When Is It OK to Start Grammar Naziing?

First, let me just say that I love the English language. I spend a goodly amount of time thinking about it--somewhat less now that I'm not teaching it, of course, but more than I did just a year ago now that Gabe is learning many of the tricky in's and out's. I studied it in school for several years and taught it for several more, but I still wouldn't consider myself anything like an expert on it. I learned just as much of its storied--possibly even sordid--history as my interest and attention span could tolerate, but then I backed off and contented myself with being "proficient." That seemed like a good place to settle down.

English is a brilliant language to use as a medium for creative thought. Its colorful lexicon (especially if drawing from one of the non-American versions, American English being about as boring and functional as it possibly could be, like American architecture) offers nearly limitless possibilities. Its basic nature is very fluid and mutable, making it possible and accessible to just about anyone with a passing understanding of its function as a canvas of the mind--making it possible for the transference of abstract concepts from one mind to the other.

To be honest, that alone is a concept that I find myself grappling with on a nearly daily basis. How wonderful/scary/fantastic/unbelievable is it that I can think of a completely off the wall concept like, say, the notion that the world is carried on the back of a giant tortoise, and with but ten words I am able to transfer that thought from my brain to another person's? It is a flabbergastingly (there, I just utilized the inherent flexibility of our language by adverbing a word that doesn't usually work that way--and I verbed two more words in the process!) complex process that startles and excites me every time I try to come to grips with it.

Yet, for this exact reason, our language is stupid. It is breathtakingly complex. When I was teaching, I started my first day of class with a brief history of the English language that I always prefaced by saying something like this:

"More than likely, you are not looking forward to this class. Few people do. Probably you have had many English classes in the past and, if you are like the majority of people, you found those classes and the concepts being discussed therein tiresome, boring, and surprisingly difficult to fully grasp for someone who has spent their entire life speaking the language well enough to get by. There is nothing to be ashamed of in this. English is among the most complex languages in the world. Our vocabulary changes all the time, our punctuation rules are strict to the point of being often ignorable, and our sentence structure can be all over the place if we allow it. Add to that a list of nearly 400 irregular verbs with varying forms (here I would give them an example of the inconsistencies of our irregular verbs by putting "sing" "sang" "sung" on the board then putting "bring" on the board and asking, rhetorically, of course why "bring" "brang" "brung" isn't the acceptable conjugation), and you have the recipe for a language that nobody in their right mind would ever WANT to learn that much about."

This little monologue would go on for a while, during which time I would discuss the fact that, despite all reason, English is becoming as close to a World Language as we've ever come (after which I would take a little break to discuss Esperanto, because I find it interesting, and the fact that William Shatner starred in the movie Incubus one of the only movies ever performed entirely in Esperanto), and so on and so forth. By the end of it, I would conclude with something like this:

"So, what does all of this mean? What can you take away from this first bit of lecture that you can apply to your own writing outside this class? (Obviously, in this class, I would remind them, we'll be trying to follow the strictest rules, but more so they knew where those rules as a sort of guideline for future writing--you have to know the rules before you can justify breaking them, after all.) Here you go. There are only three rules in English that ALWAYS apply: Start a sentence with a capital letter, end the sentence with a period, question mark or exclamation point, and you can write your entire life and never use a semicolon."

This, I'm sad to say, was the "ideal" version of this lecture. I am not one of nature's public speakers, and I detested relying on my notes any more than absolutely necessary to keep me on track, so I tended to wander all over the place and probably missed several key points along the way. Who knows if any of my students ever walked away from my classes with anything but a slight headache.

But that's not the point. The point is, if I can recall where this post started, is that I have a bit of a history of language sticklering. Because of my long exposure to the "correct" form of our language, I have a bit of a tendency to mentally correct just about every grammar/usage error that I see or hear, and this has been a bit of a trouble source the last year or so while Gabe's language skills develop.

And I wonder, at what point does it become OK for me to start correcting his honest mistakes without making him question everything and start to approach talking with timidity and trepidation for fear of being corrected (that, of course, is assuming that Gabe would EVER have fear of something so mundane as grammar correction--considering how little he pays attention to ANY of my corrections up to this point, this might be a moot point).

For instance, earlier today, he was playing with some "money" (this was the instance that prompted this little bit of linguistic soul searching on my part). I'm not sure what he was doing, exactly, with it, or even what his intention was. His grasp on the concept of currency is still a bit nebulous. I think he understands that money is used to buy things--and this because we have often used a lack of said money to NOT buy him things in the past--and he can readily identify coins as money, but he has no concept of where money comes from or anything like that.

Anyway, he was throwing his money over the back of the couch, which is the kind of money management that I'm sure he's learned from his mother (zing!), and saying, "I buyed new helicopter for Buzz." Then he climbed over the back of the couch, threw the "money" back over, then climbed back over--no Buzz and no helicopter.

"I BOUGHT a new helicopter for Buzz," I corrected.

And he lowered his brow at me, clearing questioning my credibility, as, I'm sure, any student of the language who had already learned "I try," "I tried," "I am trying" would surely do. "Don't be daft," his look said. "Of course it's 'buyed.'" And, when he refused to repeat the nonsense I was spewing, I decided to let it go and started to wonder when I would start making some kind of sense to him.

Then, just to make myself feel a little better, I picked a news article on Yahoo! at random and started correcting the grammar of the people who posted comments there. This lasted all of five minutes before I threw my hands up in the air and cursed the removal of phonics from grade school curricula (though that might be different now, I have to admit, since I haven't been paying much heed to it these last few years). Apparently, language naziing is something I'm just going to have to keep to myself for the time being.