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Logicgateone:
Blogger’s Grammar Blues What Really Matters
To be or not to be -- that remains the question today when it comes to the subject of grammar. No, not the school subject which can be traumatic and nose-bleed-inducing but the subject of applying grammar for blog-writing. And it covers just about all levels since ordinary people write blogs, just as senators (or their writers do) and professional writers do.
But often, when we mention grammar, the grammar guardians will always mean correct grammar. Someone might ask:
Is there a different kind of grammar?
I believe there are as many grammars (or ways of writing in any language) as there are people. For example, Americans love to add the word “thingy” to every word they cannot recall or for any thing they do not know how to call – such as the pointed “thingy” that the pope wears during high mass or the green “thingy” you add to soy sauce to make a dip for sashimi. So, who decides what correct grammar is or should be? Shakespeare? The English professors at Oxford or Harvard? My retired English professor-friend? Or the latest book on grammar from Amazon?
Grammar has rules or laws. But who made them in the first place?
Imagine the first human who ever spoke. Did he have a teacher? I suppose he had. Did his teacher teach him grammar?
If by grammar we mean proper construction of words to form intelligible sentences that carry sensible or meaningful words, he must have for he had the best teacher of all time and eternity!
Reading the Bible (or any classic work) is one of the best ways to learn grammar. In fact, it has been the best way for centuries since many of the translators, particularly of the old King James Version published in 1611, were linguistic scholars who were contemporaries of Shakespeare (who may have been one of the translators) and were proficient in
English as well as in Hebrew, Greek, and