The English Verb – Michael Lewis

I went on so long with my last posts that I figured I could justifiably keep this one short. I also don’t have heaps to say here. This is another book I read mostly for my job. It almost ended up on my DNF, but I decided to tear through it after setting it down for more than 8 months. The book is mostly a good research tool if you are writing a paper on English grammar. It may also be good to have if you need illuminate some grammar points.

Let’s talk about grammar for a second. Once upon a time, the “vulgar” languages didn’t actually have grammar - or at least not according to the grammarians of the time. Grammar was something solely reserved for Latin and Greek – y’know, the real languages of our ancestors during the golden era of history (please see the sarcasm there). At some point people started seeing the need to teach other languages, and grammars were developed for those languages as well. However, the grammars for the modern languages was pressed through a Latin/Greek mold. English doesn’t fit a latin mold, and this has caused problems ever since. If ever someone has told you that it is a rule not to split an infinitive in English, you are seeing the problem. It was impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, and so it was thought that you shouldn’t do it in English either, because English should aspire to latin. Idem with that nonsense about ending a sentence with a preposition.

This book illuminates those point, but doesn’t give you the history behind it. It explains the grammar and its inconguities. English doesn’t have a present simple, it has a present habitual that is poorly named ‘the present simple’ because of some philologist from a few hundred years ago decided to call it such. Per linguists, English doesn’t actually have a future tense, to which the book gives a good explanation.

But who gives a shit? When I taught, none of my students gave a tinker’s damn if ‘be going to’ was a future tense or a construction to speak about the future. If you care about academic nitpicking, give this a read. But it’s not all that useful outside of that.