Then the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said 'Let me go over', the men of Gilead would say to him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' When he said 'No', they said to him, 'Then say Shibboleth,' and he said 'Sibboleth,' for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites fell at that time.

Take, for example, the double negative (e.g. "don't never"). It is a schoolroom shibboleth that such constructions are illogical, that two negatives imply a positive. Over the last few centuries, this argument has succeeded in making use of the double negative a sure sign that one is not a speaker of Standard English, thus depriving the standard version of the language of a very very useful form of repetition for emphasis, one which was logical enough for Shakespeare's time and is found in many many other languages. This is important because many people believe that speakers of Standard English are somehow better than speaker of non-standard dialects.

All this is quite unfair, especially if you are on the Ephraimite side of a usage dispute, and by the standards of linguistics, the scientific study of language, it makes no sense at all. French may be known as the language of love, but most linguists see no evidence at all that one language or dialect of a language is better than another for discussing love or any other topic. Linguists often avoid the very term "correct"--preferring to speak of usages as "acceptable" or not within a given dialect. Sentences that follow the rules of the language are referred to as "well-formed." Indeed, we should all want our sentences to be shapely and/or studly. The question is whose standards of language beauty should apply. In practice, the answer is the Gileadites--or whoever else happens to be in power at the moment.

Standard American English is the most prestigious dialect of the language--in the United States, although certainly not in Great Britain--because it is the dialect preferred by groups which are themselves prestigious because of money, power, and status. Only the rich and powerful believe that they are so because they are morally superior. The rest of us have heard that money is the root of all evil, that power corrupts, and so on. What matters, though, is that they control the fords of the Jordan or our next promotion. We need that promotion. And some of us might be willing to risk the moral dangers involved in becoming rich and powerful.

Because we harbor such unworthy ambitions, what we have here is at least partly a prescriptive grammar of English. In addition to trying to explain how the language works, it suggests that some ways are better for some purposes than others, and it offers advice on how one should speak and write in various situations; it spends more time on certain disputed points of usage than is justified by their linguistic significance, simply because such points crop up on alleged tests of writing.

Just in case you ever take a real linguistics course, you should be warned that linguists, an individualistic and egalitarian lot when not engaged in the status games of academia, are not fond of prescriptive grammars. They tend to see prescriptive grammars as a set of arbitrary rules administered by English teachers and other members in good standing of the Language Police. (If you are the kind of person who likes to say that certain usage errors "drive you crazy," you may be ripe to join the Language Police.) They believe that the study of language should have the intrinsic appeal of any science, catering to our fascination in finding out how things work, and providing the aesthetic pleasure of discovering fundamental principles behind its subject's apparent complexity. They would argue that studying language has a special interest because we are talking about ourselves, something most of us enjoy, and that language is deeply connected with what it is to be human. There may be other species who exhibit behaviors we might call "language," but no animal language has the kind of range and complexity of human language--or if it does, the animals have yet to tell us.

A good descriptive grammar of English would try to account for the rules and categories involved in the making and interpretation of sentences. These rules and categories are not really strange to us--we "know" them, because following them is what allows us to communicate with one another. But we are not usually aware of our own knowledge. Studying language makes us aware of arbitrary distinctions which govern our behavior, and our initial response may be that language is much more complicated than we had thought. If we keep at it, though, we find that some of the most complicated structures are made up of relatively simple building blocks. A descriptive grammar along such lines would not try to impose Standard English--or its author's prejudices about what should be standard. It certainly wouldn't waste its time on the kind of trivial points of usage usually involved in our grammatical shibboleths.

Even so, there are times when we want to know how to pronounce shibboleth with an initial "sh." That is more or less why our schools are mandated to teach, and even enforce Standard English. Doing so is not unreasonable so long as all concerned understand that Standard English is taught for its utility, so as to expand the students' range of opportunities, and that teaching it need not imply that other ways of speaking English are marks of inferiority.

Unfortunately, the formal study of grammar in itself is not guaranteed to make one into a speaker and writer of Standard English. As a way of learning to speak Standard English, the study of grammar is probably less effective than hanging around people who already speak it; as a way of learning to write well, it is not nearly as good as reading good books. Our aims here are a bit more modest: to provide a necessary vocabulary for talking about the difference between standard and non-standard varieties. What follows is an attempt to help you review some of those terms and show how they apply to various issues in writing and speaking. We'll try to do so without doing incredible violence to current linguistic grammars, though that means that sometimes we are dealing with two different sets of terminology, that used by linguists and that used in school handbooks. The hope is that studying all this will improve your ability to use and talk to others about English syntax--and, of course, make your sentences more shapely.

How Much of This Will be on the Test? Most of this section has been concerned with matters of attitude, in the hope that you will see mastery of Standard English as a socially useful skill but not a marker of intelligence or moral character. There will be no attempt to test you on your attitude, however, since that only encourages faking it. You will be expected, however, to remember the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars and the definition of syntax. These and other terms we'll be using can also be found in the Glossary.