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Grammar. What is it?
My peace of mind would probably be greatly enhanced if I would simply forget about the necessity to use any of the so-called rules of grammar when I attempt to communicate a thought or a feeling from my mind to the mind of reader. After all, such a thing has been done from time to time.
Even Carl Sandburg once wrote: "I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it."
Yes, perhaps that is what I should do; write as I once did back in my early years, with no thought for rules of grammar. In revision I can then decided whether my writing is better, more understandable and more communicative than it would have been if I had adhered to the standard rules of English grammar.
Or not.
This experiment, being no more than an experiment, could well be titled: EXPERIMENT.
Just a thought.
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HISTORICAL CLIP
On this day, March 9, 1996, the legendary performer George Burns died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, just weeks after celebrating his 100th birthday.
By the time Burns and Allen married in 1926 they had already become known on the vaudeville circuit.
In 1950, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show made a seamless transition to television, airing on CBS and becoming one of the top-ranked programs for the duration of the decade. The Burns-Allen team remained in the public eye until Allen’s retirement in 1959. She died of a heart attack in 1964, at the age of 58.
After Burns underwent major heart surgery in 1975 at the age of 79, his career got a second wind. That year, he played a retired vaudevillian in the film adaptation of Neil Simon’s play The Sunshine Boys, co-starring Walter Matthau and Richard Benjamin. Burns won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role. After that, there was no shortage of movie parts for the octogenarian actor, who played God in Oh God! (1977) and its sequels, Oh God! Book II (1980) and Oh God! You Devil (1984), in which Burns was featured as both God and the Devil. He also starred in Just You and Me, Kid (1979), Going in Style (1979) and Eighteen Again (1988).
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WORD FOR TODAY
grammar
noun
1.
the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed; morphology and syntax.
2.
these features or constructions themselves.
3.
an account of these features; a set of rules accounting for these constructions: ex. a grammar of English.
generative grammar is a linguistic theory that attempts to describe a native speaker's tacit grammatical knowledge by a system of rules that in an explicit and well-defined way specify all of the well-formed, or grammatical, sentences of a language while excluding all ungrammatical, or impossible, sentences.
prescriptive grammar is an approach to grammar that is concerned with establishing norms of correct and incorrect usage and formulating rules based on these norms to be followed by users of the language. Also, a set of grammatical rules based on such an approach.
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that governs the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics.
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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Born March 09, 1934
Died March 27, 1968
Died March 27, 1968
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.
Born March 9, 1454
Died Feb. 22, 1512
Died Feb. 22, 1512
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer who first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as initially conjectured from Columbus' voyages, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to Afro-Eurasians. Colloquially referred to as the New World, this second super continent came to be termed "America", probably deriving its name from the feminized Latin version of Vespucci's first name.
Born March 9, 1943
Died Jan. 17, 2008
Died Jan. 17, 2008
Robert James "Bobby" Fischer was an American chess grandmaster and the 11th World Chess Champion. He is considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time.
A chess prodigy, at age 13 Fischer won a "brilliancy" that became known as The Game of the Century. Starting at age 14, he played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a point. At age 15½, he became both the youngest grandmaster and the youngest candidate for the World Championship up to that time. He won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship 11–0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament. His book My 60 Memorable Games, published in 1969, remains a revered part of chess literature for advanced players.
Born March 9, 1918
Died: July 17, 2006
Died: July 17, 2006
Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American author of crime novels, many featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the U.S.
Note: I think I read all the Spillane novels back in the old days and have a notion to read some of them again soon.
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“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”
--Michel de Montaigne
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