[GoodLing] - "I was a grammar nazi, and I was wrong"
defeatingthedragons.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/...
defeatingthedragons.wordpress.comPosted Jun 9, 2015, 5:01 AM UTC
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defeatingthedragons.wordpress.comTechnically the blog post itself is goodling, but there's a bunch of discussion of the badling she grew up with. Lots of interesting stuff about the contents of A Beka's Christian homeschooling curriculum.
I was taught that there is a moral difference between prescriptivist and descriptivist grammar. The problem all started with “post-modern ideologies” that affected the way people see language and communication, and it all came to a head with Merriam-Webster’s Third Edition. Dictionaries are supposed to tell you the “correct” spelling for a word, but the Third went and changed it all by refusing to say whether or not a spelling was correct. Over time “correct” and “incorrect” have been replaced by “preferred” or “standard formal.”
This is a huge problem, according to conservative Christians, and the rationale goes something like this:
- Christians are “people of the book,” as our Gospel was delivered to us through the medium of language.
- Evangelization depends on clear and effective communication.
- Clear and effective communication is best maintained by teaching “correct” grammar and syntax.
- Therefore, failure to teach grammar is detrimental to the Gospel.
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Holy crap... I was raised on A Beka. Lemme tell you, it is a wonder I still have a hardcore interest in language, writing and linguistics (and history). That curriculum was bad at every subject it attempted. It's a miracle, and wholly independent of this curriculum's efforts, that I managed to get a good education and a love of learning.
I'm still a hardcore Christian, and a strong proponent of homeschooling (when done very carefully), but A Beka Books was a monstrosity and an affront to academic and spiritual growth.
/rant
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[deleted]
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Similar arguments were used to force Deaf people not to use sign language, since the Word of God is needed to be saved: so some people considered understanding spoken language as necessary to be saved.
Edit: spelling mistakes
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That's just...depressing.
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In that case they should stop translating it into English and study the usage and connotations of whatever Greek term was used in place of "word", to see if it includes signing or not.
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If they're really strongly IFB or in that same vein, they're probably KJV-only types, which means they literally think the King James translation of the Bible is the only correct version and all others are incorrect, and that includes the original manuscripts.
Therefore, studying the original Greek is useless, because only the KJV is the "real" Word of God.
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Don't forget the Hebrew / Aramaic, as the Old Testament Greek version is a translation in itself. Though those people tend to pick and choose what they want in the Old Testament.
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lol
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The first time I ran into one of those guys I thought he had to be trolling
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...how the fuck is that possible?
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Might be that, at least to them, learning the original Greek simply doesn't ὕλη. The origin of the problem is ignorance, after all.
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I'd point out that the first efforts at formulating descriptive linguistics begin in the first decade of the 20th century with Sassure and Pierce(long before postmodernism was A Thing), and this is when we see more interest in the description of non-European languages. But that probably is not very helpful.
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This is definitely not something that all fundies practice. I grew up in a large fundie organization, and there was none of the insistence on proper grammar being godly.
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It's definitely something that differs between groups. Fundamentalist Christianity is a wide field -- while the various churches and corporations have certain commonalities and trade ideas around, different subgroups all have certain quirks.
This particular approach to grammar is somewhat specific to A Beka, which makes sense as they're a company that produces fundamentalist Christian homeschool materials. Interestingly, Accelerated Christian Education, another company that makes terrible materials for terrible "schools," also takes an outdated, rigid view of grammar, while combining it with propaganda. Jonny Scaramanga is an activist who's been working to get ACE out of UK schools, and he describes it here:
Almost all English instruction in ACE is in the form of traditional grammar exercises — diagramming sentences, identifying subjects and objects, and learning parts of speech. Never mind that study after study have failed to find any evidence that this improves students’ writing, and never mind that we have known since at least the 1950s that ACE’s understanding of grammar is unscientific and not how language works in practice. There are plenty of credible English educators who still support grammar instruction, but none of them recommend doing it ACE’s way. ACE doesn’t care about that. Grammar teaching using isolated sentences is traditional. And traditional, to fundamentalists, is best.
Teaching grammar this way requires thousands of individual sentences for students to parse, and this suits ACE perfectly because it makes every page an opportunity for fundamentalist propaganda. The sentences tell stories of missionaries and Christian heroes, and they teach good Christian children how to behave. A lot of these sentences are about who you should and should not befriend.
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I guess I missed that. I did go through the A Beka program for one year, but I don't really remember all of it.
I definitely believe that the problem exists, because I've known of all kinds of crazy shit to go down when I was Pentecostal, I was just pointing out that it's not a universal fundie thing.
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i can't read that chart at all
i have never seen it before
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Sue left school Early because she felt sick, but her mother brother her back because she had fogotten her Latin book.
It's a Reed–Kellogg sentence diagram. They're not limited to this sort of Christian evangelical school of teaching grammar; I learned how to use them in my American public middle school English classes in the mid 2000s.
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interesting
i don't believe we ever charted or diagrammed a sentence in my public schooling
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i don't believe we ever charted or diagrammed a sentence in my public schooling
That's how we know that you are in the process of destroying the English language.
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I learned that kind of sentence diagramming in junior high in the late '80s.
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Well, good on her for being able to move past that! It can be hard to break out of stuff you were taught since you were a kid--especially if you were taught it that strongly. And it's just nice in general to see some goodling for once. :)
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And looking through the website, I see badling was really the least of her problems... lately my faith in humanity is steadily diminishing (and there wasn't so much of it to start).
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You only think this is dumb because you're not reading it in the original Coq.
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And that was the day when I realized that linguistics isn’t of the devil.
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this is hardcore
Amen (from the Sanskrit).
Redundant and unnecessary.
Literally