Grammarians take to song

By Robert Masters

We all accept that English is an evolving language; it has been doing so since Anglo Saxon times.

Academics and educationalists often say that as long as a person’s expression, or written word is understood, it is acceptable in today’s world.

The emergence of hip-hop lyrics is testimony to that, just as is some of the sporting sentences, let alone the pronunciation of many words.

If half the community today stumbled across the word ’syntax’ they probably could not say it, understand its meaning, or use it in a sentence. 

However, it sets the rules for the language and its foundation.

It also enables us to play with the language, along with the game of spotting our least favourite pronunciations, or circling the poorly constructed sentences in today’s newspaper, or more correctly the ‘commentary papers’.

This YouTube clip is an excellent lesson for all modern speakers and writers to lift their standards and understand the meaning of a ’subject, ‘verb’ and ‘predicate’.

Language has rules and the penalty of breaching them is the continued downward spiral of the English language, despite what the academics and educationalists say.