Deciphering grammar can make a dummy out of you

JUNE CASAGRANDE

I like to think of this column as grammar for dummies by a dummy. But

today, I’m taking it a step further and actually making it about

dummies. No, I haven’t been watching FOX News or any Keanu Reeves

movies. I’ve been reading about grammar.

You see, after years of working as a copy editor and more than a

year and a half of writing this column, a few months ago I finally

bought a real-live, bona fide grammar book. Until then, I’d been

relying on style books and usage books -- mainly the “Associated

Press Stylebook,” which governs most newspapers, and the “Chicago

Manual of Style,” which sets the rules for book publishing, and

“Garner’s Modern American Usage,” which tries to put the whole mess

of modern language rules into perspective for the average user.

The stylebooks contain lots of useful stuff on style issues, such

as whether to use a comma before “and” in a sentence such as, “I

relate to dummies, dinks and dolts.” The Associated Press frowns upon

adding an extra comma, which is known as the “serial comma” or

“Oxford comma.” Newsprint’s expensive, you know, and any extra

character could cause a line of text to wrap around one moment

sooner, which in turn could cause the words to fill up the page

sooner, which would be a tragedy. The “Chicago Manual of Style,”

which shoots fast and loose with its adherents’ supply of ink and

paper, supports the use of the extra comma.

These books also contain some practical stuff about grammar. But I

never realized how much they omitted until I coughed up 50-odd

dollars for my impressive-looking copy of the “Oxford English

Grammar.”

When I began thumbing through this book, one of the first things

that caught my eye was the word “dummy.” It was like a warm welcome,

the equivalent of, “You, June Casagrande, are welcome here.” Of

course, a moment later I felt even dumber because Oxford was talking

about a whole different kind of dummies. Specifically, what I was

reading about were “dummy operators” and, as I read, I was

increasingly more embarrassed that I’d never known or even thought

about these dummies before.

Consider the Oxford example statement, “It interferes with your

life,” turned into the question, “Does it interfere with your life?”

Notice how, when we make a question, we sometimes throw in an extra

word: “does” or “do” or “did” or something along those lines?

Dummy that I am, I never really noticed before this thing I now

know is called a “dummy operator.” And it’s a quirk of English that I

might have noticed while studying French or Spanish.

In those languages, you form a question just by swapping the order

of the subject and verb. “It interferes” becomes “interferes it?”

They don’t have to add “do” or “did” -- dummy operators.

Take pity on people who “no speak-a the English too good” because

I’m here to tell you, the more I learn about English, the more I can

see that it’s cruel and unusual to anyone who didn’t begin learning

it from birth.

When we make a question out of, “You enjoy movies,” we don’t just

say, “Enjoy you movies?” We throw in the dummy operator “do” and

thereby add a whole level of confusion. “Do you enjoy movies?” We

don’t change, “I walk in the park,” to, “Walk I in the park?” We say,

“Do I walk in the park?”

Just to be even more cruel and unusual, the dummy-operator rule

isn’t so hard-and-fast. You can form a question out of, “I have

books,” without a dummy operator, “Have I books?” But walking around

talking like one of Sir Lancelot’s court in this day and age gives

yet another whole new meaning to the word “dummy.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

JuneTCN@aol.com.