Change is the only constant in life. I get
annoyed with the “grammar police” at times. It seems to me that they are
claiming a standard when we don’t agree on the standard. It seems that we seize
on grammatical niceties, the trivial, and miss the more important aspiration of
clarity and elegance in writing. I recall with some chagrin that the writing
instructors of our daughter never gave them a template or suggestions about
good writing, only a red pen for minor trespasses of form. It may be a way of
trying to claim some authority, an air of knowing something that the common
herd does not. I think that some of the concern with grammar bears class
prejudice, even an attempt to claim superiority, based on the knowledge of
grammar itself. It can be an attempt to create a barrier between the accepted
and the proper v. the improper and the unacceptable.
In seminary, I do recall that every instance of
folks struggling with Greek and Hebrew was due to not knowing English grammar.
Both of our daughters learned more grammar in Spanish than they did in their
schooling in English class. My own distaste for mixing up who and whom derives
more from people mistaking whom for when people say “between you and I” is in
part grammatical but more that it is a mistaken attempt to sound more formal.
I wonder more about folks who try to freeze words and their meanings.
Again, I fall into this at times. I do not like that the word, disinterested
(impartial) has turned into uninterested. In his new book on changes in church
history, Garry Wills reminds us that for some time Latin were considered not
only the language of the Roman Catholic Church but all scholarship. Its grammar
was considered the ultimate template. I suppose English, with its much less
careful taxonomy of words was automatically suspect. I was amused to see a
self-important scholar bragging that he knew that peruse meant to carefully
examine a document. When he was reminded that dictionaries also permit its more
common usage to scan something, he then declared that one and only one
dictionary was honored by him. I was amused as the same author constantly
disparages traditional church worship in favor of anything and everything
considered new.
The older established denominations are
struggling mightily with change. Seeing memberships tumble, perhaps we should
grab at the hem of the garments of the new and seemingly popular. Perhaps the
tide of change has turned against the older churches. I sense that we support
change when we agree with it, and we oppose it when it violates our
preferences. Complaints about hymns are almost always phrased as old hymns, but
folks usually mean ones that they recall from childhood. (I have heard people
complain about a “new” hymn that is 500 years old, but call How Great Thou Art
an ancient song.(The version most people treasure dates from 1949).Change is
with us always, whether in language or in church traditions. We hold it in
tension with tradition itself, I suppose, at our healthiest. Otherwise, if we
try to freeze time, we seem like King Canute trying to command the waves to
stop. We do well to question change, question it, not the naive assumption that
change for its own sake is always better. To try to freeze a language, to try
to imprison church liturgy into the mirage of a missed past is to ignore the
flow of life itself. Swept up in a tidal wave of change, we focus on the
insignificant, since that we can grasp.
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