Today in the car Klara and I were memorizing lines from Scripture for her Memory lesson. They have Memory every day, and as a result, she now probably knows more Scripture by heart than I do. Outside of religious considerations, I can say as a literary critic that there’s no better exercise for literacy and the capacity to appreciate great works of literature than this. It would be much easier for me to teach if my students knew their Bible. It’s tiresome to have to explain Cain and Abel every time I teach Unamuno, for example. One keeps wishing for some basic level of shared culture when one teaches.
Tomorrow, Klara’s class is performing an operetta for which they memorized some lines in Greek. This gave me an opening to talk about antiquity and Greek roots of some words.
This kind of school does make sense. It’s not AI’s fault that in many places school has been perverted through the use of education fads and application of inane ideology. You can make school useful. It’s not hard. Simply throw away all the fads and go back to the basics.
Clarissa's Blog 
School is for proles, and always has been.
The scions of the rich have always had tutors.
Schools for the rich are about cultivating connections with other rich families.
Schools for proles are, at their best, for offering literacy and numeracy to the children of the illiterate, for culturally integrating the children of immigrants, providing upward-mobility ladders for the minority of bright lower-class kids, and for reinforcing religious norms inside of religious subcultures.
More often, they have been used to acclimate children to the needs and norms of wage employers, to deter upward mobility and the acquisition of useful experience and skills, and to break familial, cultural, and community bonds– increasing dependence and decreasing agency among the lower classes.
-ethyl
LikeLike
“If I would have done that”. More and more I notice the normalisation of this plebeian form of non-standard grammar in current US speech, even among the educated.
Another shibboleth of mine is “things I wish I knew” instead of “I had known”. Is this normal? Are teachers in grade school no longer correcting students’ mistakes in the US?
LikeLike
” plebeian form of non-standard grammar in current US speech”
English is a pluricentric language, there’s not a single standard that everyone follows or aspires to. Conditional forms have been leveling in the US for a long time.
“If I would have done that” sounds fine as colloquial everyday American usage. I wouldn’t use it in a formal speech but different registers have different standards. Someone who uses formal forms all the time is someone no one really wants to talk to.
LikeLike
I hate “different than.” If something differs from, then it should be different from.
We don’t do that with any similar words. Divergent from. Separate from.
We don’t say separate than. We don’t say this thing differs than that thing. We’d sound like schizos. But everybody says different than. WHY??
Different than is ugly.
But the usage goes back at least a century, so I don’t get a say. It’s a legitimate construct.
-ethyl
LikeLike
“I hate “different than.””
What do you think of “different to”? That seems increasingly common in British usage and may be spreading….
“How are we different to traditional teaching?”
“Is The God Of The Old Testament Different To The God Of The New Testament?” (that example from Australia)
“Social media witch-hunts are no different to the old kind”
For me it sounds awful like biting down on aluminum foil….
(and don’t get me started on “innit”….)
LikeLike
That construct makes people sound like hicks, but without any of the redeeming features of hick dialects.
-ethyl
LikeLiked by 1 person
“If I would have known” is still non-standard, in standard educated form of British, US, Australian English, regardless of cliff’s fondness for it in informal contexts. When in London, I also tend to go for plebeian cockney English, but I wouldn’t say it’s standard in informal registers.
I do not think this has anything to do with the pluricentric nature of English: pled is standard in the US where British has pleaded – even though, for obvious reasons, the US form is gaining ground in the UK. Or, “I just saw him” instead of the perfect “I’ve just seen him”, which is the British standard. And like these, there are many other features which mark the different national, and even regional, standards of pluricentric English.
“If I’d known” is no more formal than “she’s just left”, which in British English has a different nuance compared to “She just left”.
Anyway, I suppose I must have ruffled quite a few feathers – involuntarily, I must add – by the use of “plebeian”. There’s nothing wrong with the use of plebeian forms by the plebs: it’s their idiolect and just as valid as a language as any other variant, linguistically speaking, but not in the mouths of people who have had the privilege and advantage of learning or knowing the educated standard form of the language. Whether there is a syntactic shift taking place in American English which is refashioning the subjunctive in second conditional forms I do not know, and that is why I asked.
My question was a genuine one, but it went unanswered, and the more’s the pity. Prescriptivism is long dead, I know, also thanks to the mostly middle-class and upper-middle class academics who, they themselves, use the best of impeccable and standard forms of English except when out on some slum tourism expedition.
LikeLike
It’s so hard to teach Spanish hypotheticals because they are just like English hypotheticals which nobody knows any longer. “If I will win the lottery” and “if I would have knew” are slaughtering me.
LikeLike
” just like English hypotheticals which nobody knows any longer”
A lot of the grammar of English is collapsing from overuse as a second language by people that prioritize communication over everything else and who have all sorts of frozen forms that don’t conform to any native usage but are widespread in ‘international English’…
I saw one video by Geoff Lindsay where even native speakers don’t necessarily distinguish a and an anymore and seem to use them almost interchangeable “I’ll have a apple and an bagel” (not an example from the video but you get the point).
LikeLiked by 1 person
We had a graduate student come in today to encourage people to go to grad school. He told us that you can take “less courses” in certain programs. So. Yeah. A huge grad school success. I’ll let everybody guess in what subject he’s getting his degree.
LikeLike
” still non-standard, in standard educated form “
I have a broader definition of standard than you probably do that includes daily informal usage. That is, to simplify greatly,
high standard (formal speeches, in court, in government)
low standard (the same people in private)
“If I would have gone” is perfectly correct informal GAE (General American English) the common language of the US and someone who never uses it is socially… deprived? Not gonna have many friends cause who wants to hang around with someone who talks like a bureaucrat on camera.
The daily informal usage of educated (by which I mean at least high school graduate) has lots of features in any national standard that don’t occur in others.
I would never use the phrase ‘crack on’ (except paralinguistically) but a person in England who never used it is not using the language correctly. I wouldn’t say ‘If I would have done that” is required but it’s well within normal parameters and only hopeless pedants would object to it in contexts like the one you’re quoting (and I say that as a proud hopeless pedant).
I have no ideas what schools do or don’t say about grammar in the US. A few years ago I read that for various reasons most UK schools never discuss usage at all (I assume it’s all DEI propaganda all the time in ‘English’ class).
I only bits and pieces of grammar rules from when I was in school. I think they frowned on “if I was” and some local past tense forms.
LikeLike
Avi, for what it’s worth, I too abhor the abomination.
As for what Cliff says below, “If I had done that, I would’ve done that other thing” is not particularly formal at all. If you wrote a piece of fiction and sent it to an editor, they’d edit the text into this form. It’s simply the logically and grammatically consistent way to speak of hypotheticals in the past.
Hypothetical in the present: “If I did this, that would happen.”
Hypothetical in the past, moving both tenses one step into the past: “If I had done this, that would’ve happened.”
There’s a song with the lyrics “I wish I knew you when I was young” and it absolutely drives me up the wall every time I hear it. It’s “I wish I’d known you when I was young” FFS
And don’t get me started on people using simple past tense instead of past participle in absolute monstrosities such as “I should’ve went…” *shudders with revulsion*
I really don’t think it’s the fault of ESL speakers, contrary to what someone said below. I’m an ESL speaker and I promise you that I care way more about grammar and spelling than a vast majority of my American-born students. I am forever correcting their spelling on tests. Native speakers, especially if they have no knowledge of any other language and if they don’t read (which is most people), simply go with whatever feels right and pay no heed to grammatical coherence, to my eternal chagrin.
LikeLike
“is not particularly formal at all”
But it’s what you can say in a formal situation maybe “Had I done that…” is a tad more formal. But in everyday interactions there are a lot of other options. You don’t have to like them but they’re part of the language since millions of native speakers use them.
“don’t think it’s the fault of ESL speakers”
Not ESL speakers per se, but the conditions under which hundreds of millions of people are compelled to learn a language they may not have any special interest in or affection for.
If you suddenly had to learn a language that didn’t interest you and you didn’t much like would you take extra care to meet the formal requirements of grammar or would you do just barely enough to get by… Lots of non-native speakers care about a prescriptive form of English than native speakers do and many more…. don’t.
The thing is that for many/most native speakers using the prescribed forms all the time seems like a straight jacket and/ior boring and so they liven it up with spontaneous forms, language play and deliberately ‘wrong’ forms. This is pretty much universal and not unique to English native speakers. Talking with friends I might say: Now, I do that…. (with higher than usual voice through the clause) instead of “If I had done that”.
“I wish I knew you” vs “I wish I’d known you” is probably down to ease of singing, try it the former is a lot easier than the latter, the last two syllables rhyme and no real closed syllables. Lots of odd lyrics are ultimately about ease of performance in professional settings… (The song Wichita Lineman originally had a different name but ‘Wichita’ sounded better sung).
LikeLiked by 1 person
“The thing is that for many/most native speakers using the prescribed forms all the time seems like a straight jacket and/ior boring and so they liven it up with spontaneous forms, language play and deliberately ‘wrong’ forms.”
*sigh* Yes, I am aware that slang exists. However, I promise you that I have never said and will never say “I should’ve went” or “If I would’ve done that.” Slang and all sorts of wordplay are not incompatible with grammar.
I always have questions for people who subscribe to a totally descriptivist view of the language: Why bother having editors, or style and grammar books, if it’s impossible to say that some forms are simply incorrect and however the majority uses the language is the language? At what point does “I should’ve went” stop being plain wrong and becomes what you teach ESL speakers in classrooms? How exactly do you teach people a language if you don’t also teach them the grammatical structure of the language?
LikeLike
” a totally descriptivist”
I’m not quite that. Close, but not quite. I have no problem telling people ‘don’t say’ “If I’d went” or “She don’t know”.
But the reason has less to do with grammar and more to do with social rules. Following certain rules in speech and writing is showing that you know the rules of the game and are willing to play by them.
A lot of ‘grammar’ rules in English have little foundation in actual usage (long story: writing grammars for people who wanted to be upwardly mobile was a cottage industry in England for a while and a lot of the rules were more or less made up out of thin air, like the old will/shall rule (if you don’t know that.. be happy).
There’s no equivalent in any other European language that I know of. A lot of ‘standard English’ is an amalgam of existing forms and weird nonsense rules that have no basis in usage (like saying ‘It’s me’ is ungrammatical or that beginning a sentence with ‘hopefully’ is wrong).
But when a certain percentage of native speakers use a form, it’s part of the grammar of the language. Whether that form should be used in all situations is another question altogether. All living languages have registers of formal and informal usage and things that sound fine in one… often don’t sound fine in another.
And language play is a lot more than slang. Take the song lyrics.
“Li’l’ David Was Small, But Oh My!
He Fought Big Goliath
Who Lay Down And Dieth”
Not slang, breaks a bunch of grammar fules but also very creative and memorable.
Behind the surface chaos you’ll find that native usage in any place, even very informal forms is highly rule bound, it’s just that the rules in place aren’t the same as in grammar books.
LikeLike
“There’s no equivalent in any other European language that I know of.”
Whenever I hear this about any language, I roll my eyes. All languages feature wordplay and all languages have slang; you keep insisting that I somehow don’t understand that. People are playful in any language. But there is intent in wordplay; there’s knowing the rules of the language and bending or breaking them for intended effect. And then there’s just having no idea that something is incorrect. There is such a thing as the standard form of a language. It’s the form used on TV, in newspapers, etc. The form that is taught in schools. Yet you’re pretending like there isn’t one, that language is free for all, and that pointing out there is a standard form of a language, with standard grammar and usage, means a person has no concept of wordplay (which btw kids understand as toddlers). 🙄
LikeLike
“All languages feature wordplay and all languages have slang”
Maybe I wasn’t clear. What I meant was that the grammars of most European languages were written by philologists or other people with training. A lot of the grammar of traditional standard English was written by chancers with no training in the language arts. That’s where weird rules about not ending sentences with prepositions come from (for example) they were less trying to describe usage of real language and more trying to create linguistic traps for those who didn’t buy their books.
Another factor is that a lot of written media in the US is no longer produced by native speakers or even by people in some cases. Newspapers outsourced a lot of writing to places like the Philippines with a few native speakers to edit their work And computers have been able to write newspaper articles for years before anyone heard of AI.
The written media in the US is just not a good model anymore.
“then there’s just having no idea that something is incorrect.”
Not at all.
“Women in my country are discriminated.” is incorrect.
“I saw the doctor to enter the car.” is incorrect.
“The party was very funny.” (meaning the person enjoyed themselves) is incorrect.
“I just want to tell a few words.” is incorrect.
“I don’t know where does she live.” is incorrect.
Those types of constructions are all very common in International English and I think they’re all wrong since they’re not naturally produced by native speakers.
Similarly, “Did you give it him?” is incorrect in NAmerican English but okay in everyday British usage.
“It were” instead of “it was” is also incorrect in NAmerican but I knew an Oxford PhD graduate who often said it.
“If I would have done that” is not incorrect but it’s not appropriate for a lot of occasions.
LikeLike
I’m in complete agreement.
And at the same time I’m very fond of some of the regional constructs I grew up with, such as might could, might should, might oughtta, and the use of “right” as an amplifier.
There’s a progression of degree that goes: open–> wide open–> right wide open. The window was open to let in the breeze. That idiot left the barn door wide open and all the cows got out. The tornado blew the post office right wide open.
We know better than to use those in formal situations, but they make the story more entertaining 😉
-ethyl
LikeLiked by 1 person
I also use “right” that way.
“He’s a right fool”, for example.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree, and I work in schools. More and more I wonder if kids are actually learning anything and if school is just a place to dump kids so parents can work. In a lot of classes I’ve subbed for, the kids have all their work in Google Classroom or have worksheets that are just busywork to keep them in their seats. Much of the time, I just make sure that they don’t go on YouTube or social media but do no actual teaching.
As far as Biblical references, I was shocked when I taught a Sunday school class years ago and the children had never heard of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, or that Christmas is supposed to be the birthday of Jesus. The same kids didn’t know the name of the president, the schools they attended, or even the town where they lived. These were average 10 year old American kids, not children with special needs
LikeLike
I agree, and I work in schools. Too many schools act as free babysitting and a dumping ground for kids so the parents can work, most of the work is on Google Classroom or is just piles of worksheets asking questions from previous chapters to keep them busy, it’s not actual learning. All I need is to take attendance and make sure the kids don’t go on YouTube or social media, it’s not real teaching.
As a Sunday school teacher, I’ve met a lot of kids without any knowledge of the Bible or Biblical stories at all, they’d never heard of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Moses, or only had a vague idea about Jesus. These same kids didn’t know the name of the president, the name of their school, or even the name of their schools or town, these were average American kids and not children with special needs
LikeLike
One of my children has a Bible name. Not a common given name, but it’s an extremely prominent (I thought!) story in the New Testament. Surely, everyone is familiar with this name, even if they don’t know anybody with the moniker.
Nope. Outside of church, the only person I’ve met who instantly recognized it, was my neighbors’ Mexican bisabuela, who was giving my Spanish its most strenuous workout in years. She got it, and was delighted. So we can be friends 😉 it helps that she is old-school Catholic.
Everybody else: they’ve never heard it, they have no idea how to spell it (even though it’s spelled exactly like it sounds), and when they hear it, they transmute sounds to make it into a different completely made-up gibberish name. It’s become an unintentional literacy test.
-ethyl
LikeLike
Ooh, fun. I’m thinking Nicodemus, Lazarus, or Barnabas (Zacchaeus if you hadn’t said it’s spelled exactly like it sounds).
LikeLike
Going with Lazarus, though. I wouldn’t really say that Nicodemus or Barnabas are tied to a story per se, especially an extremely prominent one.
If it is Lazarus, there’s a fun reference to the name in Spanish, speaking of the bisabuela. “Lazarillo” is the traditional word for a seeing eye dog/service animal (literally, little Lazarus – the name comes from a 16th century Spanish novel about a boy, Lazarillo, who’s a guide for a blind man).
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have a funny story about this novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. The boy’s stepfather in the novel is black. But I couldn’t get my students to say he’s black. They kept referring to him as “African American”, refusing to listen to my explanations of why that didn’t make sense.
LikeLike
I was not familiar with “Lazarillo” for seeing-eye dog! That is great!
I lobbied for Nicodemus because I like that one too 😉
Bisabuela simply brightened up and asked: “El amigo de Jesucristo? Bueno!”
I wonder if there is some dumb TV character everybody but me is familiar with or something, because even though none of us lisp, and we are now *very* careful enunciating, people consistently transmute it into some atrocity with an “eth” on the end. Like what? Why? Why would you take a known name and transform it into gibberish like that? I have a wacky hippie-parents name myself, and I am totally used to people morphing it into the closest ‘normal’ name they can think of, because normalcy bias means they literally can’t hear an unfamiliar name. I get it. It’s fine. But this? Where is it coming from? I’m baffled.
-ethyl
*OK did the thing, looked it up, and there *was* a 2024 movie (sigh and eyeroll). So clearly this is a marker for “way too much screen entertainment” people. But now it’s going to be hard for me not to mentally deduct 20 IQ points when I hear that “eth”. Dang. I’d rather not know.
LikeLike
I don’t think it’s that. That obscure movie wasn’t culturally dominant enough to rewire people’s phonetic instincts en masse. It’s not a media rot thing.
I think the name sounds a lot like Nazareth and people’s brains just subconsciously pattern match. It is phonetic, just not phonetic within modern English naming patterns.
I get what you’re saying but wouldn’t be so harsh about their IQs. Your reaction is, How do you not know this?? because the name seems ancient and prominent in church culture. But outside of the church, you don’t hear that name. It’s not like Mary, John, or Noah. It feels universal in your subculture but is basically unknown everywhere else.
Laze seems like a cool nickname (if you don’t overthink it heh)!
LikeLike
You can’t help the IQ you’re born with. There’s no shame in it.
But if that’s not the explanation, then people don’t exercise enough agency in curating their entertainment media: they’re boring and ignorant by choice.
You can make yourself effectively dumber that way: so immersed in the output of Hollyweird that you have excluded yourself from the most basic items of practical knowledge and historically-normal cultural literacy (and I feel exactly the same way about people who’ve never heard of, say, Orpheus and Eurydice, or Lord Nelson, who are not part of my religious subculture).
I mean, why eat steak or asparagus when you could just have ice cream, right?
I’d blame this on my parents’ not having a television, but… I more than caught up on screen culture once I reached adulthood. And then I reached the end of it: genuinely enjoyed a bunch of movies and a few TV shows, and then… ROI collapsed. Ran out of things it was worth blowing an hour or more to see. I have no idea how people wrap their leisure time around screen entertainment, year in, year out. After a couple of years, it was boring, repetitive, I could see all the gross manipulative editing tricks. A really good film is like a haiku– eloquent in its spareness. Most screen entertainment never approaches this: it’s cheap monkeying with neurological mechanisms and emotional triggers. What do people get out of it? Rat push lever. Why don’t they get bored? Why doesn’t having their emotional chains transparently and repeatedly yanked make them angry and disgusted?
Low IQ is the most generous possible explanation here. If you can’t see the machinery at work, if you can’t understand what’s being done to you, then it’s not your fault. If you can see it, and you still spend most evenings engaging… let’s not think too hard about the implications.
Given the choice between hanging out for an hour with someone who talks about anything they have real-world expertise in, whether I’m interested in it or not (raising snails, diesel trains, hair accessories, scuba diving, septic systems, raising geraniums, whatever), and someone whose cultural references are all from Game of Thrones or whatever the current equivalent is… give me the snail fancier. That is a person with interests (maybe just one, but hey), experience, and a knowledge base, from whom I might learn something. The screen junkie: her whole world is just whatever she’s tickling her emotional giblets with currently. Ew.
Would far rather talk to an autist obsessed with municipal sewer systems. That guy knows something interesting.
LikeLike
TV, yes, but it’s gotten so much worse than that. It’s all in short-form videos now. People stare for hours at these 2-minute videos. It destroys their brain. A total poison.
LikeLike
–and I disagree about phonetics. I think it *is* a pop culture reference combined with dreadful ignorance, because I had never heard it before the last few years. It’s a new thing.
LikeLike
Yeah, I didn’t want to get into the vidscrolling. Parking toddlers in front of Mr. Rogers wasn’t ideal. Parking them in front of a tablet device is… I’d be shocked if that didn’t cause brain damage.
-ethyl
LikeLike
Name buddies! NO one else has that name, which to me is odd; most Biblical names had some time period of popularity but not that one. My L&D nurse said, “I’ve had two Lucifers and never a Lazarus before. I like your choice better…” It fit him; we lost him twice before/at birth.
LikeLike
(high five)
It’s a good name. We felt it was lonely, underused, and deserved more love.
I think it was a lot more common in the 19thC in the US, but got the reputation of being a “black” name. Ref. classic songs like “Po’ Laz’rus”
We joke that if you put all our kids’ names together, then as a group, depending on the priors of the observer, they could reasonably be interpreted as the slightly eccentric choices of:
-a religious black family
-rabid SciFi fan parents
-Orthodox
We’re cool with that.
-ethyl
LikeLike
Can’t mention that without posting the requisite Lomax recording from Parchman Farm:
Po Lazarus
LikeLike
I knew a 4th grade neighbor who didn’t know his birthdate. It was the same as my daughter’s, so I knew it, but he did not. I thought that was incredibly strange.
Amanda
LikeLiked by 1 person