Found a lost book

 For many years, I was certain that a book I used to read as a schoolboy was lost. Yesterday, my wife and I cleared 5 large boxes that we had left aside for many years after moving in and I found the book in very good condition in one of the boxes. This book has been out of print for decades.

In the 1960s, linguists decided that the teaching of English grammar was inimical to a child's linguistic development. How they came to that decision is a mystery. My grandpa thought that was silly and insisted that I should not be so deprived. Because all schools stopped teaching English grammar, a whole generation of people who went to school after the 1960s (and that means almost the whole of humanity) grew up without having studied English grammar.  

But this huge mistake has been addressed in the UK. Grammar is now taught in schools but they have only started to do it very recently, albeit with much unhappiness on the part of clueless parents. But it's not the same in other countries. English grammar remains outside the school syllabus elsewhere in the world. 

The linguist David Crystal once told the story of a question he asked a uni class which nobody could answer. It was a simple question: What is a preposition? Finally, a student hazarded a guess and she asked if a preposition was the posture one assumed before getting on a horse!

Can you imagine what huge impact these linguists have made for a whole generation of people all over the world? As Robert Burchfield the famous lexicographer once put it although in a different context, all of us (most of us at least) now live in a grammarless cavern.

Does it really matter?  Shouldn't a language function solely as a means of communication? As far as communication goes, English has done a fine job in connecting people all over the world. It's the only language that truly traverses all boundaries, be they national, cultural or ethnic. Google has been prompting me to write my blog in Chinese or Malay or Indonesian (and one wonders how Google knows these are the languages I am proficient in) but if I were to do that, a large part of the world would not be able to read it.