From the moment we begin formal education we are drilled with the idea of “proper grammar.” “My friend and I,” not “me and my friend.” “A large number of people,” not “lots of people.” And so on. Learning these rules might give us good grades and mold us into uniform members of the upper middle class, but in the grand view of things, is grammar really a net benefit to society?
In my view, the obsession with proper grammar, e.g. Standard American English, has created a hyper-curated environment in which everyone acts the same way in order to fit in. It’s molded our fight-or-flight response to only accept those who speak a certain way; hearing someone speak bad grammar makes us uncomfortable. We panic, thinking of whether we should correct the person or walk away and refuse interaction.
But this type of discomfort is precisely what we all need. The type of discomfort that comes with hearing a new language, a different dialect, an unfamiliar tongue. It’s not easy breaking out of the bubble that we’ve built for ourselves to take shelter.
Proper grammar has limited the capacity of the language functions in our brains. We’ve become complacent with knowing one dialect very well, and even more complacent being completely ignorant of others. A decade of English classes, and we can’t understand pidgin, or read Irish English?
Proper grammar has contributed to a multi-million dollar industry funneling students into exam prep, with the comical expectation that doing well on the TOEFL makes us good communicators. It’s made us waste countless hours proofreading and editing our papers so it conforms to the arbitrary standards of academia. And perhaps worst of all, it’s become a breeding ground for parasites to thrive and chase us around the Internet.
Yet grammar does not matter. Language is constantly evolving, and humans have been able to understand each other for millennia without standardized language. Grammar was made up by Latin-obsessed elitists to subjugate society by race and class. Prescriptivism exists to maintain a dominant social order. Without it, divisions collapse, and we start to understand one another like we’ve never imagined.
Without grammar, we are forced to listen to and learn from each other, just like how we try to comprehend babies even when we’re not sure what they’re saying. We open ourselves up to be tolerant of more diverse speech, and by extension, more diverse viewpoints. We start to speak more, listen more, write more, publish more, in however way we want, all without fear of being judged. Isn’t such a world worth striving for?