My mother was a fierce grammar snob. She corrected the Winston cigarette jingle — Winston tastes good like a cigarette should — every time it came on tv. “As a cigarette should!” she would shout indignantly and predictably at the screen. “Like is not a conjunction!” she sputtered. She was perhaps most offended, with a kind of aesthetic revulsion, by people who believed themselves to be speaking and writing “correctly,” and who were members of a class who, she thought, ought to know better. She understood that the demands of art often called for non-standard English. She had no objections to Huckleberry Finn’s regional dialect, and she would not have wanted Ella to sing “It doesn’t mean a thing if it hasn’t got that swing.” But she found it hard to forgive “uneducated” English in the mouths and prose of the “educated.” She appreciated the usefulness and pleasures of consciously deployed colloquialisms. She did not want her daughter’s English to be disfigured by unconscious violations of grammatical laws. 

I am a retired English teacher, and I think that I carried that snobbery into my classroom. I attached what I now regard as an irrational, almost superstitious importance to “good” grammar. I was a prescriptivist, not a descriptivist. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me to be otherwise.

About a decade ago, I was making my way through a six-week grammar unit with my eighth graders, and in teaching nominative and objective case pronouns, I made an unqualified distinction between their “correct” and “incorrect” placement in a sentence. With impressive poise and, as it seemed to me, a tranquility born of moral authority, one student asked, “Who gets to decide?” “The people in power, I guess,” I answered, happy to be brought to this conclusion so skillfully by a 12 year old. (She was a year younger than her classmates.) She smiled. I was proud of her.

Although I did make more room for a judgement-free acknowledgment of the necessity for colloquial English in various contexts, I can’t say I changed the way I taught grammar. It wasn’t until the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder that I and my colleagues really wrestled with the question of grammatical rules and what they signify about culture, heritage, class, and identity and erasure. Of all the efforts we made to rise to that moment, of all the changes we made to our pedagogy and curriculum, the adjustments we made to the teaching of grammar were the simplest, the easiest, and in retrospect, the most obvious. The wonder is that it took George Floyd’s death and the upheaval that followed it to arrive at them.

We invited students to write and talk about the kinds of Englishes they heard and spoke— at home with their parents, with their older relatives, with their teachers, with their friends in school, with their friends at home, in the music they listened to. We invited them to think about what each kind of English they used said about who they were and where they came from. (A colleague, a poet and a scholar, suggested this framing of grammar instruction, and was the first person I’d ever heard use the plural noun Englishes, which itself sounded to my ears like an error.) My students and I talked about code-switching, about when you might choose to speak and write one way and when another. We talked about how, with usage, language changes and so do our ideas about correctness. I now taught standard English grammar as one of many kinds of English. They and I now had control over which kind of English we chose to use. We were not bound by the inviolable laws of a grammar deity. It was freeing, for them and for me. 

I have never forgotten that precocious eighth grader’s words. My mother’s words are in me too. I feel a twinge of contempt when someone (often someone I dislike, or whose English lacks the clarity and freshness Orwell prizes) is guilty of a solecism. But really, I realize, my grammar snobbery was a mindless prejudice like any other. The emotional vestiges of prejudice are hard to rid oneself of. We shake them off, but helplessly feel their tug.