Grammar and the eunuch pygmies

This is a rant brought on by seeing eunuch pygmies seeking to take control of the sex education curriculum for tall people. I am referring here to the mandatory testing of grammar among 11-year-olds in Britain. Here is a link to a sample test, but don’t feel sad if you struggle with it, because I did: I apologise for citing a third-rate paper, but this sort of rubbish is correctly domiciled there.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationquestions/10966167/Can-you-pass-the-grammar-test-for-11-year-olds.html

I am a professional writer who wins prizes for his writing (one award was even for “literature”), I can’t answer most of those questions. Parts of speech are not my thing, never have been, never will be. I don’t need them. I acquired my total mastery of grammar and style by listening and by reading. I learned spelling the same way. Lists are for those whose brains are deficient, those better suited to being trained than being educated.

You absorb an education, you imbibe it, you glory in it, you savour it, you play with it, you acquire it and it becomes yours. You learn to obey training.

Where do these rules of grammar come from? Were they written down first, so that the first cave man to emerge from the simian pre-human fog and mist could slavishly obey them? Or did the rules evolve over time, until somebody sought to extract the essence of grammar, turning it on the rack, drying it on the griddle, so the desiccated corpse could be raised on an altar, or run up a flag pole, for all to be trained to bow down before it?

As a child, I knew that training was what you did to recalcitrant animals, and I quite enjoyed being recalcitrant. So I switched off whenever training kicked in. Recite the times tables? No thanks: I'll move my lips and fool you unless you're a lip reader, but my mind is working on extending my powers-of-two list above 65536, or finding the longest run of composite numbers under 100. My Different Drummer was my only drummer.

True, my father subjected me to endless sterile exercises in what was then called "parsing", but no part of it ever took hold. I do know about the subjunctive after the conditional (Q4), but this demand for testing in the rules of grammar strikes me as being in the same class as people, unable to string a sentence together, let alone write a book, pontificating on how to write. Or pygmy eunuchs teaching tall people how to procreate.

This attitude of mine explains why, on my first attempt at the Leaving Certificate in 1960, I broke down and wrote a brilliant essay explaining that it was pointless to psychoanalyse Macbeth, because Freud had not been invented when Shaksper (and you would think that spelling might have rung a few bells) was working, that he was a working playwright, seeking to get bums on seats in the Globe Theatre, and putting in whatever the crowd wanted, so his themes stemmed more from populism and building up logically than from any grandiose mind-fart.

It would be as useful, I said, to ask me to say if I thought it was Macbeth who painted "Go Home Macduff" on the walls of Edinburgh Castle, or to examine the coexistentialism of Macbeth as exemplified by the witches.

That is pretty close to verbatim, and there was a lot more in the same vein: it was literate, coherent, and went totally against what the sterile, dumb cattle who passed for English teachers clung to. These same people would probably get restive at my ending a sentence with a preposition.

If I may diverge for a moment and quote from my own work, elsewhere in this very blog:

http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/and-dont-end-sentence-with-preposition.html

The King James Bible, generally regarded as a foundation text of modern English, setting many of today's standards, is also available in electronic form. A pass of the global exchange mechanism in my computer reveals the following sentence endings: 9 overs, 1 under, 68 ups, 39 downs, while 'to' ends four sentences, while 'for' ends two sentences. There are 9 sentences ending in 'by', 2 ending in 'with' and 2 ending in 'from'.

Search where you will among the works of classical writers of English, the heroes of literature, and you will find them joyfully breaking the 'rule' that never was. Chaucer did it, Charles Darwin did it, so did John Bunyan and Jonathan Swift, and the Reverend Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne. In fact, no author deemed worthy of electronic storage by Project Gutenberg seems to be entirely free of this wicked sin of ending a sentence in a preposition. As a law of careful writing, it seems only to be honoured in the breach.

Now back to my examination paper: the examiners, those dull bovine lickspittle eunuchs, held the whip hand, and I was accorded a failing mark on the pass paper. I was doing English Honours, and supposedly, when you failed the pass paper, your other exam paper, your honours paper was not marked. Or so they said.

Because I was in charge of all examinations (including English), 25 years later and 30 years ago (so I am out of reach of any prosecution), I pulled out the old records. This was against the rules, but hooray for the Statute of Limitations: if you are the sort who thinks I should be prosecuted, don’t even think about it, because I eat people like you for breakfast.  You may stand by your rules, but I don't necessarily fight by them.

Anyhow, as a result of what I choose to dismiss as a minor infraction of foolish rules, I learned that my honours paper had indeed been marked, and skimming through, I saw that it gained a higher mark than that of a mate who gained first class honours.

(I might say that while I was in that job, I went in to bat for a few kids who did similar things in their exam papers, and saved the bloody lot from the pygmies’ cauldron. I used my speaking and writing skills, my command of language, not my simpering rote-learned knowledge of formal grammar, to run rings around the cattle, and each time I passed behind them, I knotted their tails together. It was a pleasure to be what a public servant should be, a servant of the greater good.)

Nobody stood up for me at the end of 1960, so I had to go back and do the whole thing again. It was a good year, with lots of time for independent and extra-curricular reading, but I dropped English Honours for chemistry and physics honours (and later got both of those). I toed the line in English, getting a good A in the pass paper. Luckily, the cattle didn't test parsing or any of that rubbish in the Leaving Certificate.

I break wind in their general direction.