Grammar, pride and prejudice

Where did this grammatical framework, that people are so stuck on, come from? And do we really have to stick to the rules? 

Good written grammar is the vehicle you drive to get your words and ideas from A to B. It ensures your reader’s ride is smooth. But some people think it’s much more important than that - when grammar goes bad, they get angry. Many a well-meant email or article is filed straight to trash because of a tiny error that made a very big impression. Whole arguments binned, because “she started her sentence with a ‘but’”. But where did it come from, this grammar that divides and defeats us?

It’s fair to say that English grammar used to be a bit of a boys’ club. The first publication on grammar and usage was written in the 16th Century - it was a pamphlet. And it was written in Latin. This seems a little strange, because only only men who’d been to posh school could actually read it. Scholarly pamphlets on grammar continued to be published throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Some were even published in English, but it was still mainly men that consumed them. Women remained generally uneducated and locked out of life’s libraries for some time yet...

In 1759 and 1762 grammarians John Brightland, James Greenwood and Robert Louth did us all a solid and wrote some ‘shorter’ books for children and “the fair sex”, which tell you a bit about the level of grammar that they thought the “fair sex” could handle. But actually Louth really hit the nail on the head with his “Short Introduction to Grammar”, as no-one needed that to be long.

So, why the kiddie book for adult women? Because grammar was a place where women weren’t really welcome. For centuries women had been running their lives, friendships, families and communities quite happily without grammar. As “women’s language” had historically been largely conversational and not written down (see “uneducated”), it deviated horribly from grammatical structure and rules. Well, obvs. And when women started to become more educated and even start writing things longer than a shopping list, or a note to the maid, our learned grammarian men (let’s call them grammari-men) delighted in pointing out their grammatical failures. Women needed to learn the structures that the men had spent so long crafting and finessing. And men would help them, no really, by criticising them for their overly emotional use of language and their general lack of grammatical structure and discipline. As a woman, learning to read and write was a treacherous business - raised eyebrows, grimaces, heads in hands. Jane Austen (1775-1817) nailed this sexist (I mean, it was sexist) disapproval of women’s grammar in Northanger Abbey, when Henry Tilney tells Catherine Morland that,

“The usual style of letter writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars...a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops and a very frequent ignorance of grammar”.

Austen didn’t stop there. She peppered the language of her more vacuous leading ladies with empty adjectives and adverbs, showing the grammarians that she saw them and how they perceived women and their “fashionable” use of language.

If we fast forward to the turn of the 20th century, when more women got to go to school, learn, read, write etc, we start to see women fight back and to question the origins of grammar, who invented it and what its purpose was. Virginia Wolf said that sentences were “made by men”, that they were “too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.” She was a woman disrespecting grammar, after centuries of grammarians disrespecting women.

So, we’ve come a long way since then. I don’t think of grammar as a weapon in misogyny’s arsenal. But it has a history of prejudice, that arguably repeats itself whenever you roll your eyes at someone’s grammatical “misuse”. Generally, trying to confine anyone to a pre-determined cage of rules defining how you communicate is squashing what they’re trying to say. In the age of hyper-communication, message is more key than medium.