I was immediately reminded of what I went through as a boy in one of my grammar lessons. English grammar teaching was discontinued in the early 1960s all over the world at the recommendation of linguists who thought the study of grammar was too difficult for children and it was enough if they learnt the practical communication aspect of language alone. But the thoughtfulness of linguists did not benefit me one bit because even though I went to school LONG after linguists had discontinued the teaching of grammar in schools (I'm really not THAT old), I was made to undergo a rigorous private linguistic education for many years and I was given a challenging reading list every week that included the boring tracts of the Society for Pure English while my friends were all having a whale of a time reading Beano and Dandy comic books. It is hard for me to say today what I thought of my early education but I certainly did not subject my children to the same system.
What I went through only serves to make me very much aware of any tiny linguistic imperfection which used to be a big deal in educated circles and although I merrily flout some of these rules whenever I can, I find that I tend to observe them instinctively if I do not check myself.
The sentence in Channel News Asia in the photo above is just what many grammarians in the 20th century would have slammed as 'illiterate'. But this is one 'error' I used to struggle with as a boy. I could hardly understand a word when I was told repeatedly almost without any variation that 'Ordinary particles with adjectives require a nominal antecedent'. When a child is told a sentence is wrong but he can't see why it's wrong, and educators are stupidly unable to explain the grammatical concept in a way that is comprehensible to a child, there is only one solution for him - avoid the construction altogether. So what I did was simple. I made it a point to recast my sentence and I would use unexceptionable compound prepositions without knowing precisely why the original sentence was wrong. I just 'knew' it was wrong because everyone said it was. When I came across a sentence such as the one printed by Channel News Asia above, I would just tell myself that it was grammatically incorrect and I shouldn't write that way but I could not for the life of me tell you why it was wrong. There are things a child simply cannot understand if educators continue to write as if their works are read only by linguists.
Recently, my brother messaged me when I was with a friend. I briefly told my friend that my brother had been discussing the different voices in the Greek verb and how they differed from English verbs when my friend told me that if I was going into technicalities, he would just 'switch off'. But there were no technicalities in what I said. I later understood that my highly educated friend did not know what 'voice' meant in grammar and he regarded it as a 'technicality'.
Most people today do not know English grammar simply because they have not been taught grammar but they are not even aware that they have no knowledge of grammar. Because they speak English, they naturally assume they must have been taught English grammar and they must have forgotten everything after they left school. They don't even know that they have been shortchanged by education policies that are based on the pronouncements of linguists in the early 1960s that children should not be taught English grammar. They do not realise that the English lessons they had in school were lessons in which grammar had been carefully filtered out. It does not matter which part of the world you went to school in. Every school on this planet stopped teaching English grammar since the 1960s.
But there has since been a change, at least in the UK. The British government reinstated the teaching of grammar in schools a few years ago but it's too late - a whole generation including those in government all the way up to the Prime Minister knows nothing of English grammar. Click here for a BBC video of David Cameron refusing to answer three simple questions on grammar put to him by an MP and acknowledging that he was badly educated even though he went to Eton and Oxford.
A German friend once asked me a question on English usage and in order to answer his question effectively, I had to talk about the transitivity of verbs. I asked him if he knew what a transitive verb was. He replied, 'Of course. We have it in German grammar too'. What I found amusing was if he had been an American or a Brit or anyone who could speak only English, I would probably have to 'refresh his memory' on what a transitive verb is. Curiously, it's only the teaching of English grammar that was discontinued in the 1960s; the teaching of grammar in other European languages was not affected.
I used to be outraged by the erroneous babbling of Singapore's Speak Good English Movement which even presumed to write books on grammar. These books are nothing less than disgraceful publications that embarrassingly reveal that English grammar is totally alien to the writer or writers. I have argued repeatedly that the Movement ought to be disbanded. People who live in a grammarless cavern (if I may borrow the vivid expression of a famous linguist) should not attempt to teach others grammar or to write a book on usage and grammar.
Should we reinstate grammar teaching in our schools as they have done in the UK? We will have to first educate our teachers who are probably just as clueless about grammar as the rest of the people are. This was a problem UK schools encountered in 2015 when grammar was newly introduced in schools. Teachers had to go back to school.
Much depends on how effective the teachers' re-education is. It will be a nightmare for us if teachers with half-baked knowledge teach our children one shocking error after another, just as the Speak Good English Movement have done in every single publication of theirs for the past 12 years or more. Or should we do nothing because there really is no money in grammar and our resources are best channelled into money-churning subjects such as Business and Finance?
Click here for the links to my blog posts that deal with the countless errors made by the Speak Good English Movement and others.
ADDENDUM (added half an hour after the above was published):
I must be suffering from the first onset of dementia. Within 10 minutes of my posting this article, I received a message from a reader who told me that I wrote something similar more than a year ago.
On 6 January last year, I posted this blog post: CLICK HERE. This earlier blog post is far more detailed and my argument in favour of grammar teaching more vigorous. This current post was purely motivated by what I read in an article on Channel News Asia about the world's reaction to the coronavirus. Upon reading the first sentence that I highlighted in this blog, I was brought back to my early childhood when I was told repeatedly (and sometimes sternly) that such a sentence was wrong. My reader also informed me that I was not clear in the blog post - is the sentence I'm talking about still wrong today?
I must thank my reader for pointing out my neglect. Most linguists will say that the sentence is all right today. The American Webster calls it 'grammatically impeccable'. The Australian linguist Pam Peters says we may use it freely and British linguists are also generally accepting of it. One famous British linguist in the late 20th century wrote that such a construction would probably be acceptable 'in the 21st century' and he was accurately prophetic. Many would argue that it was already widely in use in Fowler's time even though Fowler dismissed it as 'illiterate'. A British linguist rightly observed in 2015 that we can always recast our sentence if we don't want to offend pedants.
Ultimately, much depends on the context. If you are going for a job interview and you think there are starchy pedantic prigs among your interviewers, it is sensible for you to make sure that every utterance of yours is beyond reproach.
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