Sentence case
A few weeks ago in this space I detailed how a controversy over the number of commas in the Second Amendment is affecting the interpretation of its meaning, and how when the Supreme Court considers a gun-rights case next year, both sides have their house grammarians lined up and ready for battle.
But a new grammatical argument popped into the fray via the New York Times last week, this one positing that both the grammarians and the gun nuts should be focusing not on commas, since 18th-century English grammar played pretty fast and loose with punctuation anyway, but on sentence diagramming, that most tedious, odious of grammatical exercises.
“The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas,” writes Adam Freedman in the Times. “When the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: ‘Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.’ In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.” He bases his argument on Latin rules, which we won’t go into here, because Latin is boring.
Never mind that Freedman’s argument and the comma argument both arrive at the same conclusion: that the Second Amendment is not about individual rights, but about militias. (Okay, maybe not never mind. Confidential to any Supreme Court justices reading the Angry Grammarian: Look over that sentence a couple more times.)
The real crime here is that, after endangering our children with irresponsible gun laws, we’re doubly steering them toward a life of crime by forcing them to learn sentence diagramming—that hateful enterprise that’s made countless schoolchildren tune out, drop out and become hardened criminals.
Sentence diagramming puts all the words in their place, and has been a favorite practice of stodgy grammar teachers for millennia (literally—Freedman’s argument has to do with diagramming Latin sentences). But through the stubborn, overwhelming force of dullness, sentence diagramming has done more harm than good to the English language by turning young students off and boring them until they want to shoot themselves in the head. Maybe without sentence diagramming, we wouldn’t need guns in the first place.
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