Grammar vs. Standard Usage

There's a difference between good grammar and standard usage. Anyone who communicates clearly using a native language has good grammar. Standard usage is another matter.

Consider this sentence from my four-year-old: "I bringed you a book, Daddy." Bringed is not standard usage. Bring is an irregular verb so its conjugation doesn't follow the "add an ed to the end to make it past tense" rule of usage. But the grammar template in my daughter's head is just fine. She knew, and without my ever teaching it to her, that the past tense of verbs is formed by adding ed to the end. That's good grammar; the grammar part of her brain is working. But as she hears the construction a few hundred or a few thousand times, she'll add that little exception to the grammar in the form of a standard usage rule.

Her grammar is good, but her usage is not yet standard.

I talk about this with my students all the time.

"I ain't got good grammar," says Billy.

"Billy," I say, "your grammar's just fine. For example, in that sentence you just put a nominative case subject before your verb, you contracted an informal version of an auxiliary verb and added it correctly to a past participle to form the past perfect tense. And I understood you perfectly. Nice grammar, son."

Billy then looks at me sideways and I explain how his brain's grammar was formed and pretty much fixed by the time he was 13 (You can test this yourself: find an adult international who still has an accent, then ask when they arrived here. It was probably after the age of 12. Before that, when the grammar template in the brain is still forming, the new accent--American English--will replace the old one. It's a general rule, so you'll find exceptions.). What Billy's learning in my class now is the standard usage of American English.

So the next time you think to yourself, "My grammar sucks." Take heart. If you can make yourself understood in English then your grammar's just fine. It's your usage that sucks.

Ain't that great?

Psych Refresher - Milgram's 65

There was a story in the news recently of a man who drowned himself in the San Francisco bay. Sadly, there's nothing newsworthy about suicide. It happens all the time. The reason the story went national is that people there knew what was happening before it happened. They called the authorities, who quickly arrived at the scene. And then everyone--bystanders and first-responders alike--stood on the beach and watched him drown. 


It wasn't that the water was too deep or moving too fast or dangerously cold. It was a beach . . . in San Francisco. They watched him die because due to recent budget cuts, going into the water to rescue someone "wasn't policy." So when those in uniform didn't respond, neither did anyone else. They were all deferring to an authority (albeit the wrong ones--official policy, uniforms), so they all did nothing but watch.


We're all under authority, many authorities in fact. As I read the story, I thought of this. I also thought of a Peter Gabriel song and something haunting I learned in Mr. Sparling's high-school psych class...


In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram was trying to make sense of Nazi Germany and the Jewish Holocaust and human nature and all that, something a lot of people in the social sciences were doing in the years following WWII. One of the questions he was asking himself was whether the people most directly involved in the events shared some dark moral illness or was there something in the authority structure that would explain how such things could happen? So he began a series of experiments testing human subjects' responses to authority.


Here's how his experiment worked: There were two groups of participants--"teachers" and "learners." The "teachers" were the oblivious volunteers, the true subjects of the experiment. The "learners" were actors paid by Milgram to do what actors do--to be convincing. Before they were divided into their two groups, they supposedly drew lots, slips of paper, for those roles. But all the slips said, "teacher," so the volunteers didn't know this was a blinded experiment and that all the "learners" would be acting their parts.


The groups were then paired off and separated so that each teacher and learner worked in different rooms with a wall between them. They couldn't see one another and communicated only through a one-way intercom through which the teacher could speak, and a push-button display through which the learner could respond. 


They were then given a task which involved learning word pairs. The teacher would first read to the learner the entire list of word pairs. The teacher would then read the first word of a pair and four possible answers for the second word. If the learner got the second word wrong, the teacher would be instructed, by someone in a white lab coat holding a clipboard, to remotely administer an electric shock to the learner (before the experiment began, the teacher would be given a real sample from a shock generator--that way he or she knew what was at stake.). The shock administered to the learner was fake, of course, but the teacher didn't know that, and the learner would do the appropriate acting to express pain based on the supposed voltage. 


Milgram designed the experiment so that the "voltage" would increase by 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. And with each wrong answer the learner's performance would rise accordingly--screams of pain, shouts for the experiment to stop, pleadings that their "heart condition" might kill them. The climax of the learner's performance would involve banging on the walls for the teacher to stop, and then silence--no response at all to the shock generator, as though the learner had gone unconscious or even died from the shocks.  


All the while, white-lab-coat guy is standing over the teacher, prodding him to push ahead. And all the while, the teacher really believes that he is shocking the learner in the other room.  


At any time, if the subject (the volunteer "teacher") expressed a desire to stop the experiment, a series of prompts would be given by the authority until the teacher either continued or insisted on stopping. 


The prompts went like this:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If, after all four prompts, the teacher still wanted to stop the experiment, it would be halted. Otherwise, it didn't stop until the teacher had given the learner the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.


But here's where things got scary. Before any of these experiments had been run, Milgram polled 14 Yale senior-year psych majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical "teachers." All those polled believed that only a small number of the teachers would inflict the maximum voltage. The poll results were between 0 and 3 out of 100, an average of 1.2. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found similar results. And since then, countless psych teachers in high schools and colleges have introduced these experiments and polled their own kids before revealing Milgram's results. The predictions are consistent. Most people believe that most of the subjects will stop the experiment before it gets out of hand. 


Here's what Milgram actually found: it wasn't 1.2% of the participants who went all the way to the maximum voltage, but 65%! 65% of the teacher participants--the blinded volunteers--reached the final, massive 450-volt shock. Despite the fact that they believed their learners were in great pain, despite believing that their actions might even be causing severe injury to another human being, almost two thirds continued to follow the instructions of the authorities and administer the shocks. And these weren't folks who were employed by the authority or who had pledged themselves somehow to follow the authority or who had guns at pointed at their heads; they were just in the same room with a guy from Yale wearing a white lab coat.


And that was authority enough. 


The experiments have been repeated since then with much the same results. Not surprisingly, the 65% diminishes as intimacy between teacher and learner is increased. Two-way voice communication drops the rate substantially. Removing the physical barrier between the two results in an even more dramatic drop. After all, it's hard to cause pain to someone you're looking at eye-to-eye. But these just illustrate both our pathetic ability to see what is true and our misplaced trust in feelings as our guide to right behavior. The Yale psych majors and Milgram's colleagues got it way wrong, and they were shocked by their own ignorance. But then, faith in humanity--humanism--always disappoints. 


There is one group, though, who shouldn't be shocked, because their teaching predicts exactly what Milgram "discovered." The Christian who looks into God's word, who understands that our depravity is beyond understanding not only can expect results like these but should. Only the Christian faith teaches that we are so hopeless that we must be saved from ourselves by someone outside of ourselves. By that light, Milgram's results aren't a surprise, they're evidence of the depravity of man, and without the Christian worldview, events like the Holocaust must go unexplained and must be repeated.  


All authority belongs to Christ, so all people will (now or at some point in their future) submit to God's word. Under God's word men don't torture others because a man with a clipboard says to, and men don't withhold help from others as they drown. But for the humanist, and for the complicit bystander, "it's policy" is authority enough.




"We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)"
by Peter Gabriel


we do what we're told
we do what we're told
we do what we're told
told to do

we do what we're told
we do what we're told
we do what we're told
told to do

one doubt
one voice
one war
one truth
one dream

Sport - A New Definition

So I'm channel flipping and I come across a hotdog eating contest on ESPN. 


A hotdog eating contest.


That shouldn't have surprised me when I recall that I've recently watched a spelling bee, snowmobile and airplane races (separate, not racing each other, as cool as that would be), poker, billiards, skeet shooting, and fishing all on the same network.


Now, I'll grant this--the E in ESPN does stand for entertainment, and those things are no doubt entertaining to some segment of the viewing public. I love airplane races and did get sucked into a riveting half hour of spelling where I at least once shouted at the TV, "Get the language of origin!" So I'm not suggesting such things aren't entertaining or competitive. They can be. I just can't help but wonder if there shouldn't be clearer lines drawn, lines that would separate things like rugby from kids spelling words-you've-never-heard-before or football from men playing card games. ESPN is the sports network, right? There should be clearer lines around this stuff, right?


I think, yes. So I'm going to help ESPN by proposing some new lines, a change in the definition of the word sport. This should help their programming decisions immensely.


Here it is...


Sport: n. an activity in which two or more participants engage in all of the following: 1) they compete with each other directly; i.e. both competitors are present simultaneously in the area of play; 2) it's athletic: a majority of the body's muscles must be skillfully utilized; 3) there is a ball (or some other object: e.g. puck, shuttlecock) that acts as the central point of contest; and 4) there is a clear method of scoring that does not require a third-party judge (referees and umpires notwithstanding).


That's it. Four simple criteria that anyone can apply to any competitive situation for a quick assessment as to its sportness. No more guessing, doubting, guffawing. It's black and white.


This doesn't mean there aren't athletes in other activities. This isn't about that, it's about semantics. I'm just not going to refer to those activities any longer as sports, and it's my hope that the world will join me. Boxing, biking, skiing, all forms of racing--these are not sports. Are there athletes competing in them? You bet. They're just not athletes competing in sports; they're competing in...well, boxing, biking, skiing, and racing. Competitive activities, but not sports.


It's a realigning of categories, that's all.


So the biggies are still in: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, cricket--yes, cricket--rugby (trying to think internationally). These all meet the criteria. They're all sports. Admittedly, the new definition does allow for some questionable entries--ping pong, for example. At the gut level, ping pong (or anything else you can do in your basement) just doesn't seem like a sport. 


But wait! We don't need the gut any longer. The objective criteria will tell us. Two competitors directly and athletically involved in a clearly score-able contest using a ball? Yep, ping pong's a sport. How about skateboarding--is that a sport? Let's see, two or more participants in the same space? Nope. Is it athletic? Yes. A ball? No. Is it self-score-able or do you need a Judge? Judge, so no again. That's one out of four, folks. Skateboarding's not even close to being a sport. Not anymore. We all knew that intuitively, but now we can say it to the punks in front of 7-11 with some confidence. 

So congratulations to ping pong and dodgeball. Apologies to my many golfing friends (you lost sports status on point #1). But guys, you knew all along didn't you? Deep down, I mean, you knew that anything you could do while drinking that much beer could not possibly be a sport. 

ESPN, I look forward to seeing what you do with this. You're Welcome.

God and Pronoun Case Form

Much of grammar involves putting things into categories. Case forms of pronouns are one group of categories, and I spend a lot of my grammar-teaching time talking about case forms of pronouns.


For example, we say "Please take a picture of Abdul and me." Not "Abdul and I." Why? because the pronoun me is in a particular category; it's in the objective case. That is, it's acting as an object. Something is pointing at it--either a verb as in "do you love me?" or a preposition like the of in our example. I, on the other hand, is never an object. At least it's not supposed to be. It does other jobs, the primary one being subject. Then there's the possessive case, as in my, mine, his, her, your, our, their. That one's easy--it's the form a pronoun takes when showing possession.


So I've been thinking about case form lately, not because I teach it but because I find myself conceiving of God in certain ways. There are times when I am unusually aware that everything around me is oriented toward God. Everything is pointing to God. Ontologically, God is in the objective case, not only in a category sense, but in an ultimate sense. He is the object toward which all things point and move. Of course, everything is always oriented toward God in the sense that all things exist in God and are held together by God. But my awareness of this is as variable as wind. I wish I were more constant.


At other times, I have a stronger sense that God is the prime mover behind things, and I conceive of him as being in the nominative case. He is the original subject, actor, force, first cause. He is before all things and "in him all things consist." And yet, all things are still oriented toward him, so he is both subject and object, and there's no category for that. After Jesus calmed the storm, the disciples asked, "What manner of man is this?" In their amazement, they were pointing out a theological truth--that there is no known category to put Christ into, that he is unique.


He is both nominative and objective.


Oh yeah, he also owns everything, so he's possessive too. That would be all three.


Like I said, it's only a sense I have that drives this thinking, so I'm careful with it. The Bible doesn't use grammatical terms (except the Word) to describe God, so I should emphasize that these are only senses that point me to what is already stated as truth: That God is the prime mover behind all things, that all things are oriented to him, that he owns and rules over all things. He is nominative, objective, and possessive.


And that's our grammar lesson for today.


"Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
   to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
   and by your will they existed and were created."

Just Funny