On the Three Principles of Good Grammar.

I will postulate three Principles (a word I prefer to "Rules") for what a grammatically correct sentence or phrase should have. They are, to paraphrase a pirate from Disney's "Pirates of the Carribean", more akin to guidelines than official rules.

As we know, from time to time someone we know will use a particular arrangement of words that, either owing to the speaker/writer's cleverness or his negligence, calls into question its meaning, because we are unaccustomed to the grammatical geometry of it. Sometimes, we even venture into a semantic discussion as to whether or not that particular grammatical form "makes sense".

The way that one usually makes the arbiting statement is by declaring that the phrase was grammatically incorrect. Yet this may not always be so. If the speaker/writer is from another culture, he/she may be trying to impress upon us a concept that can be understood only in the grammatical context of his/her native tongue. These nuances then appear necessary to examine.

If one wishes to assert that a certain phrase is grammatically incorrect when it is "in fact" only grammatically unusual, one typically posits a more conventional, familiar arrangement of more or less the same words, delineating the same intended meaning. This could be misleading if the original meaning was not sufficiently ascertained, out of negligence on the part of the prosecutor or a refusal to acknowledge the vagueness of the notion that the speaker tries to express.

Most often, one loses, in this process, the CONCISE quality of the original expression.

If we are to use formal reasoning to use this hypothetical scenario as the basis for our self-appointed "rules" for grammatical linguistic behaviour, we must conclude that "grammatically" correct speech is defined by three chief variables:

1. GRAMMAR. In the usual sense. The set of formal rules of grammar that we learn from books, in classrooms, and by virtue of our environment. Since these three contexts in which we learn grammar are innately disparate in almost every case, we must presume from the outset that no DEFINITELY "grammatically correct" way of saying something exists, as though as a Platonic form.

2. COHERENCE. This would have more or less been the prosecutor's argument. The "grammatically incorrect" form of the sentence would have been inferior to the "grammatically correct" form not so much because one of them "broke the rules", but because one was more familiar and therefore more COHERENT to the listener.

Again, a disparateness of circumstance challenges the possibility of any kind of dogmatic authority being leant to this criterion. What may be incoherent to a layperson, for instance, may be totally coherent to a man of letters, simply because the person of letters has read more text and been exposed a more exotic palate of language.

3. CONCISION. What is most concise is most applicable in the critical circumstances of emergency or any other situation wherein careful consideration for traditionally "well-constructed" grammar would be stifling, such as in the instance of tremendous emotional or otherwise physical involvement in a task.

If the prosecutor wishes to accuse the defendant of an absence of clarity, the defendant can assert that clarity is subjective. This would not be mere sophistry; in fact, it would reflect an attempt to appeal to the authority of an intellectually refined and perhaps rigorous class. It also shows a zeal to express a difficult or subtle concept which may at first appear alien to the conscious psyche.

If the prosecutor asserts, furthermore, that a phrase is "grammatically incorrect" simply because the prosecutor can call into consideration a "more coherent" permutation of the same phrase, the underlying logic rests in the presumption that "THAT is incorrect because THIS is better."

If the second statement has a surpassing coherence, however, what it usually lacks is concision.

Yet usually, as I have pointed out, coherence is subjective, and any serious evaluation of a given work, be it literary or otherwise, except perhaps in strictly technical matters that are not however suited for emergencies, will yield the conclusion that one way of saying things is no more or less coherent than the other. The first just seems to "appear" less coherent, AT FIRST.

This being the case, the defendant has a sudden advantage. If his phrase does not technically break the formal rules of grammar, which are of course vague and "iffy" often, then he actually meets all three criteria: Grammar, Coherence, and Concision. He is no worse than his opponent in respect to the first two criteria, and he actually SURPASSES the alternative in terms of the third; the speaker's way of saying things is more CONCISE.

If the grammatical correctness of a statement depends, as I have pointed out, upon the SUPERIORITY of one statement to another, then that actually renders, by the definitions implied by the prosecutor's allegations, that the original statement was and is actually MORE grammatically correct than the prosecutor's revision.

dm.A.A.