Grammar for Social Awareness in Time of Class Warfare

Abstract

man, quotable were it not for copyright, in which the gloomy bard of Shropshire compares human efforts to set a wrong world right to rain falling into the sea. Not even a cloudburst can turn the salt sea to fresh. For grammarians, the gloomy verses immediately suggest a gloomy application. Teachers of the so-called language arts (arts only poorly defined by language as their material medium) have tried for over 200 years to help or make the unwashed speak and write like the washed. Results have never been commensurate with efforts. The pupils who have profited most have been those who least needed the instruction. A smaller number, unwashed in less privileged families, have been cleansed by the blood of the grammarian and may by compliant behavior have occasionally reached the doubtful goal of upward mobility in the mainstream culture, less paradise than long purgatory. Very few have been both canny and humane enough to use their new knowledge as one among other means to gain status for themselves and, from their more favored position, to make war on the damnifiers of the lowly. In a society which boasts of its Judeo-Christian tradition, the privileged seldom draw the obvious conclusion from the first NOel, which angels allegedly said, not to princes and prelates, but to poor shepherds at work in the fields. Since the blood, sweat, and tears of generations have neither eradicated ain't nor