The very first thing I started working on as a baby writer was grammar. That and spelling. As a thirteen-year-old with a typewriter, I thought that the most important thing I could know in order to write anything was how my language worked and how to do it correctly.
I learned right away that English is a daunting, confusing, wonderful language.
I have since learned that grammar and a history of English is only part of what a writer needs to know, but it remains not only important, but interesting to me.
English is a bastard child of pretty much any language being spoken near England for the last 3,000 years. The island where my native tongue was born was under attack and rulership of so many different places, it’s almost impossible to completely untangle it. But overall, English is a Germanic language with some heavy duty Romantic influences. (Thus why we swear in German but order dinner in French: interesting) Enter the written alphabet and lack of standardized spelling, followed by the printing press, and you have a real mess on your hands. Which is fascinating and wonderful and interesting.
But it does mess things up for a writer. It means that we have so many rules and exceptions and colloquialsims that your head might start to spin. You need to keep your singulars and plurals straight, so you refer to a single individual who “was” and more than one person as “were,” but hypothetical situations are always supposed to be expressed as “were,” as in, “I’d run if I were you.” However, colloquially, a lot of people do in fact say “I would run if I was you,” so you need to factor in where the hypothetical is actually being written, and who’s saying it, and if they would get it right or say it like their friends might. And then there’s the fact that some phrases have almost become little words themselves, and are said correctly, while phrases that are thought out get flubbed, like the person who says “if I were you” almost like its own little word, but later says “I wish I was thin like that,” where there is no neat little packet of pre-heard material they can use.
See what I mean?
The great vowel shift (should that be capitilized? Hm. Aha, yes it should!) The Great Vowel Shift and printing presses further confuse things by creating standardized spelling about a century or two before everyone just started pronouncing words differently, giving rise to spellings that used to be phonetic and no longer are, like “knife” and “through” and other words that have letters we don’t say and silent e’s on the ends of words. Later, an American president — I should probably look up who, but I’m feeling lazy — that decided that American spelling was silly and started changing how we spell words but didn’t get all the way through his list before he was stopped, which is why we spell “color” and the Brits spell “colour,” but we still have wacky spellings like “thigh” and “knickers.”
Then there are the controversies, like words that have switched back and forth from regular to irregular form over the years and are in the process of switching now, like light and lit. People used to say lighted, and they’re starting to again. Which one should you use? Or the pronoun controversy, can you use “they” as a non-gender specific singular? (I’m firmly on the side of “yes” on this one, some writers are firmly on the side of “no,”) but most people do in fact use “they” in speech to mean one unknown person of either gender.
My studies into grammar led me down a lovely rabbit hole of human history, migration, conquering, technology, and genetics, and opened up my mind to words, language, thought, and awareness. But the very bottom line is, I keep a handful of grammar books near me, and any time I am stymied by a word or a rule, I don’t trust my gut or my ear, I look it up. Then I switch the rule on or off based on how people around me actually speak. It does mean that sometimes I have to slam on the brakes when I’m in the middle of a flow, but I think my writing is important enough to get it right.
How about you? Do you find English frustratingly gorgeous? What’s your favorite grammar book? What’s your favorite word? What word always screws you up when you’re trying to spell it?
