Peter CostelloWorld of Books
Recently, the internet was graced by an image posted by teachers at an English school, holding up for all to see a sign which admitted they could not tell the difference between e.g. and i.e.
Well, I suppose exampli gratia and id est are not in fact English at all, but a relic of what the two teachers would think of as a dead language.
The point they were trying to make was that we should not be so strict and pernickety about the rules of grammar, let students write as they speak. Now much of what once passed as the teaching of grammar in the past was the outcome of applying the rules of classical Latin to English, a very different and less conditioned language.
However, grammar is not a mere matter of rules. Modern students of linguistics speak of the deep structures of grammar that underlies all languages, the biological foundation from which language itself springs. So grammar is not a matter of rules as the teachers think, but of biological necessity.
Grammar is only a part of the use of language for expression. We can see this in the traditional class divisions once common in Jesuit colleges, which derived from classical ideas of education. Each year was known by a name: Elements (first year), Rudiments (second year), Grammar (third year), Syntax (fourth year), Poetry (fifth year) and Rhetoric (sixth year). In some colleges, such as Stonyhurst in England, there was a further pre-university division called “the philosophers”.
These structures are no mere useless rules. They are the very essence of expression. In these days of ‘creative writing’ it seems to be thought that the ideal is to let people express themselves as they speak. That is all very well in a novel. But for other occasions something more is needed.
The use of ‘real speech’, far from liberating students, actually enslaves them. Such popular language, argot or patois, changes all the time. There is nothing more embarrassing that an aging hipster speaking the slang of his youth.
It is not for nothing that the élites of the world use more formal speech. Their desire is to make themselves known to the widest possible audience. The use of an argot prevents this.
Those English teachers with their strange confusion over e.g. and i.e. are restricting the opportunities of their students rather than enlarging them.
The use of language, whatever its origins among the ways of communication that we find in the animal world, is a distinctive feature of being human.
Descartes, though, famously claimed “Cogito, ergo sum”, I think therefore I am. It might be truer to say that “Loquor, ego sum”, I speak therefore I am. For it is language that drives thought, not thought that drives language. How can I know what I wish to say until I write it down? This was encapsulated by E. M. Forster as: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
Grammatical speech then is the source of thought, of philosophy and perhaps ultimately of religious understanding.