Good Book

If in a pinch I use the Harbrace College Handbook, then forgive me... Talk as you read and read a lot, and then write as you talk is the advice I give... Dr. Samual Johnson, one of the great scholars, critics and even writers of English said there is no English Grammar, and that is- compared to Latin where many parts of the sentence had to be in agreement, and only a few writers over several hundred years actually wrote examplery Latin... English is much easier because the rather arbitrary genitive has been dropped...

I use Fries' The Structure of English as well, but I really consider that English is my language and that I am free to mug it, trash it, or massacre it at will... It is some times easier to make a lasting point by screwing up the tongue... Remember that communication is truth, and that when you tell truth you do a service, and an essential service to others and all of humanity... If you will tell the truth as you know it other people may trouble themselves to understand you regardless of your weakness of Grammar... Excuse my spelling.. Have fun...

What is the end purpose of your desire to learn English grammar, SeoDezin? Is it so that you can become functional/fluent in English or is it for you to learn about the English language?

You should put its best use, Fido, to fuel your woodstove or a campfire.

One uses the tools one has, or usually none at all, which is usually where I am because no grammar seems near when most I need one... I used to tell guys in Ironwork: If you don't have the right tool you have to use your head... What if you need a pinch bar??? Or a maul??? Or a come-along, a name that says what it does...

My point being that correct means very little and effort means everything... If you want to communicate, you lay meaning on meaning like a painter lays brush strokes until people get your drift... It is not a perfect act or a perfect art, but a very general and common occupation... A sentence may be like an arrow, and with a point; but communication is more like a game or a dance that is its own purpose, or accord, or understanding, or perhaps, relationship...

My point being that the Harbrace College Handbook was not a reliable guide on how English was actually used.

It was and still is useful as fuel for a fire.

I have a pile of good books on the English Language, and I would have you trust me, that it is a work in progress and has been from nearly the beginning... It still has much vocabulary in common with German, and even with Latin, but it has went its own way, meaning the way people in trade and communication have pushed it from the beginning... People who want to stand on grammatical correctness are idiots... From a rhetorical point of view we want our sentences to mean what we want them to mean... To worry too much about it, or to spend too much time talking about it is clearly the second intention...

The first intention is to deal with the situation at hand, what ever that may be, and given the nature of human kind, the situation we always find ourselves in, of crisis, with everything on fire and nothing but gasoline to put it out with, because we absolutely refuse to resolve things for good and all, and prefer, if we would judge by the majority, to live in myth and magic and faith, and never confront our fears of the future, and so never realize the possiblities to be found there, and so are trapped more by our psychology than our language...

I would ask you: what is the point of talking in an exact and correct fashion about something that is nothing, with no more reality than a puff of smoke if that... For reality we have math with rules clearly spelled out and obvious...We can express what math says allegorically, but with much less of exactness, and see that even the exactness of math is based upon fallacy... In reality is not where our problems lie, nor in the language to deal with our moral issues, which are not real, or physical or conceived of by physical forms. Our problem lies with moral forms which are only spiritual considerations, and the only way of addressing them is artistically -giving them an -as if- sort of reality, and making ourselves real in the same process...

You're doing it right now, talking in an exact and correct fashion. You do it, like virtually all native speakers do it, every time you open your mouth. The point I was making is that there are a pile of crap books out there and many of them are the very ones that are used to teach English "grammar".

Of course, language is, has always been a work in progress. But the changes that are of grammar come slowly, those that are of idioms and vocabulary come much faster.

I would not confuse clear and simple prose with exact and correct... No one wants to sow confusion, but if they should then take another swipe at it... It is not math or science... It isn't aeronautics, and it isn't brain surgery... It is simple conversation, that when it reaches a point of difficulty one can either layer on meaning, or resort to math...Language is a human activity and everyone sort of follows the rules of their community in order to be understood, but trying to get too perfect about it simply takes all the fun out of a wonderful and primitive sport: Communication... Dr. Johnson made some remark about the French loving to here themselves speak... Well, YA!!! The Arabs call Arabic the Tongue of Angels... It does not matter if I believe them... It is not how you say it, but what you say, and language is a form of relationship and communication takes both truth, and the willingness to hear it, or rather, to share it, to both give of it and take of it... It is not how we say it, but that we say it, that we are alive to say it, and that out of our being and the search for more being, that we can give words meaning...

Simple conversation is all of those things. It's enormously complex.

I agree that language can be enormously complex if you look at it as a thing in itself... So can riding a bicycle be complex, or flying an air plane... One of the Wright brothers reasoned that flying would be complex, but that people learned to ride bicycles and people could learn to fly planes just as people learn to speak and write generally following the rules of their particular road to the point that they can be accepted, and understood... I can often write well, and in writing poetry, I find words can be assembled in almost any fashion and still say the same thing, and there my dislexia does not inhibit so much as expedites my effort.... I have books on lingusitics and grammer and most of them are sleeping pills on a shelf... I know from regular experience that I can comunicate well enough with people deficit in Grammer, vocabulary, and intelligence... It is because the desire is there which makes communication possible... If I may bore you with a story... A friend of mine from ironworking days was a Vietnam War Vet... He told me of his Captain who was GI from stem to stern... He was in battle with this officer once, and saw the man shot in the head, by which I mean, a round from the man's left front took out his right eye, and knicked his skull on the right of that eye... Roger said the guy went down to his knee, and came right back up fighting... But here was the point of the story... The officer never left the army or the war... He never got a glass eye while in Vietnam...He wore a patch to cover up the sort of grizzly wound that most men fear to be seen with in peace... And I discern a purpose for the patch in what Roger told me... If some ranking officer was outlining some hare brained plan over maps in the C and C bunker; this captain would raise his head, and raise his patch, and look at the other officer and Say: I don't believe I see what you are getting at, SIR!!!

War is a pleasure that comes at a price and usually that price is paid by the grunts while the pleasure is all for the officers... We should not kid ourselves about the price of our failures of communication... I am not talking about the line from Cool Hand Luke which is so much Liberal nonsense... The main reason for our failures of communication is not to be found in our language or Grammar... It can be found in the unwillingness of others to see what we are trying to say... To use a common example: We say that money talks... If money is talking to our government representative, do you think he will be able to hear the pain of those who sent him to office??? The futility of those trying to get good out of their government is for the most part, built in, constitutionally... The success of those with money buying influence from government comes from the fact that even the most virtuous and idealist people must some day give up fighting the inertia of the form, and take the money... No one willingly invites frustration into their existence... Most of us are dealing with the frustration we find already there to the best of our ability... The failures of government no matter how bad they may seem are not really a failure of comunication... The failure of communication is a symptom of a society at cross purposes with itself... The ability of words alone, reason or rhetoric, even if framed most perfectly is limited by a narrow view of self interest...