Eliza Doolittle's Grammar--and Ours

"I don't want to talk grammar," Liza says in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. "I want to talk like a lady."

Eliza Doolittle (you might know her from the musical version, My Fair Lady) may not want to talk about grammar, but if she wishes to speak (or write) at all she certainly must use grammar. At least that's the case if we accept the linguistic definition of grammar as a system of words and sentence patterns that a person acquires when learning a language. As Professor Higgins reminds us, "It's the greatest possession we have."

But that's not the only definition of grammar. It may also refer to the systematic study and description of a language or a group of languages. Eliza's mentor, Dr. Henry Higgins, is primarily concerned with just one aspect of this descriptive sort of grammar--phonetics, or the study of the sounds of speech.

Yet for most people, Eliza's reference to talking "like a lady" is closest to the everyday meaning of grammar, which is based on principles of what makes up "good" and "bad" grammar--that is, correct and incorrect usage. It's this prescriptive definition that Shaw had in mind when he wrote in the preface to Pygmalion, "The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it." Or when Rex Harrison says, "There even are places where English completely disappears. Why, in America they haven't used it for years!"

To see how we attempt to reconcile these different perspectives on grammar, please visit What Is Grammar? With a little bit of luck, you may find it not only "intensely and deliberately didactic," as Shaw intended his play to be, but also a little bit of fun.

More About Grammar:

• What Is Grammar?
• What Is the Difference Between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar?
• Why Does Grammar Matter?

Image: Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady © 1964 Warner Bros.