It's National Grammar Day, Ain't It?

Ancient attitudes to grammar still survive: many people are in awe of it, know little about it, tend to fear or dislike it, often find it baffling and boring if exposed to it at school, and yet a minority is fascinated by it: a field in which precise scholarship and nit-picking pedantry have coexisted for centuries.
("Grammar," in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, edited by Tom McArthur, Oxford University Press, 1992)

Whether your approach to grammar is descriptive (scholarly) or prescriptive (nitpicking), March 4 is a day when we should all get along. That is, a day on which we should all get along. Or a day for us to get along. In any case, Tuesday is National Grammar Day.

Sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), National Grammar Day was created by Martha Brockenbrough, the disarmingly cheerful author of the Encarta column Grumpy Martha's Guide to Grammar and Usage. Because SPOGG's mission is not only to "encourage the use of standard English grammar and spelling" but also to foster "a sense of humor about language (and other things, as well)," we're happy to play along.

Now if we were in a nit-picking and peevish prescriptive mood, we might observe National Grammar Day by fussing at the president for his frequent subject-verb agreement errors. We'd probably gripe about the widespread abuse of quotation marks or even criticize our colleagues for the common errors in their blogs.

Tag Questions

But why be contentious on such a grand day? Instead of wielding the red pen of the usage police, let's pay homage to a common grammatical structure that's rarely taught in school. A structure as simple as the enclitic eh? in Canada and eh no? in Scotland. And sometimes as annoying as the American huh? and the almost universal OK?

You're referring to the tag question, aren't you?

Yes indeed. A tag question (or in Britain, where even linguists drive on the left, a question tag) is a question added to a declarative sentence, usually at the end. More common in spoken English than in formal prose, tags serve to engage the listener and invite agreement. As Randal Graves says (and tags) in the movie Clerks, "There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others, is there?"

So this sentence also ends with a tag question, doesn't it? Right again. Tag questions are usually negative after a positive statement, and positive after a negative statement. Linguists call this "contrasting polarity." But then you're not really paying attention anymore, are you?

Why Grammar Matters

In the feud between descriptive and prescriptive grammarians, we try to avoid taking sides--especially on National Grammar Day. Still, it's worth remembering that grammar is not just a cranky exercise in pointing out the stylistic shortcomings of others. Grammar matters because it allows us to talk about language, and language (so we've heard) is a defining characteristic of being human.

Or as Bart Simpson says, "Grammar is not a time of waste." Is it?

More About Grammar:

• What Is Grammar?
• Basic Sentence Structures
• Why Does Grammar Matter?
• Top 24 Grammatical Terms That We Should Have Learned in School

Image: National Grammar Day logo, The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar © 2007-2008. Martha Brockenbrough's Things That Make Us [Sic] will be published by St. Martin's Press in October 2008.