Grammar, a Prescriptive Relic

The rules of grammar. A torturous and pointless exercise we all go through at school. But, as David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, grammar never starts off that way:

“People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious rules that people seem to be employing when they speak.”

 

The transformation to an oppressive and meaningless relic happens later, over decades and centuries:

“Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.”

 

Shane Parrish reiterates that point: “descriptive” means “it tells us what the world is currently like”. Whereas “prescriptive” means “it tells us how the world should be”. Grammar (and dictionaries) were created to be “descriptive”, but they become “prescriptive”. And that is when they clash with real-life: Language itself evolves over time, but the rules of grammar don’t get updated fast enough. And the wider the mismatch between language v/s grammar-and-dictionaries, the more pointless and oppressive the latter feel.

 

Come to think of it, no native speaker of any language ever learns the rules of grammar. Even the defense that grammar is for foreigners who want to learn a language doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If you live in a place where they speak a different language, you fumble around, make grammatical errors by the truckload, and eventually get good enough to get through. Along the way, you internalize the speaking conventions of the language unconsciously, not by learning any grammar. And that’s without even getting into those online translating apps, which increasingly are capable of almost real-time translations anyway.

 

So why not abolish grammar altogether?