Sloppy Brits or uptight Americans?

Who is sloppier when it comes to grammar or should we all just get over it?

A recent discussion on a teachers’forum has made me wonder amusingly and bemusedly again about correctness,
prescriptive grammar rules and how English teachers just LOVE grammar and
arguing about it - I wish lexis would prompt such heated debates, for example
what verb should go with knowledge: gain or acquire? or some
such.

Among the comments about pointlessness of teaching grammar to students -  why bother if native speakers make mistakes - the one that stuck with me was an amusing remark made by my friend, colleague and former co-mentor Adele who often comes by this blog (Adele, are you reading?). She wrote:

[…] It took me a while after marrying a Brit, to get used to the poor grammar prevalent in the UK even among many educated people. Adele

Interesting thought… Recently I was coordinating Jeremy Harmer’s visit to Israel.
As part of his programme, he was scheduled to appear as a keynote speaker at theannual study day organised by the Forum for College English Department
Heads with his talk in which he (mildly) criticizes Dogme. The talk originally
entitled:

Teaching Unplugged Beats Acquisition? What to Teach to
Who, with What and Why

caused a bit of an uproar when I announced it at a monthly meeting of the
English Forum. The English Forum (quite a few of them
Israelis of American origin) found the title ungrammatical, bemoaned falling grammar
standards and stopped short of accusing Jeremy Harmer of not knowing English. The
title was thus changed to:

Teaching Unplugged Beats Acquisition? What to Teach to
Whom, with What and Why

This also reminded me of another incident when a North
American friend of mine and I were at the closing gala of the British Film
Festival a few years ago where the former deputy director of the British
Council in Israel said something like “we would like to thank people who we
worked with”. My friend launched into a long tirade about how she should have
said “people with whom we worked” and didn’t shut up until the speeches were
over and the screening started.

So is it really Brits who have poor grammar or Americans who
can sometimes be sticklers for somewhat outdated prescriptive rules?

While I was writing this, the above cited message prompted
the following response:

Americans are no better with overuse of the present progressive, confusion of adverbs and adjectives and eliminaton of perfect tenses. Just listen to President Barak O' Bama speak freely (not from a pre-written speech) and you hear every mistake listed above. Francine

Diachonic corpus analysis (that’s when you compare lots of
written and oral texts from today with those of the past) indeed shows that the
present progressive is becoming more common which is manifested in such
utterances as:

I’m hating my job

You’re looking good.

and often quoted:

I’m lovin’ it.

(but let’s be honest, have you heard anyone actually use it
except for Justin Timberlake in his song which was eagerly adopted by McDonalds?)

  

In all of the above sentences stative verbs are used in the
continuous / progressive form (pace Raymond Murphy) which was not common, say, 50 years ago.

As regards the issue of adverbs and adjectives, the “confusion”
can be exemplified by:

He was driving real slow vs He was driving really
slowly

Then again, Americans may be using the former more often but aren’t all these examples of spoken language which does not always abide by the prescriptive
rules of traditional grammar? For generations of teachers and learners raised
on Murphy’s grammar it might indeed be difficult to embrace the view that
language is a constantly evolving organism whose norms are inevitably changing. As a result, infinitives
become split and nouns become verbs (e.g. Facebooking and googling) and
subjects and verbs – this one does not cease to shock me – do not always seem to be
in agreement (Windows IS shutting down).

In contrast to Murphy, Carter and McCarthy’s Cambridge Grammar of English (CUP
2006), for example, offer a much more descriptive
view of the English grammar based on real every day usage with whole sections devoted to the grammar of
spoken English. In my earlier post Spoken Grammar I talked about the  grammar of spoken English being distinctly different from the written grammar and suggested activities
that can be used to highlight the features of Spoken Grammar in class. 

So what do you think? 

• Do you also find that the British are sloppier when it comes
  to grammar?


• Should teachers just get off their high horses and stop arguing
  about the prescriptive grammatical rules?


• Or do you think without these debates our profession would
  not be as interesting?

P.S. Oh and if you’re still interested – and I trust you are
since you’ve come by this blog – both “acquire” and “gain” mentioned above collocate
with “knowledge”, albeit “acquire” is more common according to both Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA) and
British National Corpus (BNC)