Grammar that makes you cringe

[ian]

I don't know what a frontal adverb is (my mind performs an emergency stop at 'full frontal'*) and I write (and draw pictures) for a living (I know, I know, laugh it up, you ain't seen my pay cheque – and if you have, I want it back). I don't feel especially deficient. I come from that generation without grammar, we just had words at my school. Considering we all spoke Erewashian, which as dialects go is pretty much a glottal apocalypse where consonants fear to tread, I think mere words were challenge enough.

I did recently read a book about grammar I found on my wife's desk (she's a writer and editor) which was awfully dull, so I pity the kids that are subjected to such enhanced grammarification techniques. What are the adverbs in this sentence, it would demand. I don't know. Or more I didn't care. Sentences either sound good or they don't. Much rhetorical flourish, I'm sure, is defiantly ungrammatical.

Reading about kids and schools these days, I'm glad I went when I did, before we slapped a target on everything and didn't believe anything that didn't come with a checklist.

*Yes, I know, on re-reading it's 'frontED'. Freud wrote that book, not me.

[citoyen]

It's not 9-10 year olds that get the fronted adverbial shite, it is the 7-8 year olds.

That's insane.

What really offends me is not that they're being taught the idea of moving adverb phrases to the front of the sentence, which is moderately useful (if a little advanced for that age group), but that they are required to know the term 'fronted adverbial', which is recondite educationalist jargon, of no earthly use to anyone in the real world.

Since this thread is about grammar that makes you cringe, I'll also point out that this use of 'fronted' makes me cringe big time.

[hellymedic]

Only really seen 'fronted' used by estate agents describing properties like a double-fronted house in the outside world.
Can't say it bothered me then.

[Kim]

Why the fuck are kids being taught fronted adverbials anyway? Do the educational authorities want to make them all sound like Yoda?

Because Gove?

I expect that someone, quite reasonably, pointed out that it might be useful to learn some grammar in school.  And then Gove happened.

[Kim]

'They' as a singular pronoun has *centuries* of previous usage as a precedent. It's weird that people seem to dislike it so much, especially as an unambiguous non-gender-specific singular pronoun makes for a useful distinction in practice.

In formal use it still looks as if it has wandered into a wedding reception wearing unmatched gumboots.

I dunno, that sounds like my kind of wedding reception...   

I don't much mind it, though, as long as the rest of the text is consistent.  Sentences that begin with "a person" and "their" only to end with "him" and "his" make me unbutton the flap of my holster.

Agreed, unless perhaps it's an edge case where the gender of the person is revealed partway through the sentence, in which case it's a cheap grammatical trick.

And it's bloody stupid when it's under the photo of what is patently a bloke. Or must the genitals be in view?

This, not so much.  Disregarding the 'it's not about the genitals' factor, the great thing about gender-neutral writing is that you can use it for anyone.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Why the fuck are kids being taught fronted adverbials anyway? Do the educational authorities want to make them all sound like Yoda?

Because Gove?

I expect that someone, quite reasonably, pointed out that it might be useful to learn some grammar in school.  And then Gove happened.

That makes it sound like Gove was conceived as a result of grammar being taught at school. In which case, I'm all for the innocent virtues of illiteracy.

[Kim]

See, that sort of sloppy "$noun happened" construction is excatly the sort of thing people come up with when they aren't teeched proper grammer.

[ian]

I can't remember what we learned or did in English. In French it was words and how to use them to maximise the distress of our French teachers. I have an O level (grade A, if memory serves, or possibly I'm mixing it up with chicken fillets). I also have a O level in English Literature (keep laughing at the back, I've read all the big books).

I do remember we had to pick books and read them. Probably while the teacher snuck out for a smoke, which is what teachers did a lot back then, well that and the ever popular running off with sixteen year olds. Sometimes we had to read sections of our chosen novel in class, which was appropriately horrid. Thirty pairs of eyes would fall to the floor the moment our teacher look up and said 'so who next'. I think my eyeballs once scuttled into the next classroom to evade the task. One microsecond of eye contact was all it took for an Ian?. It wasn't without entertainment. My best pal back then was reading that James Herbert book The Rats. Now, as any teenage boy in my generation knows* things always got a little spicy around page 172. So in hindsight, he shouldn't have started reading at page 171 and then he would have never had to read the phrase 'she reached down and grabbed his stiff...' out loud in front a teacher and thirty of his teenage peers. His stiff what? demanded teacher. There was a moment of exquisitely painful silence.

Cock, miss, he finally replied. The sounds of thirty kids snorting at the same time isn't a good one.

Sadly, he may have thought he was off the hook. Not so.

Well carry on reading then, Neil.

He bottled it at that. You'll have to read the book to find out if it was put to a grammatically correct use.

*We didn't have the internet and the top shelf of the newsagent was a mission no one took lightly, so mastubation took a lot more effort, at least in the preparation. A playground copy of Knave or Fiesta, liberated from someone's dad's stash, was significant currency.

[citoyen]

I just found this Michael Rosen piece on fronted adverbials, which is replete with wisdom, as you'd expect...

http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/health-alert-how-fronted-adverbial.html

Full of shite, this government is.

[Kim]

I do remember we had to pick books and read them. Probably while the teacher snuck out for a smoke, which is what teachers did a lot back then, well that and the ever popular running off with sixteen year olds. Sometimes we had to read sections of our chosen novel in class, which was appropriately horrid. Thirty pairs of eyes would fall to the floor the moment our teacher look up and said 'so who next'. I think my eyeballs once scuttled into the next classroom to evade the task. One microsecond of eye contact was all it took for an Ian?.

We had a much less interesting version:  We were all assigned the same book.  Which meant that reading in class was a special, if much less interesting, form of torture where you were made to read a book at the speed of whoever was struggling with the embarrassment of reading out loud, else be caught 'not paying attention' and made to read the next bit.  Have you ever tried to read a book deliberately slowly?  It's like following the live subtitles on the BBC news, only without the comedy word substitutions.

I eventually worked out that I could preserve a shred of sanity by reading the book over the weekend before we started studying it, in order to know what happened next.  This had the advantage that I could appreciate the book on its own merit, unsullied by the analysis of English teachers.  It had the disadvantage that I had to finish a book that was almost certainly a bit dull^[1] over the course of a random weekend, but I was a nerd with no life, so that wasn't as big a deal as it might sound.


_{[1] We didn't even get Mr Darcy, let alone car chases and explosions.}

[ian]

I seem to recall set texts in English Literature, none so enlightening as The Rats. I think they were OK, if faintly radical for the dark era of Thatcher and, as a plus, none of them were DH Lawrence (as a side note, everyone in movie and TV versions of Lawrence stuff speaks with a Yorkshire accent, never Erewashian – admittedly this practice avoids the need for subtitling). I seem to recall writing a lot about Animal Farm and Pygmalion. I think I'm finally appreciating the irony of the latter, considering the local dialect.

Being forced to read out loud was, of course, an acutely embarrassing form of aural nakedity. One mispronounced word (or worse, one correctly pronounced 'posh' word) was the only qualification for months of abuse, usually by the group of more feral pupils aping (an easy skill for them) your pronunciation everywhere you went. I once had to stab someone with a compass point over the pronunciation of diplodocus. Admittedly, I expect similar behaviour from curators at the National History Museum.

[Vernon]

We need a specific name for verbing nouns, like we have gerund for nouning verbs.

gerov?

[citoyen]

Being forced to read out loud was, of course, an acutely embarrassing form of aural nakedity.

I used to enjoy it and would always volunteer to be the one to read out loud. But that's probably because I'm a shameless exhibitionist. Thus were my classmates subjected to me reading pretty much the whole of Watership Down to them, aged 11.

Perhaps the only reason I avoided getting beaten up was because I spared the less willing members of the group from having to do it themselves.

[Jakob W]

I was going to link to that Rosen piece, but was beaten to it. Of course a hideous fuckup should be no surprise for a Govian initiative, but it's the cargo-cultiness of it that offends. Some knowledge of 'grammar' is probably helpful, but AFAICS what's taught is mainly syntax, which native speakers pick up and internalise fairly well anyway; and the error-riddled box-ticking syllabus is no way to teach even the bits that might be useful.

In a similar vein to Rosen, I reckon a far better way to learn about the effective and powerful use of language is simply to read lots of varied texts, and (sorry, Kim...) to do a fair amount of textual analysis at various levels, including close reading and more structural/narratological approaches.

[Andrij]

I don't think this particular education tool has been used in the UK:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

I hating diagramming sentences, but I did learn from it.

[Kim]

I don't think this particular education tool has been used in the UK:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

Probably only in Computer Science.

[T42]

It's not 9-10 year olds that get the fronted adverbial shite, it is the 7-8 year olds.

That's insane.

What really offends me is not that they're being taught the idea of moving adverb phrases to the front of the sentence, which is moderately useful (if a little advanced for that age group), but that they are required to know the term 'fronted adverbial', which is recondite educationalist jargon, of no earthly use to anyone in the real world.

Since this thread is about grammar that makes you cringe, I'll also point out that this use of 'fronted' makes me cringe big time.

You're affronted, so to speak.

Betcha it snuck in from over there.

A propos of which, I quite like American colloquialisms, but when they thrust right-hand feet into left-hand shoes with such grotesque terminology as fronted I could happily harvey the lot of them.

[citoyen]

Betcha it snuck in from over there.

Not necessarily. I reckon our academics are quite capable of inventing crap jargon of their own.

(Apparently, a linguistics professor called Richard Hudson was mainly responsible for introducing fronted adverbials to UK education, and he's a Brit, but I don't know if he invented the term or got it from elsewhere.)

[Mr Larrington]

I had manged fifty-three years of not knowing what a "fronted adverbial" is.  Now I do know¹, and would like to go and kill someone.  Not Michael Gove, though, because everyone already wants to kill him.

1: And will doubtless have forgotten by lunch-time.

[citoyen]

I had manged fifty-three years of not knowing what a "fronted adverbial" is.

AIUI they didn't exist for approximately the first 47 of those years.

[T42]

The norm, then, being backed adverbials.  How about sided, aboved and undered ones?  Or diagonally to the rear, i.e. backsided? Adverbial on the port quarter, Cap'n!!! Give it the 9-pounders, Mr. Pullings, if you please.

I need another cuppa.

[hellymedic]

Interestingly, spent Mr Larrington much childhood in Germany, where fronted adverbs commonplace are...

[Diver300]

I hope it is only barbers, talking about the problems running resonant clippers designed for 60 Hz mains on 50 Hz, who say that Hertz is a measure of "hertage".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4eFU2fPXAA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeErR17uUc

[citoyen]

I thought it was AAA points that were the measure of hurtage.

[hellymedic]

I hope it is only barbers, talking about the problems running resonant clippers designed for 60 Hz mains on 50 Hz, who say that Hertz is a measure of "hertage".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4eFU2fPXAA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeErR17uUc

There's a high frequency incidence of technical illiteracy!

"I have twenty years of barbering experience."