On Grammar

Ugh.

As those of you who know me personally can attest, I frequently mention that I was almost an English major. By all means, I should have been – I’m pretentious as all get out and I’ve used the phrase “economy of prose” more than once in an attempt to impress women – but when it came down to me filling out my registration paperwork at the University of Oregon, I was somehow driven to put “Pre-Journalism” instead of “English” in the INTENDED MAJOR box.

My reasons for doing this were twofold: 1) If you play it right, a Journalism degree is basically an English degree with job security (making $4.00 an hour as a jester at a renaissance faire does not count as a job, English majors), and 2) The English curriculum here appears to be heavily based in reading than in writing, which is more my area of interest. Yes, I know – if I want to be a good writer, I should be a good reader. I’m just sort of banking on maybe being the exception to the rule. “If you want to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader – unless you’re Truman Capps, he’s a great writer but all he reads is Vonnegut and Stephen King. It’s really wild, he’s just… Naturally good, y’know? Damndest thing. Otherwise, though, you’ve got to be a good reader.”

By and large, I feel that my selection of Journalism as a major was a good choice, right up until I have to do any sort of work that displeases me, at which point I instantly start bemoaning my pursuit of job security and avoidance of literature. Case in point: Prerequisites. To get into the School of Journalism and Communication, you need to take five prerequisite classes, each of which pertains to a different area of journalism, each sucking in its own unique, beautiful way. In J201, I sat in a lecture hall with more people than there are in the marching band and learned the history of mass media (basically – everything was going nicely until TV fucked it all up, and things had only just got back to normal when the Internet fucked it all up again, and we still don’t know what’s going on there). In J204, I was shoehorned into learning how to use InDesign and Photoshop, skills that I have now completely forgotten and hope to never learn again. Next term I will take J202, a class commonly referred to as “Info Hell”, because it consists of a single, 100-page long research paper to be completed of the course of ten weeks. Do you see what I’m talking about? Info Hell! It’s like Hell, only you’re getting burned by knowledge itself! I prefer to take a hands-off approach toward knowledge, staying far enough back that I don’t have to breathe any smoke but close enough so that I can roast a weenie or two over its crackling orange flames.

At the moment, though, I’m fighting my way through J101, Grammar for Journalists, and if the past two weeks have been any indication, it seems that my weenie has caught fire and there aren’t any other ones left in the bag, so I’m pretty much stuck with it. Despite my experience as a writer, I’ve always had the same attitude towards grammar that Huckleberry Finn did toward Widow Douglass’ attempts to “sivilize” him – I’ve been having a grand old time running free and unwashed through the fertile countryside of Language, scattering commas like breadcrumbs and dangling my participles as I please, and I’m highly resistant of any attempts to wash my writing off, put it in a suit, and make it go to church on Sundays. My style of writing is highly individual – I have yet to meet anyone else who is able to cajole words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs in quite the same way that I do. Grammar – a codex of rules and regulations, meant to clarify thoughts and unify styles of writing – is my natural enemy. Look at how long my sentences are, or how many dashes I use – I fully recognize that this flies in the face of proper grammar, but as far as I’m concerned, grammar can get its own damn blog.

What bugs me most about grammar is that it takes writing, which I love, and turns it into math, which I hate. Up until grammar comes into play, writing is free and organic, but once you start tossing words like “gerund” and “subordinating conjunction” around I start to get the feeling that I’ll need to pull out my graphing calculator. I’ve never seen sentences as clusters of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns that form phrases and clauses. I seen them as the space between periods, into which I can cram as many interesting words as I want, provided I break up the action with a comma every now and then. It’s like if someone started harshly regulating how you played with your Legos as a kid. “No, you can’t build a house with red bricks – that’s Not Right. You have to use four black bricks, a brown brick, and this plastic Lego pizza; only then will you be Right.”

I’m not saying that the rules and regulations of grammar are bad – I’m not a Grammarchist. Grammar is very useful, to a point. I appreciate knowing where my apostrophes are appropriate and mastering my subject/verb agreements in a way many Southerners cannot. And under the right circumstances, the uniformity grammar imposes on language is invaluable. What tweaks me are the mindless Nazis that grammar creates; marching in lockstep together with smug grins spread across their faces and copies of The Elements Of Style tucked safely under one arm, glibly correcting passers-by on their use of “I” versus “Me” or “who” and “whom” – who do you guys think you’re fooling? We might need you when we’re writing newspaper articles and business documents, but not when we’re talking to our friends or writing in our blogs. Your boss doesn’t follow you home on the weekends (I hope), so please don’t follow our words home.

My professor’s reasoning is that we have to know the rules of grammar in order to break them. I disagree – I think that we have to know the rules of grammar to know that we’re breaking them. Ignorance, as far as I’m concerned, is bliss.

Truman Capps doesn’t get to say “weenie” enough.