Grammar Girl's Guide to the English Language

Style mavens lament the lost art of language

Tues., Jan. 6, 1998

FINAL EDITION

Section: LIFE

Page 10D

 

From the crow's nest of academia, Don Taylor views grammar as the Pequod, the doomed whaling ship in Moby Dick.

Call him the Ishmael of Language.

He is witness to a discipline tempest-tossed by television, marooned in the classroom and now being dragged to the bottom by the Internet, the Great White Whale of modern communication.

``Where is the grace of Cicero? The style of Johnson? The delicious prose of Dante?'' laments Taylor, who keeps a watch on words from his home in Wichita, Kan. ``Gone in the frothy scum on the decks of the Pequod.''

Defenders of English mourn a bygone era when readers knew that penguins flock in a colony, cranes congregate in a herd and larks gather in an exultation.

``I remember distinctly doing adverb clauses and adjective clauses,'' says Mary Anne Jameson, a high school English teacher from Cocoa, Fla. ``All that went out in the '60s, when everyone was doing his own thing.''

Alas, fewer people read the classics these days. They watch television instead.

What they hear is terrifying.

For example, a news anchor in the Midwest recently described an automobile accident in which a man was killed and his wife survived. The newsman solemnly intoned: ``The man died leaving she and the young son to grieve for him.''

Once again, Taylor felt the stinging froth from the Pequod's bloodied decks.

``AAAArgh!'' laments the retiree with a Ph.D. in English literature. ``No wonder kids are having problems with grammar.''

The newsman, were he grammatically vigilant, would have said: ``The man died leaving her and the young son to grieve for him.''

Taylor and his ilk bristle at the young woman on the Tylenol Sinus commercial who chirps about an upcoming outing: ``We do it every year, just Dad and me.''

``Dad and I!'' the Grammar Police exclaim. ``Dad and I!''

Even the watchdogs of language throw a bone to those who uphold English. Taylor and his friends laud Internet sites that are grammatically flawless, such as the U.S. Navy's Web page on the structure and operation of submarines (www.csg9.trfb.navy.mil/html/ssbn.htm).

Those who harpoon the Internet will be happy to learn that the grammar lifeboats have been launched. Among those providing guidance to the linguistically lost at sea is Grammar Girl, a caped cartoon blonde with a ``G'' on her chest. Her grammatically correct comrades include the august Lydbury English Centre; the Grammar Queen; and the Grammar and Style Guide.

In terms of proper usage, the Internet itself raises questions. In fact, the Grammar Lady (www.grammarlady.com) received a recent challenge on that front:

Q: Is there an appropriate way to list a Web site in a bibliography?

A: List the address, with only the punctuation needed for complete access to the Web site; the date the author consulted the site is listed in parentheses at the end.

 

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