May I rant about language... just a little?

I guess by definition a rant isn't "just a little" anything. Oh well.

This is purely an English teacher rant and has NOTHING to do with my school. NOTHING.

It does have everything to do with a linguistic approach to grammar, though. At my beloved alma mater, I had THE linguistics professor as my grammar teacher for both undergrad grammar and grad school grammar. I loved her.

She made grammar come alive, and yes, we covered traditional grammar and diagrammed the socks out of a gazillion sentences. I have climbed Mt. Traditional Grammar and staked a flag in its peak. But it wasn't traditional grammar that made me go "Woo Ha." It was the underlying linguist's approach to teaching language.

You see, a linguist studies language as it is and not so much as it SHOULD be. Language is dynamic... growing and changing. When it stops growing and changing, it dies, like just about everything else in this world.

Latin is fixed because it is a dead language. There are no more living native speakers of the language. That's one reason it's such a great tool for teaching -- the rules don't change.

English is another story. A year ago "LOL" was cutting edge in slang. Today if you say "LOL," you're old. A month ago you said, "haha." Today, you say "LOLs" or "LOLz." A year ago "stalking" was the term you used if you visited someone else's profile on Facebook. Today you say, "creeping." If the forefront of language (slang) has changed that much in a year, imagine what the whole language has done in 400 years.

I just finished teaching Shakespeare. We read a modern translation of Merchant of Venice because my plans got a little off and we had only two weeks to read, analyze, and test on the play. Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. We speak Modern English. There's a gap. Are the students stupid because they can't read Early Modern English as well as they can Modern English? Not at all. Modern English is their native language. They get it.

But Shakespeare (and for that matter, the writers of our historical founding documents) was working with vocabulary and syntax that differs from what we use today. So what does that mean? Well, it means we have to do a little historical native language teaching and a little translating before we can get to the ideas they communicate.

I teach journalism. We are all about connecting with our audience. Today's writing is short. Sound bites. Sentence fragments. Conversational. It's that way because it's more accessible to more people, and believe it or not, the objective of being a journalist is to get ideas/events/news out there to the people. Getting read is a good thing.

Does that mean that thought-provoking, intellectually deep articles are a waste of time. Absolutely not. However, like everything else, there is a time and a place. Different types of writing are appropriate at different times.

It's all about connecting the message with the audience. To do that, sometimes we have to write the message in the audience's language, and other times, we have to teach a few language lessons before the audience "gets" the writer's point. And you know what? Either way, it's OK.