Grammar Factor? Any Takers?
Okay: I know that no one’s being taught to diagram sentences anymore, and that most people apparently believe in scattering apostrophes randomly when making nouns plural (a restaurant down the street from me is currently advertising Martini’s, which raises a whole lot of questions that I need to regretfully put aside for another essay); but as the geeks at Slashdot have pointed out this weekend, there’s little wonder when teachers – as one in California has done recently – issue homework “expections.” (Slashdot included the link, but I expect that the text will soon change; and that’s not the point here anyway: I come not to criticize errors but to bury them.)
Typo, you say? Hardly: the menu bar was carefully retyped with the same spelling. And the teacher doesn’t stop there: children, she notes, should be reading a minimum of 15 every night. Fifteen what, exactly? Not one to limit her enthusiasm as she limits her usage, she uses three exclamation points to emphasize her directions (most of us generally feel that one suffices). Puzzles are “fun activities that parents can help”– um, help do what? One could go on and on – it’s far too much fun, and too patently unfair, to pick something like this apart.
And it’s worse than you think. I entered “expections” in Google in order to locate this article — and came up with several more examples of its usage. All from teachers.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad that there are “expections” of students. And I have made errors far more grievous than these, myself, and just as publicly, so I feel for the teacher in question – and will even more so on Monday morning when she discovers that over the weekend her errors became internationally famous. But this is an example of why the restaurant down the street offers Martini’s, and why no one in this country could diagram a sentence — unless, perhaps, they were doing so as part of a reality-show challenge.
Maybe that’s what we need. “Grammar Factor” — the thrilling new program where you can win a million dollars by showing that you actually have some command of your native language.
Think anybody would apply?
Posted in About Writing, Grammar on March 4th, 2007