The other day I overheard the managing editor of this esteemed publication lamenting that she had learned her grammar in the 80s, as if to say that she hadn’t learned any at all. If this is the case, she has recovered marvellously.
Perhaps she placed Fowler’s Modern English Usage under her pillow for a few weeks. This, I have heard, will do the trick.
Fowler’s is the Everest of English grammar and teaches you more that you ever wanted to know about the difference between should and would, how to pronounce the surname Cholmondely (Chumli), and how to accent the word irrefragable.
Parenthetically, for my money, the 1926 edition is superior to subsequent revisions. In its centenary year, I advise you to purchase one.
When I started in journalism, I was one of the first university graduates to work at the Sydney Morning Herald. The older journalists thought we were stuck-up and ignorant. No grammar. Can’t spell. No general knowledge. Useless as an ashtray on a surfboard.
Actually, I did know grammar. I had been educated before the invention of electricity, when people welcomed vaccines as life-saving, when carbon copy meant carbon copy and not CC; when nobody had ever heard of K-Pop.
I can’t remember when that was exactly, but it was definitely a long time ago.
My Year 8 teacher, Sr Margaret Louise, made sure that we never ended sentences with a preposition. She was a pious elderly nun with a big heart, a ferocious temper and a passion for grammar.
We knew our way around past and present participles, past perfect and pluperfect, subjunctive and indicative, and split infinitives. We could diagram sentences. We had to. There was hell to pay if we didn’t.
One day she had the bright idea of creating a grammar hospital. If one of us stumbled in class conversation, a grammatical stool pigeon could raise his arm and politely denounce the offence.
The sinner had to write the grammatical version 50 times.
I very quickly became the class champion and the most hated boy in Year 8, a combination of teacher’s pet and penitentiary sadist. I was, not to tiptoe around the matter, a painful smart-arse. I was not elected class captain.
The odd thing was this: Sr Margaret Louise’s own grammar was not very good. This often happens, I have noticed, with people who fret about split infinitives.
One day, with smarmy politeness, I drew the class’s attention to one of her errors and suggested that she be confined to the grammar hospital.
There was a thermonuclear explosion; flashes of lightning and bone-shaking thunder; a Battle of the Somme artillery barrage that drove lesser men mad in their trenches.
After therapy for my PTSD, all I could recall, dimly, was words like bold, brazen, disobedient, bad, bumptious boy – for she was very fond of alliterative castigation. But the grammar hospital closed its doors that very day, unmourned by my classmates.
This incident is not greatly to my credit, but at least I learned my grammar.
