Grammar can be sexy

Language has been changing since the Tower of Babel and will continue to do so. Just think of the influence of technology: a mouse used to be something you kept in a cage, and Bluetooth was a 10th-century King of Denmark. Some people, especially older ones, regard change — texting, tweeting and social media in general — as a threat to English. I disagree. The world’s mobile phone users send 15 million texts every minute. There is no evidence that they have forgotten how to write.

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, her international bestseller about punctuation (it had a special Indian edition), Lynne Truss lamented “the justifiable despair of the well educated in a dismally illiterate world”. In Strictly English, his book about grammar, the rightwing journalist Simon Heffer refers to “semi-literates” who he believes do not know how to use grammar properly.

One of the reasons I decided to write For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Guide To Grammatical Perfection was as a riposte to these and similar writers who use such insulting terms.
Many people, it’s true, do worry about their grammar, punctuation and spelling, or dismiss the subject as boring. I believe you can help them gain confidence in their use of language —and have some fun along the way. After all, the words “glamour” and “grammar” are closely related, so who knows: perhaps grammar can even be sexy.

It certainly is when the late James Brown, whom I quote in the book, is singing “Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)” and “I Got Ants In My Pants (And I Want To Dance).” Both titles are grammatically perfect. I quote a lot of songs because they can help to explain grammar. De La Soul’s “Me, Myself and I”, for example, is a great way to learn about reflexive pronouns. You can learn as much about syntax from Dr Dre as you can from Dr Johnson.

Most grammar books do not include really useful stuff, such as the fact that a comma is the difference between “let’s eat, Grandma!” (you have gone to your grandmother’s for tea) and “let’s eat Grandma!” (your grandmother is on the menu). So there is a chapter about punctuation because using it well helps you to communicate clearly, not because I want to show off my knowledge of apostrophes and semicolons.

I love the way language can throw up such weird and wonderful things. Take antanaclasis — the rhetorical term for repeating a word in a different sense, as in this perfectly grammatical sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” If you know that Buffalo is an American city, “to buffalo” can be a verb meaning to bully, and of course buffalo are animals, then you can read it to mean, with my explanation in square brackets: “Buffalo [place] buffalo [animals] / [whom] Buffalo [place] buffalo [animals] buffalo [bully] / [do in turn] buffalo [bully] Buffalo [place] buffalo [animals].”

Even spelling can be fun. If you are not sure how to spell a word, break it down into its component parts. Take “antidisestablishmentarianism”. It’s easy if you split it up into sections: anti-dis-establish-ment-ari-an-ism. But, sadly, no system can help you decide how many Cs and Ms there are in “accommodation”. You just have to learn it.

My book is really two things: a celebration of my love of language, and a guide that I hope will help people to enjoy using it well. Words have been my life for nearly 40 years as a journalist; I also have a master’s degree in linguistics. I hope that this experience has enabled me to share my knowledge in an interesting way that is easy to understand. Grammar does not have to be difficult.

David Marsh is production editor at The Guardian and author of For Who The Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest For Grammatical Perfection. The book is a culmination of his love for the English language and an even greater love for grammar. He can be found tweeting as @guardianstyle