Conjugate This  
By Martin Harris

You’ve noticed, I’d guess, that human laws are less predictable than natural laws. No one has yet improved on the three laws of thermodynamics, even though some physicists are now arguing for a fourth, which, in an effort at language-cuteness, they want to call the "zeroth". The realization that energy can be neither created nor destroyed is more reliable than the so-called "law" of unintended consequences, which wryly observes that human decisions at one point in history frequently come back to bite their descendants in unexpected ways at a later point. Lots of such decisions were made in the ‘60’s, the more elderly in this readership will recall, while younger cohorts, most of whom have chosen to be non-students of any history before their birth, won’t ever quite grasp why the world they will have inherited is the way it is. Here’s a pair of examples, which aren’t quite as dissimilar as they might, at first glance, seem.

One is the mid-60’s success of a part of the politically-powerful organized labor economic sector, the United Auto Workers, in a campaign which actually started a decade earlier, in wresting a lot of control away from management over staffing, work rules, wages, and benefits, from the Big Three car-builders, who figured, incorrectly, that in the absence of off-shore competition, they could go along to get along. Within a few decades the inefficiencies and costs, both current and legacy, would drive many of their customers to those alternative vendors and most of their industry into bankruptcy.

The other is the mid-60’s decision of a part of the politically-powerful professional educator economic sector, the National Council of Teachers of English, to wrest a lot of control over school curriculum content away from management, over, for one example, the relative emphasis on grammar-education in the public school curriculum. A lot less than previously, the NCTE decided. For a book length analysis, see "The War on Grammar", David Mulroy, 2005.(In the service of full disclosure, I herewith identify myself as the direct descendant of an NCTE member and minor official.) Concurrently and subsequently, other supposedly-curriculum-oriented organizations were pushing for "creative spelling", "new math", non-Western history, "Ebonics",_and so on, while the labor-leader American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker was spelling out his own priorities during a 1985 Congressional hearing : "When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children".  Lowering the pupil-teacher and pupil-staff ratios fits into that perspective, teaching grammar and raising test scores doesn’t. As with autos, institutional bankruptcy looms (look at Vermont’s state budget) and customer displeasure leads to loss of market share, in the case of public ed, to non-public alternatives.

The fruits of the war on grammar –verb conjugation, for example-- are showing up in today’s writers. A Wall Street Journal editor (12 Jan) thinks the past tense of "ring" is "rung". A long list of New York Times errors on the Web shows that Grey Lady writers think that the past tense of "lead" is also "lead". The Washington Post ombudsman blogs on reporters’ use of  "spitted" rather than "spat", and then their complaints that copy editors aren’t fixing their broken grammar. Even The Rutland Herald disdains grammar: a headline writer there (31 Dec) thinks the past tense of "stink" is "stunk". There’s a handful of verbs in the drink-drank-drunk and sing-sang-sung category, and back in 1942, 23 years before the NCTE decreed that grammar didn’t matter much, an enlisted Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class serving as a flight engineer did better with "sighted sub sank same" (don’t test today’s non-historians on that, either).

Does grammar matter? In 1965 the NCTE said "not much any more", then in 2002 crawfished a bit and said "yes, sort of". Teachers and students, most of whom aren’t interested in "past tense" versus "past participle", took no notice. After all, they say, the meaning is clear even if the verb conjugation isn’t. Those of us who think that grammar matters ( a group which includes most non-public-school teachers) can’t convince, I conclude from my own review of anecdotal evidence, those who don’t (a group which includes most public school teachers.)

As for unintended consequences, I’m tempted to trace the notion (quoting art critic Henrik Bering) that "the idea is all that matters, technical execution is something mechanical" back to the roots of conceptual art in the early 20th century, for example, the critically-honored and museum-displayed 1917 photograph (cutely labeled "Fountain") of a vitreous china urinal snapped by "artist" Marcel Duchamp. For another piece of work, contemporaneous with the first NCTE anti-grammar decision, consider the 1965 "One and Three Chairs" creation by "artist" Joseph Kosuth.  His chef-d’oeuvre consists of a wood chair, a photo of that chair, and a printed dictionary text defining "chair".  In the brave new world (provenance, English students?) of concept trumping competence in communication, whether art or language, it’s pretty clear that competence in grammar doesn’t matter any more. Whether the "artists" pushing that no-technical-skill-wanted notion for "art" ever intended or expected it to show up in the classroom, we know not.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights