My father, the ‘grammar nut’
More than 60 years ago, I was a student at Arlington School in Baltimore. (I still have an Arlington 234 T-shirt, although for some reason it doesn’t fit anymore.) My father was doing graduate work at Hopkins, and he was a grammar nut. He cared about the Queen’s English — or, before George’s death and Elizabeth’s coronation, the King’s English — and he wanted me to do the same.
To that end, when I was 6, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He would pay me a penny — real money in 1951 — for every five grammatical errors I heard. Hewanted me to learn to avoid the mistakes some grown-ups were making. We operated under the honor system. If I said I had heard something, and I could explain why it was wrong, I got credit.
As good as Arlington School was, my grammatical knowledge was limited at that stage. I was only in the first grade, after all. I wasn’t going to be catching dangling participles or distinguishing restrictive from nonrestrictive clauses. I had no views one way or the other about serial commas. (Besides, it’s hard to tell whether someone speaking is using a serial comma.)
What I could do was flag “ain’ts” and egregious instances of subject-verb disagreement (like “he don’t”). Maybe I’d pick up an occasional pronoun-antecedent clash as well. I knew the difference between “lie” and “lay.” It was a start.
And I think I could have caught the horrors that are pervasive now but that would have stuck out like sore thumbs then, such as the cringe-inducing “between he and I” and “I have went.” Those usages are (or at least were, to 6-year-olds as well as senior citizens) just obviously wrong.
Even most sportscasters, in Baltimore and elsewhere, knew better in 1951. Bobo Newsom didn’t host the Knothole Gang until the Orioles arrived in 1954, and, in any event, I suspect old Bobo, grammatically challenged though he was, didn’t say “between he and I.” (I can’t prove that, however.) Dizzy Dean was doing his broadcast thing in 1951, although not yet on a national stage, and he became famous for mangling the language. But that was the point: He charmed almost everyone, except English teachers, precisely because his way of speaking wasn’t the norm. Most of us knew better. Diz had no special attraction for those who thought “slud” really is the past tense of “slide.”
I needed to find grammatical offenses to get those pennies, and Bobo and Diz weren’t around to help me. To the rescue came cartoons, which I watched on TV whenever “Howdy Doody,” “Tom Corbett Space Cadet,” and “This Is Your Zoo” weren’t on (and when I wasn’t immersed in “Fun with Dick and Jane”). One of my great finds was an ancient cartoon — from the1930s, I think — in which the characters sang the chorus of “It ain’t gonna rain no more” over and over. The cartoon kept popping up on TV, and, with its endless stream of grammatical mistakes, I earned as much as 10 cents per viewing. That was like printing (well, coining) money. Had it been possible to record and replay shows in those days, I could have bankrupted Dad with that one cartoon.
I probably shouldn’t have needed financial incentives to learn grammar, but Dad’s system worked to instill a sense of its importance. (When I call Dad a grammar nut, I say that with fondness.) How we put words together matters. Subjects and verbs, pronouns and antecedents — get them wrong and meaning can change. Dad would never have accepted today’s use of “they” and “them” as gender-neutral, singular pronouns. Yes, you can usually figure out what an author or speaker means when “they” refers to one person, of indeterminate gender, but doing so requires extra effort. That’s not helpful if clarity is your goal, as it should be.
Arlington 234 also made a big difference. In the early 1950s, grammar was taken seriously there, as it was in most American schools. We wouldn’t want to recapture everything from that time, of course, but it would be nice if we could reclaim a place for grammar in schools’ curricula.