Grammar Precisionism Is a Big Fat Pyramid Scheme Part I

By El Ochiis

     There, I said it. No, actually, another critic in a

literary magazine stated that Grammar was a Ponzi Scheme and I,

not only agreed, but was glad someone else, who already had a

publishing career and contract, finally said that which I’ve

always believed.  Every time I write something, I have imagined

a secret underground bunker in some location in the universe

that houses volumes of Grammar Penal Codes; Therein is a list of

all the things I’d be in error to commit – crap, have I just

violated a grammar tenet of monumental stature? I feel so

bohemian – a rebel with a very valid cause.

     Who is this grammar enforcement and who appointed them said

title?

     Even the Ponzi scheme is a Ponzi scheme.  The original idea

had already been carried out by a woman named Sara Howe, in

Boston in the 1880’s. But, someone, with some concealed regulation book of rules and appointments of history, attributed the concept, renaming it, after an Italian man, named Charles Ponzi, much later, in the 1920’s. The same appointees, who robbed Sara Howe of her rightful authorship of the schematic fortitude to defraud solely female clientele by charging them an eight-percent monthly interest rate, and then stealing the money that the women had invested, could, possibly, be the very ones overseeing grammar guidelines. A scheme in a scheme, I resound. And, yes, the sentence before this short one, as well as others herein, is lengthy; all hail long sentences. Martin Luther King: “A Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 310 words; Marcel Proust: “Remembrance of Things Past.” 958 words; and, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.” 2,156 words. Go off you scribes of creative fiction, build great and extended sentences. Don’t forget to toss in some necessarily appropriate words ending in “ly”.

     I meant, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, who really

knows what an infinitive is?”  And having acknowledged this,

what human can actually, decipher when he or she has split one.

An infinitive is the uninflected form of a verb along
with to – to jump; to run; to correct. “She urged me to casually walk up and complain,” should be written, instead, as: “She urged me to walk up and casually complain.” Listen you, alleged,

grammar purists, Henry James and Rudyard Kipling split

infinitives and they weren’t detained.

     A dangling participle, you say?  And, which offenders keep

dangling them?  Participles are a type of verbs; they act as

adjectives. See, this is so confusing.  “The filtered water

tastes great.” Filter is an adjective that modifies water and is

derived from the verb: “filter.”  “Sitting on the park bench,

the moon disappeared behind the building.”  “Sitting on the park

bench” has nothing to modify and is just existing there, by

itself, thus, dangling.

Which and what governing body decided that the following sentence is incorrect: “Him wants to eat dinner”. I can hear your imperiously hifalutin tone there, Ms. Prudence Persnickety, when you emphatically replied: “It’s ungrammatical, the pronoun is in the object form instead of the subject form he.” But the rule that says to use a subject pronoun here was not decided by some governing body. It wasn’t an idea someone came up with and then demanded English speakers comply. Instead, this grammar rule is derived from how people actually use the language. Grammar, therefore, is at its heart, a set of standards based on common practice. If suddenly everyone in the English-speaking world started saying him wants instead of he wants, sometime in the next century him would be correct, sanctioned by every grammar authority alive.