National Grammar Day is celebrated every year on March 4th because it’s the only day of the year that is a complete sentence. Get it? March fourth/March forth? As they say on the internets, hahaha.
But like many celebrations, National Grammar Day is founded on a myth. There is no Tooth Fairy, and most of the language we produce has nothing to do with complete sentences.
Although we’re trained to think of sentences and grammar in the same breath, they’re only loosely connected. People don’t typically speak in sentences—certainly not in conversation. Even formal speeches have their share of fragments, stumbles, and rambles down the garden path that won’t fit into the sentence diagrams you may have learned in school.
As for writing, it would be weird to see sentences in such common tasks as to-do lists or notes on the fridge. Text messages and status updates may bypass the complete sentence with no loss of clarity or impact.
And if you check your calendar for March 4th, I bet you didn’t jot down your 10 o’clock with subject, verb, and object.
OK, forget about complete sentences for a minute. The real goal of National Grammar Day is to celebrate good grammar. Being against that is worse than rejecting motherhood or apple pie, amirite?
But good grammar itself is a myth. It’s true that everyone believes in good grammar. But no one can agree on what good grammar actually is. You may believe that good grammar consists of a set of rules. You know the kind I mean: Don’t use ain’t or double negatives. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Don’t split infinitives. Avoid the passive voice.
But if that’s the case, then no one shares exactly the same set of rules. Plus everybody breaks whatever language rules they do believe in. Do you reject singular they, as in Every grammarian must choose their words carefully? Just be patient, singular they will pop up in your speech or writing when you least expect it.
Do you insist that decimate can only mean ‘reduce by ten percent’? Then either you never use that word, or you ignore your own advice.
Do you sneer when someone says most unique because grammar requires language to be logical? Then you are doomed to go through life alone, because language is never 100 percent logical, maybe not even ten percent.
There is one grammar rule you can be sure of: Anyone who lays down a grammar rule will break it given half a chance.
All right, if instead of a formal list, a set of ten commandments or ninety-five theses that no one can agree upon with any unanimity, if instead of that, good grammar is just a general affirmation that someone is using standard English, there’s the problem that no one has ever defined standard English to everyone else’s satisfaction.
How can standard English be an agreed-upon set of linguistic behaviors if everyone subscribes to a different set?
So here’s my recommendation for how to spend National Grammar Day. Don’t waste time making fun of signs like “Apple’s, $1.79 a pound,” or worse yet, correcting them with a red marker. Vandalism is a crime, and it’s not a good idea to break the law in order to correct a broken law of grammar, especially if no one agrees on which grammar laws are actually laws.
Plus, not only will you make people feel bad about their own language, you’ll make them resent you. Then they’ll start looking for errors in your grammar, and that will not end well.
Because there’s another grammar rule you can be sure of: Everyone wants to be correct, but no one wants to be corrected.
The best way to spend National Grammar Day is to listen and read, to speak and write, to relish language in its infinite variety. Don’t bask in self-righteous grammaticality. And whatever you do, don’t diagram a sentence. That could be really harmful to your health.
Because National Grammar Day is not National Pedant's Day.
