Cummings, Covid, herd immunity and eugenics

For me the significance of Dominic Cummings' testimony today is first a feeling in the guts. He has conjured up a terrifying picture of this government, mired in incompetence, arrogance and hate. Of course he was part of this but we are looking at one of those rare moments in history when a member of a gang of government wrong-doers splits and spills the beans. Whatever that person thinks, it doesn't absolve them from what happened and the testimony may well be tainted with the same crazed ideology that infected the gang as a whole.

Another way to look at it, is to think of him as the mafiosi who sang. So, for me, what counts is the truth. We don't need to be distracted by Carrie's dog, and whatever levels of pique Cummings suffers from, following his exile to the wings. 

Now to the substance: for me, what counts the most is the herd immunity question. I have been tweeting and saying since at least February this year that we can deduce from statements in the public domain that this was the government's policy for January, February and the first two weeks of March 2020. Others have argued long before me, that this was the policy. Government advisers came on to TV and Radio in mid-March 2020 to urge the government to pursue that policy and they said it with the authority of people being listened to. Robert Peston appeared to be saying so in mid-March 2020 too. 

I'd like to make a slightly different point. It's about ways of thinking, what ideology informed the government's actions, what ideology informed their inclination to go for herd immunity? 

The clues are hiding in plain sight: Johnson's Greenwich speech in early February 2020, and the presence of two advisers partly influenced by eugenicist ideas, working close to the government.  In the speech, Johnson used a very strange phrase but he made clear what he meant by it: he said he was against 'market segregation' as a method of fighting the Coronavirus. He meant that he was against a public health response involving restrictions to trade. 6 weeks or so later, he had to eat his words big time. By then, the virus was embedded in the population. 

The two people with a touch of eugenicist ideas are Andrew Sabisky and Dominic Cummings (1). Many of us have said for decades that seemingly harmless comments about intelligence being inherited come from a sinister source. They are corrupted by an attitude to people, humanity, us. It sees us as divided permanently, inevitably, incontrovertibly by something deep in our bodies - our genes. And this hidden code renders some people inferior to others - and amongst the superior others are always the people telling this story about us. 

This is not of itself 'fascist' but following the behaviour of fascistic and totalitarian regimes - locally or nationally - we know that this is what has underpinned racism, attitudes to the disabled, the mentally ill and indeed anyone deemed to have a 'condition' that a regime doesn't like. It's a way of segregating us into desirable and undesirable, the human and the sub-human. 

To my mind, it's small wonder then that a 'solution' in the face of the pandemic that appealed to significant figures in government, was one that junked people deemed as less necessary, people who could be described as not needing our sympathy if they (we) died: the old, the sick, people with 'underlying health problems' (UHPs). What a great let-out that last phrase is. In one sense, we all have underlying health problems in that when confronted with one virus, some people are susceptible and when confronted with another, other people are susceptible. 

This use of language has been pernicious. It has become 'reasonable' for people to say, on hearing that someone died, 'Oh well, she was getting on a bit.' Or as the journalist Carole Malone put it to me, '...but you were 73' (when I got Covid). What?! What is 'but' about being 73? What is this world where being 73, is a 'but' or something 'less than'? That's how low we've sunk at a moment of crisis. 

We don't actually have a word for this. We have useful words like 'racism' and 'sexism' for labelling forms of discrimination based on other kinds of segregation and prejudice. There's the clumsy 'age discrimination' phrase but because of the rubbish about 'underlying health problems' this wasn't only about the old. 

So when it comes to Cummings, I haven't seen in his words or in commentators words any anxiety about this. I haven't seen a commentary on what corrupting ideas have spread through our society that has led people to think of the old, sick and that ever-widening circle of UHPs. I hope that it won't turn out to be significant or a watershed moment. I fear that it might. 

(1)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/19/sabisky-row-dominic-cummings-criticised-over-designer-babies-post

You say parody, I say satire, let's call the whole thing off

Some years ago there was a court case in the US where the owners of 'Dr Seuss' sued someone for using 'The Cat in the Hat' in order to create a satire (or a parody?!) about O.J.Simpson. (I'll post the reference at the end.)

The law in the US distinguishes between parody and satire for these cases. One is 'fair use', the other involves unfair use. Here's one part of the Judge's summary:

For the purposes of copyright law, the nub of the definitions, and the heart of any parodist's claim to quote from existing material, is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works.... If, on the contrary, the commentary has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh, the claim to fairness in borrowing from another's work diminishes accordingly (if it does not vanish), and other factors, like the extent of its commerciality, loom larger.

Id. at 580, 114 S.Ct. at 1172 (citations omitted). The Court pointed out the difference between parody (in which the copyrighted work is the target) and satire (in which the copyrighted work is merely a vehicle to poke fun at another target): "Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim's (or collective victims') imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing." Id. As Justice Kennedy put it in his concurrence: "The parody must target the original, and not just its general style, the genre of art to which it belongs, or society as a whole (although if it targets the original, it may target those features as well)." Id. at 597, 114 S.Ct. at 1180. The Second Circuit in Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301, 310 (2d Cir.1992), also emphasized that unless the plaintiff's copyrighted work is at least in part the target of the defendant's satire, then the defendant's work is not a "parody" in the legal sense:

1401*1401 It is the rule in this Circuit that though the satire need not be only of the copied work and may ... also be a parody of modern society, the copied work must be, at least in part, an object of the parody, otherwise there would be no need to conjure up the original work.... By requiring that the copied work be an object of the parody, we merely insist that the audience be aware that underlying the parody there is an original and separate expression, attributable to a different artist.

Similarly, the American Heritage Dictionary defines "parody" as a "literary or artistic work that broadly mimics an author's characteristic style and holds it up to ridicule."

What is interesting for me here is that in the US 'fair use' is parody because it is equivalent to a literary commentary (at least in part) on the original writer's work. Satire uses the original in order to make a commentary on something else altogether. 

Hold that distinction  in your mind and apply it to the case of the tweet which used a Getty image of Jeremy Corbyn reading 'Bear Hunt' to some children. In so doing, it doctored the image of 'Bear Hunt' by replacing a page of the book with the words 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and in the text of the tweet as a whole, it printed a parody (or satire?) of the words of 'Bear Hunt'. 

Applying this American judge's ruling, we would have to work out whether the tweeter was parodying Rosen and Oxenbury's work or using it to satirise Rosen and/or Corbyn. If it was a parody (ie a commentary on Rosen's literature and/or Oxenbury's art - according to US law, 'fair use'. If it was a satire (ie not commenting on Rosen and Oxenbury's work) then it's unfair in US law - and therefore liable to be a breach of copyright. 

I'm not really concerned about the breach of copyright in the Rosen case (UK) partly because the lines that have been parodied are public domain. My text is based on a folk song. Other parts of the book are my copyright. However, the book as a whole IS copyright - as shared by Oxenbury and me. 

Imagine if we were in the US and I tried to use this distinction between 'parody'  and 'satire'. Presumably, I would claim that it was a satire, had breached the copyright of the book as a whole. What's more it had done so in a way that was hurtful to me. It is in effect what Americans call a 'racial  slur'. 

What do  you think? 

Please feel free to comment on this at twitter or Facebook. 

Here's the link to the Dr Seuss case: 

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15758460119711775481&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr

Your mob, your cult...

I notice that one of the ways to criticise people who agree with me on twitter is to call them a 'mob' or a 'cult' and that if I tweet something and people agree with me,  that's because I've caused a 'pile-on', got my followers to...etc etc

It's an interesting picture. The 'mob' bit is a piece of dehumanising. A 'mob' is not a group of individuals with their own reasons for thinking or doing things. It's an unthinking mass. A 'cult' is another  unthinking 'mob', the reason being that they are such devotees that they can't think rationally or logically. Then, if it's me (or anyone else) who 'causes' a 'pile on' or who 'gets his followers to...' it's as if I or anyone else has magical powers to enlist the support of others. This denies every single one of such people any agency, any will of their own to think or do anything because they choose to.

It's not clear how I or anyone else has these magical powers particularly as these powers are seemingly exerted through the medium of twitter, a place devoid of instruments of compulsion. 

It's also a great way to deflect from talking about the substance of whatever is the subject of the discussion. Just complain that a few people are agreeing with someone else: dehumanise them and deny their agency. 

If someone found a picture of Corbyn reading one of Judith Kerr's Mog books...

 I wonder if someone found a picture of Jeremy Corbyn reading one of Judith Kerr's Mog books what they might have done to it...(the late Judith Kerr came from a Jewish family who fled Berlin and wrote many lovely children's books including some about a cat called Mog). Maybe someone who is sure that Corbyn is antisemitic could create a photomontage image by putting the title of 'Mein Kampf' over a Mog book and writing a text that parodied the text of eg Judith's book, 'Mog the Forgetful Cat' ...

Then when someone from Judith's family objected, loads of people who think Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic could defend the photoshopped image.

(For anyone wondering what this refers to: it's the story of a photoshopped image of Jeremy Corbyn reading 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. The image shows the page of 'Bear Hunt' with the title of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' on it. 'The Protocols' is a notoriously antisemitic (and fraudulent) text which fed into Nazi propaganda. The photoshopped image is accompanied by a parody of the text of 'Bear Hunt'. I resent the linking of me to the 'Protocols'. I've asked for the perpetrator to apologise to me. That's all. Nothing more. So far, no reply. But some people who think Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic have spent many hours on twitter defending the photoshopped image and telling me that because the overall picture of Corbyn reading the book to children is 'satire' then that's what the picture is 'about' and so I am wrong for thinking that 'my' part of the image is anything I should object to. Another reason why I am wrong to object is that the perpetrator is a Director of Labour Against Antisemitism. Apparently this is a get-out card for doing anything that could be construed as being antisemitic, though one of the Directors of Labour Against Antisemitism tweeted at the BBC to demand that I be taken off air because I am, he said, a 'racist ****er' (his asterisks) and another Director tweeted that he 'booed' me in the street but if his wife hadn't been there he didn't know what he might have done. All OK there, then. )

Double Standards: a case of selective outrage

 Chapter 2 (Chapter 1 follows this)

A doctored image appears on twitter. The image is one from several years ago of Corbyn reading 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' by me and Helen Oxenbury published by Walker Books. The doctoring leaves everything intact, apart from the book, on to which is superimposed the words 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. Accompanying this is a parody of some of the words from the book. I reacted by calling it 'loathsome and antisemitic'. For people interested in knowing why these obscure words matter so much, please read the wiki entry on it or take my word for it that this was a highly influential antisemitic text fraudulently claiming to be by Jews who aimed to take over the world. Henry Ford published half a million of them, the document still circulates. It is possible to argue that it fuelled pogroms and the propaganda machine of the Nazis, including 'Mein Kampf'. 

I didn't say that the person who did this tweet was 'an antisemite'. I said that what had been done to our book was 'antisemitic'. I had a name for who posted this doctored image but knew nothing about him. 

The person has the name of his university on his profile. I wrote to him at his university address; I wrote him a private message on Facebook. No reply. I contacted his university. I did this because as him and me are both academics this might be a suitable arena in which to talk about this. At no stage did I seek to have him sacked or even suspended. I always made this explicit. Indeed, later when people on twitter responded by saying he should be sacked, I wrote repeatedly that I didn't want him sacked - not that my word has that sort of power anyway! Far from it. 

I also contacted Hope not Hate and the Jewish Chronicle, thinking that they would be horrified by this use of the title of 'The Protocols' on a book which has my name on it. I tried to think of analogies - putting the name of the KKK on to a book by a person of colour, perhaps more particularly an African American. Wouldn't that be equally outrageous? And equivalent.

In the kerfuffle that followed, the university got in touch with me. That's confidential for the moment but I consistently and repeatedly said on no account was I looking for him to be sacked and that I would accept an apology. 

I hope this gives some context for what followed: many people seemed to like the overall image of Corbyn reading our doctored book, as it was a satire of Corbyn's alleged antisemitism. Some claimed that there was no way of knowing that the book was connected to me. This requires people looking at the tweet, to not recognise the words of the parody, not recognise the book, not recognise the original picture before it was doctored, and even to claim that the tweeter didn't know this himself.  It's for others to judge whether 'Bear Hunt' is more known than others have claimed. 

There have also been arguments about how really the total image is an attack on Corbyn and is nothing to do with me. I have said repeatedly that I haven't addressed the matter of the total image. I am only and specifically talking about how our book has been doctored with one of the names of one of the most notorious antisemitic documents of all time. Just that ie the single matter of how I am affected by that image.

A good deal of effort has been put into trying to prove that I am not entitled to object to this use of the words and the doctored image taken from our book. 

It emerged in this that the tweeter in question is a director of Labour Against Antisemitism. (Please remember that). I didn't know this until people told me after my original tweet about how I found the doctored image 'loathsome and antisemitic'. 

Finally, no public condemnation of this doctored image has come from any of the bodies or individuals who have raised the matter of alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party has appeared. Not one. 

This surprises me. 

 I genuinely and naively thought that the doctoring was so obvious and blatant that bodies that might in other circumstances disagree with me or even hate me would be so appalled by this flippant use of the name of this famously horrible document that they would want to condemn it. After all, most of these bodies refer to me as 'Jewish' so it's a Jewish person being defiled. Horror? No. 

People will remember that during the furore about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party, it was repeatedly stated that the victims of antisemitism are entitled to declare it: if you are Jewish and feel that people have been antisemitic towards you, then that's what it is. Victims' call, if you like. Clearly, this rule has not been applied to my situation. Double standards? 

Instead, I've received a stream of outraged tweets that have either a) approved of the overall image or b) falsely claimed that I had tried to get the tweeter sacked. Please note that. 

Chapter 1

Several years ago I was presenting a radio programme on legal language. This is in a programme I present. I wasn't being hired as an expert or contributor. One of the directors (not the one who doctored the image of Corbyn reading 'Bear Hunt') of Labour Against Antisemitism tweeted directly to the BBC saying that I shouldn't be allowed to do this. I should be taken off air because - and there was a set of reasons for this including that I am, he claimed a 'racist ****er' (his asterisks). 

In other words, he was demanding that the BBC sack me. 

Strangely, this too, has not received condemnation from any of the sources who have been outraged by alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party. 

Conclusion

So here we have an example of 'selective outrage'. When Rosen contacts the university of one of the Directors of Labour Against Antisemitism, this is supposedly my outrageous attempt to remove the tweeter from his job. (It isn't,  because I have repeatedly made clear that that is not what I was seeking by way of a response.)

When another Director of Labour Against Antisemitism explicitly tries to remove Rosen from his job, there is silence. No condemnation. No outrage. 

Double standards?

I assume from all this that I am in effect the 'wrong kind of Jew'. 

As always in the matter of the doctored image and the parody of the book's words (ie the tweet), I have said that I would be happy to resolve this matter, should the tweeter get in touch with me directly and confidentially. 

Teaching formal written standard English: bottom-up or top-down? Or both?

Teaching school students how to write has been one of the main tasks of education for hundreds of years. 

One view is that writing should be taken down to its 'nuts and bolts'. Students should be told what these nuts and bolts are called. They should do nuts-and-bolts exercises involving spotting the nuts and bolts in specially devised sentences and phrases. There should be nuts-and-bolts tests. There should be writing tasks where students should show that they can include the nuts and bolts that they've learned. Job done, the students will be able to write. 

Are there problems with this?

First, let's deal with the nuts and bolts question. What are we talking about here? Usually, this means the so-called 'rules' of language, the names for the words, and longer clusters of words: phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs. Intermingled with this, there will be some talk of 'functions' which may mean the functions of words within phrases, clauses and sentences, or it may also mean functions in terms of the jobs that words, phrases, clauses and sentences are thought to do in more human terms eg ask questions, issue commands etc. 

This is what education calls 'grammar' but which in actual fact is a very limited descriptive apparatus that is restricted to descriptions of sentences in formal written standard English. If this is how this 'education grammar' was served up, we would at least know how limited its field is. That's to say, it doesn't cover the language of conversation and speech, nor the written languages of song, poetry, plays, films, TV drama, advertising, signage, slogans, mottos. 

So when we say school-based 'grammar' teaches us the nuts and bolts of language, this is at the very least an exaggeration or distortion. In addition, it may or may not teach us the nuts and bolts of formal, written sentence language. 

Let's deal with this first. Where do we find these formal, written sentences that most people are agreed that students should learn how to write? You or I can make a list: most narration in most fiction; most non-fiction - history, geography, science, philosophy, self-help, gardening, cookery, sport etc; most instructions and information in relation to the things we use - medicines, fridges etc; newspapers, magazines and online versions of these; administration - government, management, the law and justice system, finance and reports from within these worlds...and so on. It's clear from this list that we ask of this written, standard English to do what society regards as the important stuff. In fact, some linguists call this 'prestige'. 

The question is, does teaching (and testing) the grammar of formal, written standard  English help students to write this way? 

One huge body of evidence emerged after 20 years or more: the results of the old O-level exams that the grammar school students who lasted in school till they were 16 and the fairly small cohort of secondary modern school 16 year olds in the post-war years. The three main questions of the English Language paper were 'Precis', 'Grammar' and 'Composition'. The précis was an exercise in reducing an unseen text to about a third of its original length. The grammar question was to answer questions according to what was at that time (not now) thought to be the most important elements of formal, written standard English. The composition question was a piece of formal writing. Students were set an unseen title or theme as with say, 'Trees' or 'An Enjoyable Weekend' or 'Fox-hunting'. In other words, the topics varied across non-fiction themes, to personal and to subjects that you could debate. It was made clear to us that this writing had to be correct - according to the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation we had learned over the previous nine  years or so of schooling. I don't know how marks were awarded or detracted on this matter, but the marking also addressed the matter of whether candidates 'wrote well' according to criteria agreed by examiners and education authorities. 

After more than 20 years of this, involving of course tens of thousands students, the examiners could find no correlation between the scores on the grammar question and the scores on the composition question. Of course, this flies in the face of the claim that teaching the nuts and bolts leads directly to enabling students to write formal standard English. 

Before I jump to the conclusion that this proves that there is now an open and shut case that teaching the nuts and bolts does NOT ensure that students end up writing formal standard English well, I should complicate matters.

1. The lack of correlation might be that there was something wrong with the teaching methods of teaching grammar and if this was tweaked, a better correlation would result.

(To which I would say: from my personal experience at a grammar school 1957-62, the teaching was thorough, consistent, constantly marked. We were given systems and routines every week for five years  (eg box analysis, clause analysis and that because we also all learned at least one foreign language for the whole 5 years we were exposed to the terminology of eg cases, subject and object, conjugation, tense and so on in these lessons too.)

2. The lack of correlation might be because the criteria for marking the composition was not finely enough tuned to loading the marking towards those students who produced grammatically correct compositions. Similarly, that it was loaded towards subjective judgements about 'good writing' or 'writing well'.

(To which I would say: even in the most narrow way of marking grammatically correct writing, the issue of 'good writing' has to be factored in. It is, after all, quite possible to write incomprehensible gobbledegook that is grammatically correct. Let me have some fun doing it on the topic of 'Rain' (one that I remember having to do in English). 

Rain is a strange banana. If telephones capture lemurs, the rain which has up till now been solid, may explode. However, rain can also be found on the ocean floor. It was Jacques Cousteau who said, 'Better the shark you know than the onion you don't.' 

I'll leave that one with you.

Now let's switch tack and consider the argument that there are better ways of teaching the grammar of formal, written standard English with a view to teaching how to write formal, written standard English.

Here are some them:

1. Demand that students in class only talk in 'complete sentences'. They must not speak using slang or teen talk. They must try to speak with the accent of southern British, educated English (BBC English or Queen's English, so-called). They must not use 'dialect' language eg Cockney, Yorkshire, Geordie etc. 

(To which I would say that the problem with this is that it assumes people speak standard English. No  one does. Not even Boris Johnson. Speech involves repetition, self-correction, a lot of umming and erring,  insertion of many phrases like 'kind of', 'you know', adjustments like 'well', and 'you see'; tailing off into seemingly unfinished parts; using words and phrases that aren't part of complete sentences; using gesture, facial expression and tone of voice to indicate meaning and intention, to structure utterances in such a way as we tend to put the theme/subject/topic at the front and the provisos, conditions or caveats after; we interrupt each other mid-flow and so on. It is unrealistic to expect conversation to follow the 'rules' of written standard English. The main way we hear standard English is in the scripted talk of radio and TV announcers or in audio books or indeed, people reading to us. 

The further problem is pyscho-social and political. We all speak a dialect. Boris Johnson's dialect is the dialect of a public school educated person who has stayed in that milieu for the whole of his life. Other dialects don't have the 'prestige'  of his, but they are no less part of the identity and ethnicity of people. The question we have to address is whether it's advisable to tell young children and students that they shouldn't use spoken language that is part of their identity and ethnicity. (I'm not talking here about obscenity or offensive language.) 

When we ask all students to write formal standard English, it is for every single one of them a different form of language from the one that they speak. There is a valid argument for saying that some versions of spoken English diverge more widely from formal written standard English than others. The question then, is whether it's right and worthwhile to ask of those who diverge most to self-correct. An example would be the London 'we was' construction. Many teenagers in and around London say this. Do we know that if we ask of them to never say 'we was' in school, that such students will write formal standard English better? Do we have the evidence for that? Are there other ways of exposing students to the idea that when we write formal standard English we do not ever write 'we was'? 

One suggestion is that we teach codes, registers, dialectology and what is in effect a form of sociolinguistics, particularly in relation to dialect. That's to say, we ask of students to compare speech and writing, to compare their versions of spoken English with the English of formal, written standard English. The idea here is that we give students the 'toolkit' to see that all language involves 'choice'. Ultimately, no matter what we are told in school, how we speak and how we write will always be as a consequence of what we want to do. After all, in various ways students in schools have been told for the last 100 years or more that speaking in certain ways are wrong, and yet regional and class variations in speech go on including forms like 'we was' and we go on producing slang words, phrases and expressions that don't find their way into formal, written standard English. Education might be about equipping students with what it takes to make informed choices about all this.

2. Try to integrate the 'grammar' teaching more with 'writing or a purpose'. I'm sympathetic with this because it integrates the abstractions of grammar with real language use. It veers away from the absurd invented sentences that students are invited to read or write in grammar exercise books, tests and high stakes exams. It also takes us towards seeing that the language we use or create comes in what Michael Halliday called a 'mode'  - a word he used to cover the types of text we read and create, whether that's in terms of genre or overall purpose or form. So even with formal written standard English, there are variations between, say, the narration of a piece of adventure fiction, an explanation of a statute, a political manifesto and the instructions on how to take thyroxine pills. The grammar of these different types of formal written standard English is indeed worth looking at.

My argument with this is that grammar may be a necessary condition for this type of writing but by no means a sufficient one. I've already touched on this by referring to Halliday's 'mode'. Because all language, and within that all formal written standard English comes in a form or type or genre (or hybrids and combinations of these), there will always be other nuts and bolts other than what is available to us through grammar. One way to think of this is in terms of bottom-up versus top-down. Or, if we don't want to think of it as an opposition - how do we combine bottom-up with top-down so that we end up with the 'whole'? 

If I accept for the moment that 'grammar' gives us bottom-up ways of constructing formal written standard English (I don't but I'll leave that to one side), what gives us the top-down of overall purpose, theme, type, genre of the passage that we're trying to write? 

In my experience the best way for top-down is through immersion, imitation, investigation, interpretation and invention.  

Immersion is reading loads of standard English and hearing it read to us - as much as possible both in and out of school ie a lot of 'reading for pleasure' and all that that entails. 

Imitation is just that: let's write like the instructions of on a box of pills, let's write like a sports journalist in the Daily Mirror, let's write like the opening of a novel etc.

Investigation is asking students to find patterns in formal written standard English. Some of these tools are: prosody, lexical field, patterns of imagery, patterns of 'affect' (language about feeling and/or designed to make us feel something), code-switching, use of rhetorical devices like hyperbole, bathos etc, thematic  similarities and contrasts, using terms like instruction, command, imply, suggest, evoke, reveal, digress, headline, foreground, focalise, time-frame, point of view, implied audience, message, elaborate, figurative language (eg metaphor, simile, personification)/literal language, detail, specific, general, abstract, questioning, tone, speculative, argue, emotive, justify, illustrate, instruct, analytic, imaginary, evaluative, inclusive, non-sequitur, analogy, example, tentative, theme, motif, symbolic, literal, allusion, illusion, echoing, pre-figuring, time-frame, red herring, point of view...and so on. 

In my experience, learning this material is best done from two ends at the same time - investigating from one side and being told (instructed) from the other. 

Investigation can lead to interpretation - what is this piece of writing? What is it setting out to do? Does it succeed? (if yes, how?If not why not?) Another form of interpretation is invention. 

Invention can of course be in many different directions and methods. But if, let's say, we are looking at the formal standard English of popular music criticism. We can have a go at inventing a band, inventing its music and style and writing a piece that would be acceptable in a magazine or online. We can then use the top-down and bottom-up tools to see if it fits what seems to be required for such an article. 

My argument is that we won't get that bit of writing right unless we do both. 

What is grammar?

 I'm someone who believes that there is something we call 'reality' or 'nature' or the 'material  world' and this precedes the terminology we use about it. A cliff exists before we thought up the word 'cliff' and before we decided that the cliff was made up of 'rock', 'pebbles', 'stones', 'earth', 'soil', 'mud'. We also decided that a significant thing to say about cliffs is that they are 'eroded'. This language represents a selection of bits of the material world and giving them names, and selecting what we believe to be important processes and giving them names too. 

I'm not going to say that any of this is wrong but with a bit of imagination, you or I might choose some other bits of the cliff and other processes and regard these as more important to talk about. For example, my top priority might be cracks and fissures. I could create a whole classification system for these and provide an argument as to why they are the most important thing about cliffs. Or, instead of erosion, I might wish to classify cliffs in terms of 'the most suitable for hang gliding off'. 

With this talk of cliffs and language about cliffs, it's quite easy to see that what we choose to describe and how we frame knowledge can vary a great deal. This depends on where we are in the history of ideas and the purposes for which our terminology is needed. 

Why would 'grammar' be any different? And yet people often talk about  'grammar' as if it is some kind of holy writ, a perfected descriptive apparatus of 'language', and that its processes - variously called 'functions', 'rules' and the like - explain all that there is to know about 'how  language works'. Indeed, some will talk of 'grammar' as if it is language or as if we can reduce 'language' to 'grammar'.

This last point would be the same (and as ridiculous) as saying that the cliff is the descriptions of it. 

So before we go into what is grammar, we have to be clear that language precedes 'grammar'. Grammar is a descriptive apparatus to describe something, not the thing itself.

Further, the term 'grammar' can not and does not mean one grammar or even 'the' grammar. In short, there are several, if not many, grammars. What has happened is that the inventors and writers of 'grammar' have managed to elbow themselves in front of all the other grammars and convinced powerful people (eg who run education) that their grammar is 'the' grammar. 

In fact, the grammar that primary aged  school children have to learn is 'one grammar that describes some terms and processes used in written standard English sentences'. That's it. However, under that heading, they do throw in some other stuff that isn't really grammar. They are:  examples of their sentence grammar straying into bits of semantics (eg use of words like 'command' for descriptions of forms of sentence), value judgements about ideal usages (eg with their use of words like 'formal', 'informal', 'correct' and 'incorrect'), stylistics (eg use of the notorious 'fronted adverbial' which is a choice we make according to what effect we might want to have on a reader), and false concepts that have nothing at all to do with 'grammar' (eg synonyms and antonyms). 

The field that this 'grammar' applies to is one small part of our total language output. By far the greatest amount of our language output is through speech in conversation. In comparison, the output of written standard English is tiny: very significant but tiny. All talk of 'correct' or 'right' or 'wrong' has to be seen in this light. Yes, if we want to say that written standard English must conform to certain ways of writing, fine - correct is OK. But let's not kid ourselves that this applies to speech. Speech has a whole 'grammar' (or many grammars) that are needed to describe eg how we converse, how we shape our subject-matter, how we revise what we say, how we emphasise, how we use prosody (sound, rhythm, speech-patterns, musicality), how we create patterns, how we use cohesion, how we are sensitive to different participants, different kinds of speech-situations, and different kinds of speech forms. Speech also tolerates hesitations, revisions, incompletions, noises that aren't usually called words yet convey meaning, gestures, tones of voice, volume of voice and a huge range of dialects and accents. All this is how most of us conduct our lives. Most of us do not conduct our lives through the medium of written standard English. 

This means that the 'grammar' that is taught in English primary schools has excluded the main way in which we communicate, share thoughts, ideas and feelings and how - when we do it - think in words. How bizarre! 

(By the way, let's not forget that written standard English is not the same as 'writing'. That's another hoax foisted on us. Poetry, song, plays, film scripts, TV drama scripts, dialogue in novels, advertising, signage, slogans, mottos, emails, texts, chat-room chat, etc are full of non-standard written forms. Much of what are described as 'rules' or 'correct usages' aren't rules or correct usages for these other forms of written language. And yet this 'grammar' by implication,  treats all  this other stuff as less important. It's not.)

But, as I pointed out in the previous blog, this 'grammar' excludes a whole set of conditions that explain how and why we write what we write. It excludes the role of the participants in any given piece of language. It excludes the genre, channel, text-type. It excludes the subject matter of the text . It excludes the historical conditions for the text. 

As if this wasn't enough exclusions, it also excludes processes that are vital for explaining our choice of language eg cohesion. Though the English primary school sentence grammar makes a nod towards cohesion, in fact it is a fundamental part of how we communicate in writing or speech. That's because cohesion processes are in effect what I have dubbed the 'secret strings' of language at various levels: through sound, patterns of imagery, patterns of 'affect' (ie language designed to convey feeling) repetition of words/phrases/clauses/sentences, similarities of any kind, contrasts, or  language that fits into this or that 'lexical field' ie forms of language we can group or link together by virtue of them being on the same topic, theme, or even language which co-refers to the same entity as with the pronoun system but also with phrases or words that 'refer back' in a text as even with the crucial word 'the' (!).  In fact, you could create a grammar of cohesion, make up your own terms for the processes involved, and for the particles or items that  you've selected and you would find that you had a very interesting and rich alternative to the 'sentence grammar of written standard English'!

The claim is made that we need  this 'sentence grammar of written standard English' to be able to write and to be able to analyse writing. I believe both of these propositions to be false. Some of this grammar is quite useful for 'writing sentences in standard English', but I argue that there are much richer descriptions of language that help us do this: most of which fall into the category of 'stylistics'. I have written a good deal about this elsewhere on this blog. Same goes for analysing writing. I do not accept that something so limited and weak in its explanatory power, and so inconsistent and confusing (and confused) in its terminology has much to tell us that is any way as powerful and rich as the full range of stylistics.  

Grammar - what it leaves out

For several hundred years, some people have been interested - at times obsessed - with dividing the world up into categories, 'sets' or 'classes'. Some of these become so fixed in our mind that we can easily forget that they are made by people. They are not identical to the way the world is. They are human inventions, devised ultimately for our own use. Think of the distinctions we make in education between say, History and Geography, or between PE and Dance or between shampoo and soap. 

We have to also remember that some of our activities are not directly about the process of classifying even if they use classifications or 'types' that others have made. You could argue that the moment we begin to write or say something, we write in a 'genre' that has evolved over time: a letter, a poem, a tweet, an insult, a song...and so on. 

Some people tend to view these as rules, while others are more easy-going about it. I'm up the easy-going end of things because these are not laws, there are no genre police, and doing a bit of genre-busting can be interesting. 

This is all by preamble to what we do with language. The grammar that is taught to primary school children in England is obsessed with categorising and classifying language. It's done according to some ancient systems and in so doing slices off some crucial parts of speaking, writing, reading and listening. For a start it is based entirely on written standard English - one small part of total language output. Within this, it is based entirely on the sentence, which again is a main part of SE but not entirely so. Secondly, its systems of terminology, categorising and classifying are either based on itself or it starts from itself and maps it on to activity outside. 

So the basic notion of 'subject' and 'verb'  is not derived from how humans relate to each other. It's derived from categories from within observing language. Or if you look at a category like 'command', this isn't based on how we 'command' each other in  its entirety, but is mapped from a verb form (the 'imperative' so called) on to the way we command things of each other. However, we command each other in many different ways. This kind of 'grammar' excludes these as not being commands! 

When we are immersed in the language and classifications of this 'grammar' it's hard to see what kind of system it is, and how weak it is in explaining how we use language, how we behave with language, why we behave with language in different ways and how we change language. It is in fact a descriptive-prescriptive mess. It claims to describe but in the hands of those who demand that it be taught, instantly becomes prescriptive: you will make the subject and verb 'agree'! You will not use 'informal language'. You will use a fronted adverbial. You will expand your noun phrases. You will not mix tenses...and so on. 

I heard a national broadcaster say that she is  'bad at grammar'. What did she mean? That she didn't speak properly? That she didn't write properly? That she didn't know the names for the things she was saying and writing? How could someone end up blaming themselves for not knowing this stuff or thinking that there was something imperfect about how they spoke and interviewed people nearly every day on the radio?

The main reason is that this system - 'grammar'  - is an abstract code, a kind of maths of language - far removed from how we actually use it most of the time. It is positioned at some distance from our feelings, our reason for saying or writing something, our reason for wanting to listen or read, our emotions as we read and listen, and indeed many of our social needs to persuade, convince, coax, condemn, organise, hustle, and hundreds more.

What a bizarre state of affairs! 

Humans invent something that is fluid and total in the way that it is part of our behaviour and along came some people who've classified it in such a way as to not include the social reasons for having created it! 

The thing is though, not all 'grammars' are like this. Some people have tried to incorporate our social, historical and psychological reasons for our speech, writing, our ways of being affected, and our ways of understanding. People like M.A.K. Halliday, Dell Hymes, and a host of others who've worked in fields of eg cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, the grammar of genres and styles, or 'communicative competence' and others.

I'm no expert in these but the more I dip into them, the more I am impressed by what it is many of these people have tried to do: to  locate language in our social behaviour (perhaps all behaviour is 'social'!) and in our needs. They have looked at language as a matter of eg choice, purpose, an effort to make meaning, as part of how we are with each other (social organisation, social conflict), and how we feel, how we are affected by language and how we produce 'affect' and much more. 

At first glance, this kind of thing might look much too complicated for schools. But is it? How complicated is it for students of all ages to look at advertising and to discuss what is it trying to do, why and how, and where did it's phrases and slogans come from? How hard is it to compare how different people in their lives speak or write? And then to investigate possible reasons for this. Our main instrument for using language is our voice. How hard would it be to spend time listening to different voices and discuss why we might think someone has 'soothing' voice, why someone else seems to 'sound aggressive' and so on through scores of other emotions. Every school student other than those with severe speech impairment has to use their voice to express themselves. Why is that not a subject worth studying? 

One of the consequences of the kind of 'grammar' taught in English primary schools is that it fools us into thinking that this 'grammar' has captured how language makes meaning. Its grammarians have broken Standard English down into parts, processes and functions (within itself, not social functions!) and claimed actually or by implication that this is the meaning-making machine. I play games in my shows where I tell them a line (the only line I remember) from the first poem I ever wrote. The line is 'and now the train is slowing down'. I condemn myself for having written something boring. Then I check myself and ask the audience can we make it more interesting by changing the way I say it? Happy voice? Angry voice? Sneery voice? Sad voice? In a hurry voice..and so on. It's an exercise in changing meaning through phonology and prosody, something we do all day every day, and yet is outside of the world of 'grammar'. In other words we fib to children that meaning lies in grammar and because of grammar alone. And if the argument against this is that you can't do this in writing then a hundred years or more of advertising, signage, graphic design etc have spent trillions for no purpose, no effect, no outcome. 

Arts, education and the child

1)

The power of comparison and analogy: when a child says 'this' is like 'that', they're on the first rung of a ladder that leads to making categories and classes or abstractions. Reading is one way we can do this, comparing what's in a book, with our own lives or in other 'texts'.

2)

In 'At the Very Edge of the Forest', Carol Fox points out that for very young children, stories often do a lot of cognitive work to do with eg scientific concepts adults take for granted: gravity (falling), properties of matter (melting), relative speeds (chasing) etc.

3)

Even as high art is celebrated and consumed in high art venues and stately homes,  the arts are being downgraded for the rest of us. High art often celebrates the interpretation of other art: paintings of Greek myths etc but in education interpretation has to be in sentences and tested in exams.

4)

Millions of words have been written by people interpreting 'Line of Duty' as it unfolded, speculating about what might happen next and why. Education can create these moments too, enabling flexible thought and debate based on evidence from texts.