Is there such a thing as good grammar?

And when should a kid learn it?

Q&A Time. Soulbender Chuck Sherman asks:

Jay,

How do you feel about using guilt as a verb? When did this practice start? 

Are college professors supposed to use/teach standard English?

He includes a quotation by Dartmouth business school professor Laurens Debo, in a piece about current tipping culture:

“Tipping is emotional. You may be guilted into it via human nature.”

Personally, I’d be more inclined to question the professor’s “via,” a word that gets abused by academics and pundits. It forces the speaker into an unnecessary passive voice. But I digress.

Should we feel guilty for guilting? See my post on How to Verb. Neologizing* can be dangerous in high school or a government agency, where novel usage may come across as linguistic impurity. But the words will come, whether we want them to or not. Better you and I should invent them than some adolescent on the street or, worse, some adolescent with a smartphone.

Actually, “guilting” isn’t as new as you might think. Guilt was a verb in Old English well before the twelfth century, though it held the opposite meaning from today’s version. Back then, “to guilt” was to commit a sin. Guilting’s modern usage began in 1977 as guilt-trip: “No guilt-tripping about our lovers, sisters, please,” reads a quote from the feminist magazine Spare Rib.

The current version of guilting understandably leaves out the “trip.” 

Now, what about Chuck’s question? Should colleges use and teach “standard English”?

The problem with standard English is its short half-life. The standard English of one generation rarely survives into the next. In my day, grammarians frowned at the use of “contact” as a verb, as in, “I’ll have my admin contact your admin.” But words often enter common usage out of need, not ignorance. “Contact” is shorter than “get in touch,” and more general than “call,” “text,” “write,” “meet with,” “Zoom,” or “bother.” If you don’t care how the secretaries talk to each other (and who has a “secretary” anymore?), have them achieve contact.

“Impact” used to get similar frowns, some of them deserved, when one used it as a verb. A meteor impacts the earth. A defensive lineman impacts the quarterback. I’d even accept a tax increase impacting the economy—running smack up against the gross domestic product. When people overuse “impact” as a stand-in for “harm,” I get impatient. “Ebola impacted West Africa the hardest.” This is metaphornication at its worst. While a virus could impact something minuscule, perhaps, just as a sperm impacts an egg, microscopic viruses do not impact Africa.

But that just shows that I’m an old guy with a previous generation’s standard English. Our grammar has never been very logical. Or static. The Oxford English Dictionary, with its evolving etymology, has the express purpose of revealing a dynamic language. “Correct” usage isn’t rational, agreeable, or even all that clear. But it’s the code of the elite.

And that’s exactly why I believe that middle schools should teach grammar. It enables sophisticated code-switching, the ability to speak at a higher socioeconomic level. College is way too late. The grammar-producing Broca’s region of the brain has developed fully by then, embedded with a lifetime’s worth of colloquialisms, provincial expressions, and (in my case) an unfortunate accent. An ambitious youngster who desires someday to communicate with elites should learn the King’s (and some Presidents’) English.

But it’s important to remember that grammar is a code, just like hip-hop lyrics, medical jargon, and military terms. They’re morally neutral, but useful to learn.

* Neologizing is a word I made up for making up new words!