Subject+verb+object and other lies I teach

I live in two worlds. My world of work is based around language, linguistics and communication. I teach ESL, so having a good grasp of grammar, writing, pronunciation and vocabulary means that I can pay my rent, buy tubs of Greek yoghurt and go on holiday in the summer.

In my world of work, language must have form and meaning. As a teacher, I have to make clear to students the uncontested rules that grammar defines. I show them how to use language as a medium to communicate their thoughts and requirements. I award students for combining tenses and appropriate vocabulary suited to a task. My job dictates that I help students move up a scale of progressively sophisticated language usage. What this means is that they are put in boxes which denote how good their language ability is. For my students the CEFR C1 is where they want to be on their second language journey. Once they are awarded a place in this box, the world of tertiary education and work opportunities are available to them. This is my workday.

As James Joyce said, “All days make their end.” At the end of mine, I leave the boxes of my work, i.e. classrooms, CEFR levels and language rules. After dinner and a bit of Netflix, I might retreat from a world of language to a world of silence. My world of spiritual practice takes me to the absence of words and the ineffability of language. There will inevitably be mind chatter that intrudes the silence, but my role as meditator is to stop the thoughts forming sentences and images. In this space language is not wanted or needed.

But I’m drawn to writers who have a mission to disrupt language rules as we know them. I am unusually fond of post-structuralism which shows those of us who are interested, how words are unstable in their meaning.?Teaching opposites, a common CEFR A1 lesson, doesn’t quite mean the same when you consider that concepts such as ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ live in neighboring towns with porous borders.

Lucy Ellman must have copied and pasted the phrase, “The fact that,” several times over while she was typing her manuscript for Ducks, Newburyport. The writing curriculum I teach states that good writing paraphrases and does not repeat the same words in a paragraph. Faint regard for syntax, no punctuation to speak of, this book was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2019.

"Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet." (James Joyce)

I often delight in this line from Ulysees. I don't need to understand what Joyce was going on about, I just like that he asserted himself onto language to see what might come out. So at the end of the day when the text books are packed away, perhaps I should shudder at the lies I say. Writers and philosophers with skills to share, prized nevertheless, for rules they didn't care.

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