Grammatical jiggery pokery

Subject: Grammatical jiggery pokery.

 

I have a good friend who reads my blogs (he has to be a good friend to do that) and in a spirit of informed betterment, he points out my grammatical mistakes, of which there are many. Misspelling seems to be my most egregious fault, along with composing sentences which are too long and disjointed. 

And there I was thinking content was enough.

It's interesting how the importance of having a view and the willingness to spend time promoting it is questioned because of the technicalities of language which seem get in the way. I know that it's jarring to see misspelling littering the page of an essay, it takes away much of the impact of what is being said by stopping the mind in its flow and the need to consider if it's, "i before e except after c". 

I was blogging the other week about how a strong accent can get in the way of our concept of intelligence and how hoodwinked we become listening to a posh bloke talking twaddle. 

My schooling was minimal, especially when it came to formal grammar. There were kids in my class who at 15, on leaving school couldn't read or write. School was a warehousing project, a legal entity which kept children from the poorer estates in limbo until it was time to find some menial work and earn their living. 

Literature and the formal structure of language was taught at a bare minimum and any knowledge we picked up regarding graver came from the type of books we read. I was lucky to have a home where books and reading were valued and whilst the learning was piecemeal it was there, filtering in not as a set of rules but as a matter of fact absorbed on the page. Suffering, undetected, a form of dyslexia meant that spelling was a nightmare with letters jumbled up, back to front. To this day I could not possibly do a crossword puzzle or play Scrabble. It's just too much of a unintelligible visual mess trying to guess which letter follows the next, although I might know the word and it's meaning. 

Reading was a slow way out of the jungle. It gave me an insight into the minds of people who, more articulate and more visionary than myself could prod me along the way to form opinions about things outside my world of the common experience. 

Books are the passport to everything, they tell you neatly everything you need to know prior to experiencing things yourself. If you are disadvantaged and have been trapped in some existence which is mind numbingly repetitive and boring, then a book at bedtime is what you need to fly away and become a prince, and the world of grammatical jiggery pokery plays no part in your enjoyment.