The Subversive Art of Traditional Grammar

It’s time to mount a counter-offensive against the cult of grammatical dissolution, the hive-mind of unpunctuated abandon where rules are discarded not by revolution but by the slow drip of neglect.

Perhaps you’ve noticed: Instant messaging and social media have not been kind to grammar. Rather, a new dialect is born every moment in the ceaseless exchanges of adolescents who would rather mutilate language than master it. They belong to a cult of grammatical dissolution, a hive-mind of unpunctuated abandon, where rules are discarded not by revolution but by the slow drip of neglect, the way an empire crumbles not in battle but in bureaucratic decay, as subject-verb agreements dissolve like an old treaty nobody remembers signing. The result is a linguistic landscape where meaning is often ambiguous, and ideas are expressed with less precision than ever before.

But what if, rather than capitulating to the aesthetic poverty of this ersatz vernacular, one staged a counter-offensive? What if, in defiance of the casual and careless, one reclaimed the structure, the rhythm, the iron symmetry of traditional grammar? This, my friends, is the subversion: to write well, to think clearly, to reclaim an intellectual independence lost in the static of modernity’s textual shorthand.

Grammar is not simply an assemblage of arbitrary rules hammered into our skulls by schoolmasters wielding the Red Pen. No, grammar is architecture, the beams and buttresses without which the cathedral of thought collapses into rubble. The ancients understood this: the Romans, in their obsession with linguistic precision, the Greeks, whose sentences unfolded like mathematical proofs. And yes the medieval scholastics believed that the ability to arrange words properly was no less than the ability to arrange reality itself. To name a thing properly was to know it; to structure a sentence well was to think well. And so, by the time the Enlightenment rolled around, by the time Johnson and Swift were locking horns with language’s natural decay, it was understood that to tamper with the mechanics of syntax was to tamper with the mechanics of cognition.

To revive this noble discipline, one must begin with the fundamental craft of sentence diagramming, wherein each phrase is parsed and plotted like the rigging of a great ship, each clause fastened in its place with the precision of a carpenter at his bench. For in this discipline, the bones of language are made visible, the mighty skeleton of thought laid bare, revealing the hidden forces that hold a sentence aloft.

Next, one must turn to the memorization of rules and examples, for just as the mariner commits to heart the constellations by which he steers, so too does the scholar of grammar engrave upon his mind those immutable principles that guide expression. Here is no dull rote, no mindless recitation, but the steady forging of linguistic mastery upon the anvil of discipline. The student who knows his subjunctives from his indicatives, his dependent from his independent clauses—such a one moves through the world of letters with the ease of a navigator tracing the heavens, assured that his course is true.

Then comes the discipline of parsing and analysis, that grand dissection of language in which each word, each syllable, each punctuation mark is examined with the keen eye of a naturalist classifying the creatures of the deep. To parse a sentence is to unearth the grammar within it, to see not merely what has been written but how it breathes, how it moves, how its elements interact with the harmonious balance of a well-ordered universe. This is no idle sport, but a noble undertaking, a reverent study of the mechanics of meaning.

In the practice of copywork and dictation, the student bows his head before the masters, tracing their words with the devotion of a scribe illuminating a manuscript. He learns not only by sight but by hand, by muscle and motion, absorbing the cadence and structure of the finest prose until its rhythms become his own. What better apprenticeship than this?

And finally, in the realm of Socratic questioning and discussion, the battle is joined in earnest, and grammar ceases to be a mere study and becomes a living thing, an art wielded with the deftness of a sword in the hands of a master duelist. Here, in the clash of dialogue, in the probing questions and well-reasoned answers, the scholar is made not merely a student of language, but its champion, its defender.

Now, let us consider the deeper insurgency, one waged not just against slovenly grammar, but against the creeping relativism that seeks to make every rule a suggestion, every standard a subjective whim. The singular “they,” that Trojan horse of ambiguity, now roams freely across the linguistic landscape, trampling the once-proud pronouns beneath its ill-defined hooves. But should we not, in defense of precision, call this what it is: a surrender of the linguistic to the political? To abolish “his” as the universal is to sever language from its roots in logic, to concede that words do not mean but merely suggest, that truth itself, whether grammatical or metaphysical, is relative and negotiable.

And yet, one is scolded for noticing. Grammar, that once-humble steward of clarity, is now pressed into the service of ideological warfare. A pronoun, it seems, is no longer simply a matter of syntax, but of sin or virtue. To resist the creeping tide of plural singularity is to be branded reactionary, a linguistic luddite clinging desperately to the shipwreck of tradition. But let us not mistake this for mere pedantry. If we abandon the fight for precision in grammar, we abandon the fight for precision in thought. And once thought collapses into ambiguity, what follows but the slow, almost imperceptible collapse of reality itself?

Yet subversive resisters still write. They wield the semicolon like a fencer’s blade, unafraid to construct a sentence of winding elegance, to forge a paragraph that demands to be read with both patience and intellect. They do not reduce themselves to monosyllabic grunts, nor do they abandon themselves to the false expedience of sentence fragments. They do not conflate style with sloppiness, nor do they believe that informality must mean incoherence. These are the grammarians, the quiet saboteurs, the last guardians of a language drifting toward dissolution.

So pick up your pen, or your typewriter, or—if you must—your keyboard. Write a sentence that stands like a monument against the vulgar tide of abbreviations and elisions. Write with clarity, and if possible, with beauty. And in doing so, know that you are not merely preserving a grammatical tradition; you are preserving the very possibility of thought itself.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.