| JABBERWOCKY
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought-- So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought....
And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And stood awhile in thought.
One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back.
"And has though slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Calooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass
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Writing has a grammar because all communication operates according to rules. Grammar describes the rules of written language. Could you play a game without any rules? Neither can you communicate in writing without knowing at least some of the rules. The better you know the rules, the better you can play the game of writing. As a proficient speaker of the English language you already intuitively know many of the rules of communication; many of those rules can be applied to writing, though not all can. Learning which ones can and which cannot will determine your success in writing successfully.
The word grammar is often used to describe language usage, especially written language usage. People say, "I'm not too sure of my grammar. I always confuse sit with set and never know whether to say "he and me" or "he and I." Instead, think of grammar as a way for you to make sense of language. This ability to make sense of all of language from knowing only a part of it is expressed in the following quote by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be a master of a technique" (Philosophical Investigations (1953)).
Look at the poem by Lewis Carrol and see what rules of language enable you to tell much about the words whose meaning you do not, cannot, know. Even though you do not know what the words mean, you can still know a lot about the words: you know to what class of words they belong. You know which are adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs. How?
The book, Through the Looking Glass, continues immediately after the poem with these comments:
"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas- only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something; that is clear, at any rate --" (19).
What is clear (at any rate) is that we can make some sense out of this poem even though we do not know what the individual words mean. Later in the book, the author's meanings for some of the words is revealed, but we don't need these meanings to know that the words mean something. We know what class of words the words belong to because we know something about GRAMMAR. The grammar of a language is a description of the rules that enable us to understand how language is organized; without the grammar we could not understand the language. There would be no language, only sounds unrelated to each other.
Look again at the poem.
Try to uncover as much meaning as possible from each unknown word.
| "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather
a scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice," whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all." |
Grammar is a way to help you uncover the meaning of something previously unknown. As long as you know what constraint you are dealing with, then you know a lot about what is being constrained. Look at the poem again. The closer you look, the more you figure out the meanings of the words, the more you will know about grammar.
Later in Through the Looking Glass, Alice is talking to Humpty Dumpty. She asks, "Would you tell me the meaning of the poem called `Jabberwocky'?" Alice recites some of the poem. Humpty says that "there are plenty of hard words there. `Brillig' means four o'clock in the afternoon - the time when you are broiling things for dinner."
"That'll do very well," said Alice: "and `slithy'?"
"Well `slithy' means `lithe and slimy.' `Lithe' is the same as `active.' You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meaning packed up into one word." Humpty seems pretty sure of the meanings of these words. He seems to be speaking from experience. It makes some sense to think of "slithy" as a combination of "lithe" and "slimy." But why doesn't it make much sense to believe that "Brillig" means "four o'clock in the afternoon"?
It's not too difficult to think back in your own language learning experience, especially in the language we all learned in school, and find instances of discovering that some of what we learned made sense and some, perhaps most, did not. It's worth trying to figure out what made sense, and also it is worth trying to figure why what made sense did, and why what didn't didn't.
his time we have spent on grammar has been very brief, much too brief to explore the richness of what constitutes the structure of human language, let alone that part of language familiar to us English speakers. But I hope we have done enough to demonstrate that grammar is what allows us to understand language and what allows us to make sense of our world. Like so much of what makes up our experience, grammar is both a limitation and a liberation. Grammar puts restrictions on what we can say and write, but grammar also makes it possible for us understand more about language than we would otherwise be able to understand without knowing something about how the grammar of language works.
Grammar imposes a pattern on our experience, and knowing the pattern allows us to know and appreciate how writers use that knowledge to make us experience more about language that sometimes we want to know. Poets are notorious for playing with the pattern of language. Every good poet is aware of the pattern of language and makes use of that knowledge. Take a look at a poem and see how knowing more about grammar helps you appreciate more what the poet is doing.
One of E.E. Cummings' inventions was the use of one part of speech to
function in lieu of another. In places where nouns would normally be used,
Cummings put verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even conjunctions:
he sang his didn't he danced his did |
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