Welcome to Word of the Week

First Word: Grammar!

Welcome to Word of the Week, a weekly foray into etymology, grammar, historical linguistics, poetics, articulatory phonetics, and style – and literature, and baseball, and cartoons, and Scripture, and whatever else I happen upon in my way!

And the opening word of the week is grammar, which, if you come from southern Massachusetts, might name your mammar’s mammar – as the Massachusetts girls in Little Women call their mommy Marmie, not pronouncing the r when it comes after a vowel. But for most people grammar names a small grab bag of arbitrary “rules” nobody really understands or remembers. For the few and the proud, however, grammar denotes the structural logic of a language, as that is made manifest in rules or tendencies that really do make sense – since making sense, after all, despite politicians everywhere, is what language is for.

When I ask my college freshmen whether they studied grammar in high school, most of them tell me that they did, but when I go on to ask them what…