Johanna raises a difficult issue parenthetical to the "elegance
and style" matter.  On the latter, I must admit to being torn.  I
still prefer Mozart and Corigliano to Bonjovi and Madonna, but I
do like Bonjovi and Madonna.  I think a case can be made that
Corigliano's music does things that Bonjovi's doesn't, but it's
not an easy argument, nor, in the light of culture studies, is it
even an easy comparison.

However, on to the parethetical:

Johanna writes:

>I do believe that teaching grammar helps train a person in
>analytical thinking, as will training in any kind of detailed
analysis,

This is both the strength and the weakness of the type of
argument we tend to make for grammar instruction, that it improves
analytical and critical thinkiing, a claim that is empirically
difficult to test, but one that has a lot of tradition and lore
behind it.  However, as Johanna points out, so does any kind of
detailed analysis, and one could easily counter that children get
plenty of formal rigor and analysis in their math and science
courses.  There has to be a better line of argument.  One that I
like, even though it doesn't always carry the day, is the
humanistic argument that language is, after all, a primary
defining trait of humans and that it therefore makes as little
sense to leave the nature of language out of general education as
it does to leave out the nature of the physical world.  This
argument, and related lines of thought that bring in especially
the social and cultural ramifications of knowledge about language,
has sold pretty well in our English department, but we haven't
made any headway yet with General Studies, which is politically a
much tighter arena.

Johanna also makes a point about the past perfect that I must
disagree with.

>Many aspects of the current changes underway in English grate on
me,
>such as loss of the past perfect; I feel the need to correct a
simple
>past when used to mean past perfect, and to replace a 'would'
>construction with a subjunctive. But that's an emotional
reaction, not a
>rational one. Rationally, I know that the past perfect and
subjunctive
>are on their way out, and that the language will manage
perfectly well
>without them.

It isn't that the past perfect is on the way out.  Rather, it's
changing semantically into a remote past.  I hear students say
things like the following:

Student 1:  I was just there yesterday.
Student 2:  Yeah, I had been there last year.

When I present the past perfect semantics, they find it puzzling,
but when we talk about it as remote past, they pick up on it
immediately.  It then provides a nice opportunity for talking
about language change across generations.

Johanna also writes:

>There's a saying that, in a democracy, people get the government
they
>deserve. Well, a culture gets the language it 'deserves' -- if a
culture
>needs to express sophisticated meanings, it will develop its
language to
>do so without the help of grammar teachers. If a culture doesn't
care
>for detail, the language for expressing detail will fall by the
wayside.
>We may lament the poor quality of communication in our culture,
but
>don't blame it on loss of grammatical constructions.

I'm not sure I'd relate culture and language quite so closely.  I
find the near past/remote past distinction fairly delicate and
sophisticated.  I find Bantu gender highly sophisticated, but I
don't think that means that the cultures that use Bantu languages
are necessarily more sophisticated or less so than ours.  I
suspect rather, and I use this image in some of my undergrad
classes, that complexity in language is more like a plastic bag
full of jello:  squeeze it on one side and it all moves over to
the other.

Herb