Modifiers misplaced

A Post a Day in May 30/31

If you think English grammar is hard, you should try German! 

My home-room teacher in my German middle school was shocked when I arrived in her class: a little Canadian German-speaking child whose name was Amanda. It turned out that, in Germany at that time, the name Amanda was very old-fashioned and only great-aunts and grand-mothers had it. But there I was, in the flesh, with that name, not a ‘great’ or a ‘grand’ anything, just a lively little girl. That teacher taught us grammar and, to make it fun, had created a character who populated the language exercises we completed under her tutelage. That character was named … Amanda. While learning grammar can be dull and bleak, our grammar classes were great fun, because the antics the teacher’s Amanda was getting up to in the sentences we parsed were all the funnier for having me share the name. I don’t remember the specifics of those antics, but I do give full credit for my appreciation of grammar to that homeroom teacher. She made parsing sentences a game for us.

While I have never taught grammar as a course-length subject, I have always incorporated an overview of rudimentary rules in my communication classes. Many students had English as their second or third language, and even those for whom it was their first could benefit from a short refresher of the basics. I believe this because, many years ago, a student in my evening French-language class said to me in great earnestness, “I’m bad at French grammar, because we don’t have it in English.” Ha! He had either consistently skipped his language arts classes or had simply never paid attention.

It’s true, of course, that we learn our mother tongue intuitively, using the rules without ever knowing that they are the rules. We just know that it’s the way the language works. And, I grant you, perfect grammar is not essential for effective communication, but knowing the rules and relationships of words to each other does help us build sentences that say what we want them to mean.

Misplaced modifiers are a pet peeve of mine. Consider these two sentences that use the same words, but in a different order — and that order changes the meaning:

I love only her.
I only love her.

I love only her (and no one else).
I only love her (I don’t control her).

“Only” modifies what follows it, so the meaning hinges on where it is placed.

It is well documented that punctuation can make or break a written text. Lynne Truss invented the now iconic panda sentence to illustrate the point:

The panda eats shoots and leaves.
The panda eats, shoots and leaves.

The Oxford (or serial) comma makes the meaning even more clear:

The panda eats, shoots, and leaves.

I used Truss’s sentence to good effect in my college teaching of rudimentary punctuation, by telling the joke about a panda who enters a bar, eats, then shoots the bartender, and leaves the bar. You won’t be surprised, probably, that only a handful of students ever laughed, but I always enjoyed it. Without the comma, the sentence explains what the panda eats: shoots and leaves (likely bamboo). With the comma, the sentence explains the three actions the panda completes: eating, shooting, leaving.

The sentence that better got the students’ attention was this one:

A woman without her man is nothing.

Insert a colon and a comma, and the meaning changes significantly:

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

Depending on who the students in the classroom were, they preferred the meaning of the first rather than the second iteration. I was never amused.

So, when words run together without the requisite punctuation or are placed without consideration, one relative to the other, the writer’s meaning can be obscured. However, some component parts of language, no matter how legitimate, can be ignored without anything more serious than a sense of grammatical purity being at risk. I learned this lesson from an engineering-instructor-colleague, who asked me why it was so important to me that the international students in my classes use the definite and indefinite articles (the, a, an) correctly. “After all,” he said, “I have eminent colleagues from many different countries whose English grammar is not perfect, but that does not diminish their credibility in my field.”

That was a watershed moment for me. Why, indeed, was I so hung up on that particular point of grammar perfection? I realized that my intransigence on this point of grammar gave me more frustration than it gave the students value; they knew their written English was not perfect, but their work was understood and, therefore, good enough. And that is a fine thing to know.

I, myself, am still learning it: My German is no longer fluent, but my French is good. What holds me back in a conversational context, I realize, is concern about the grammar. And that’s crazy, because, while grammar is, indeed the building block of any language, it can also simply be a block — and I’m going to push myself over it.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash