11/19/02’s illustrious band:

Vaguely a Noun

Brought to you by Aunt Pedant.

Aunt P, who teaches school in a quiet rural community on the windswept plains, was trying recently to get her seventh-grade students to identify the noun in a sentence. One student insisted that are was the noun, while another was sure it was vaguely. Aunt P is understandably frustrated. These students have been covering noun/verb territory since the second grade; one hopes that at some point they would catch on.

I can personally vouch for the fact that near-illiteracy in our native language is not limited to seventh-graders, nor to rural students, nor to Midwesterners (although the unceasing wind does contribute to a certain amount of lunacy). When I was a bright-eyed young Grad School Sensation, working my way through a literature program by teaching composition to college freshmen, I encountered the same problem. My students were East-coast high school graduates who had not only made it into college, but whose test scores were high enough to land them in my nonremedial, middle-of-the-writing-road writing course. Yet most of them could not write simple sentences, could not tell a right one from a wrong one, and could not identify many of the basic parts of speech. They, too, had been hearing about nouns and verbs since second grade or so, and they, too, had Teflon brains when it came to English grammar. I was aghast.

Wanna know the worst part, though? I'm not much better myself. I'm a professional writer whose primary tool is the English sentence, yet I still have to crack a book every time I run up against a choice between who and whom. I can distinguish active voice from passive, but I have never known what a subjunctive mood was, unless it means the end-of-vacation doldrums. I’m thumbs-up on adjectives and adverbs, thumbs-down on diagramming sentences.

Why is this so hard? How can we use a language all our lives and yet know next to nothing about it? Most of us would not claim to be auto mechanics, but we can name the basic parts of a car and explain how they work. Why care so little about one of the few characteristics -- the ability to use language -- that separates us from hedgehogs?

I don’t have answers for these questions. If you do, send them in.