be done about it, and anyway that usage has no bearing on the technical usage in linguistics. My impression is that in linguistics the term 'grammarian' refers primarily to people like Pullum and Huddleston, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik, Jim McCawley ("The Syntactic Phenomena of English", 2 vols.), Otto Jespersen, etc. What they do could be called in more modern terms "descriptive morphosyntax". (People who write descriptive grammars of languages other than their own are usually called simply "descriptive linguists".) Then there are the theorists, who are concerned not so much with the description of the facts of particular languages, but with understanding the nature and form of the general principles governing the internal structure of sentences in any language, keeping in mind that what always has to be accounted for are their properties of unity and completeness. These linguists, it seems, are typically called "syntacticians". (And btw, as shown by Sadock's "autolexical grammar", Hudson's "word grammar", Fillmore's "construction grammar", and even Chomsky's "lexical features", the phenomenon of lexicons has always been a part of what they are theorizing about.)
But the sense and reference of the term 'grammar' in its technical usage in linguistics is not so straightforward. It's a term of ancient origin, and has been subject to reinterpretation over the centuries, but, as seen in the OED definition above, what it actually refers to is usually just taken for granted. But if linguistics in general, and the study of "grammar" in particular, is an empirical science, and if, as seems to be the practice of descriptive linguistics, "grammar" as the empirical object of interest has the property of objectivity, then what is it that gives it that quality of objective existence in the world? (This question does not seem to bother the theorists, probably because they can sidestep it by pursuing the method of modelling.) Censoriousness is no part of the linguistic grammarian's task; they're just trying to get it right wrt what they take as an objective fact. But what in the real world is the grammarian, or the syntactician, actually talking about? What sort of an object is a "grammar", what mode of existence does it have, and where exactly is it? Does it have primarily a psychological-level existence, is it primarily something associated with a speech community? Simply the data written down in the notebook? For Chomsky it seems to have a basically biological-level existence. And especially, how did this object, which is a pre-existing fact wrt any new speaker's entry into the world, for any particular language, get to be the way that it is today? (I mean what are the mechanisms of construction?)
E.g., language contact is mainly a historical relation between speech communities; "grammars" change as a result of it, but what sorts of objects (ontologically) are changing, and where are they? It would seem that linguists would be interested in getting clear about what kind of thing they're referring to when they are describing a language's "grammatical" phenomena, or especially grammatical principles. Not to mention the problem of what Putnam called "pointing to the inscription and thinking the meaning", and what aspects of the human language phenomenon are included in the "grammar of a language". (BTW, linguists should be interested in Wittgenstein's (or Anscombe's) use of the related terms 'use' and 'usage', and not just take philosophers' understanding of them without question.)
/df said,
November 28, 2024 @ 12:01 pm
As with choice/price, so with Mayfair/My Fair …
One poser for the "stiff grammarian" from the 1806 poem
"While laughs around the jocund spring."
is only resolved after conning (to use its word) the words in the line as "laughs" = n.pl. (subj.), "jocund" = "jocund (person)", n.sing., and "spring" = vb. (intrans.), 3rd pers. pl. ind. act. How should said grammarian view the use of "among" as a post-position?