My pet theory is that English is so devolved (right term?) grammar wise that English teachers pick obscure stuff to study.
In languages like Italian etc there is a never ending list of things to study.
In languages like Italian etc there is a never ending list of things to study.
The same goes for other languages, like Italian.
My impression is that the main difference between English and other languages is the lack of an (central) authority that can tell you what the language "is" and what it "isn't" and that gives off the feeling that there isn't much to say about the language other than random stuff arbitrary people make up.
But I'm pretty sure there are tons of people who study the languages (including English!) In good faith with professionalism and sobriety.
An accessible example of it is Dr. Geoff Lindsay
In many languages there are some obscure grammar that you need to get right to sound smart. Like a filter for people with university studies. A in group out group thing. Secret club handshake.
My point is that English teachers try their best to emulate that, but they don't have much to work with, so it comes down to trivia.
"I" vs. "me", and
"who" vs. "whom".
EDIT: Also, "me" vs. "myself".
Maybe working with compilers means I'm unusually comfortable with English grammar rules?
The downside is that I notice it easily in speeches or other talks given by otherwise intelligent individuals. If frequently repeated, it can be jarring, similar to an excess of 'um' or 'like'.
- Who saw it? - John and I! (correct)
- With whom did Mary go? - With John and I! (what? why?)
If the speaker doesn't really understand deeply what is the reason why you'd use "I" or "me", then all the rules around that sound arbitrary and they will make an effort to "clean up" their speech in order to not be labeled ignorant, but they will make another mistake that only truly annoying nitpickers like me will complain about, and that won't make any difference :-)
Or, equally painfully, "With John and myself!" (What? The speaker was also the subject of the sentence?)
THB I'm pulled between two incompatible positions:
(1) Nobody has a right to define "proper" English language. The language's grammar is literally however a plurality of people use it.
vs.
(2) There is a "proper" English; it's what we were taught in elementary school in the 1970's. Failing to adhere to those grammar rules (e.g., when to use "myself" or "whom") is objectively incorrect.
This article [0] seems to capture my thoughts nicely.
But, I was deprogrammed of my prejudice in University linguistics courses (highly recommend). What I learned is that speech is primary and it comes in many varieties (aka dialects) with different rules, and because textual communication has become the norm, we increasingly see these written.
It's a mistake to assume that a construction is ungrammatical just because it doesn't follow the rules of prestige English. Of course other varieties have subtly different rules. Many don't ever use "whom", for example, and it would be eyebrow-raising if you did. You can think of it as register or code switching, if it helps.
Similarly, orthography is just orthography, secondary to speech. It's a mistake to think that because someone wrote "should of," that they must not know the difference between "of" and "have". (In fact, that this orthographical error is virtually always made by a native speaker is some kind of signal.) Substandard for professional writing perhaps but that's all it is.
Schools, with few exceptions, try to get everyone speaking and writing in prestige English. We generally don't appreciate variety and fail to see the parallels with, say, snuffing out foreign languages.
I've since made the observation that it's curious that loving English almost always takes the form of being pedantic about prestige conventions and not instead enjoying the different flavors and their histories.
"Rules" are just discovered patterns in the arbitrariness of language, convenient ways to capture and communicate how most people within a certain linguistic context express a certain idea. They are point-in-time observations of an evolving natural system, sharing much more in common with aphorisms like "April showers bring May flowers" than with the law of gravity or the tax code.
The English language is whatever English speakers and hearers agree it is. No linguistic "authority" can stop the inexorable evolution of language.
(Language evolution has dramatically slowed, but that's because of the printing press, the radio, the television, and the Internet creating massively larger and more durable linguistic communities than ever existed before, not because of authority.)
And to the original point of this thread... all of these so-called names for groups are nonsense. "A group of owls is called a parliament"... by whom? No one ever. Thus a group of owls is not called a parliament or a stare or a hoot or anything else cute. A group of owls doesn't have a name because owls don't form groups. In the unlikely event someone discovered a large group of owls together, I am quite certain they would call it a "flock", no matter what someone who thought they were clever wrote in a book.
Yeah, this is a trigger for me. (:
Dr. Geoff Lindsey is a great reference. Another is John McWhorter, specifically his books The Power of Babel and Words on the Move.
Linguists are scientists of the natural world, not law-makers.
Yes, that's a the descriptive rules. They are useful for people who are interested in understanding how the language works or for people who just want to be more effective at communicating.
But then there are also "prescriptive rules", which are rules that don't necessarily reflect how the language works but are rather about how the language "ought to work". These are useful for people who want to create a distinction between an in-group and out-group, or generally just want to preserve how things used to be in the golden days of when they were young (or so they think).
I mean, verb conjugation of an irregular verb fills up a sheet of paper.