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?

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."