Jackson Gregory

We’re expecting again. We plan on naming him Jackson Gregory. We would rather just call him Jack but it doesn’t seem to roll off the tongue when coupled with Gregory, my father-in-law’s first name. Jack Gregory sounds too terse. So we’re adding the son to create resonance. Naming a child is tough; names seem to catch the essence of character, some suppose. I think we’ve all heard someone say, “Well, that makes sense; you look like a….” Whatever that means. What does a Blake look like, anyway? I wish I had the courage to name my children something creative and original, but I don’t (or maybe I know my wife won’t let me and it’s not a battle I’m willing to fight). Sometimes I feel bad for the children whose parents had such courage. I don’t think my children’s identity is an appropriate medium for my creativity; if they want to be eccentric, that’s their prerogative. So I'll stick with tradition for my kid’s sake.

Me and My companion

During my first zone conference in the Scotland, Edinburgh Mission, I sat in a pew at the Dundee chapel listening to my fellow missionaries offer their testimonies. There was something odd about the meeting, however: several missionaries, in mid-story, interrupted their narratives to correct their grammar. It was always the same mistake, too: “Me and my companion were tracking when—oh...uhh...sorry, President Vriens—My companion and I were tracting when….” Realizing their minor grammatical blunder, invariably the missionaries would publicly correct themselves while sheepishly addressing President Vriens. Sitting in my pew, I thought perhaps my mission president had a pronoun case agreement complex—everyone is entitled to at least one grammatical pet peeve, right?—and I made a mental note to never make this mistake in his presence. After the meeting I had an interview with President Vriens. Forgetting my pronoun promise, however, I slipped up; I said, me and my companion.

With his piercing voice, powerful and terrifying, President Vriens interrupted me midsentence: “Elder Bockholt, we never say, ‘Me and my companion.’ We say, ‘My companion and I.’” I knew then why the other missionaries corrected themselves. But why was he emphasizing the subject before the conjunction and not the misemployed pronoun? He went on, “If you put yourself before your companion, it means you’re selfish, Elder Bockholt.” So his grammar rant had nothing to do with pronoun agreement and everything to do with morality. And stop calling me Elder Bockholt, I thought. “You need to learn to put others first. Put your companion before yourself. Put your investigators before yourself. Put the Lord before yourself, Elder Bockholt. Go on, Elder Bockholt, ‘My companion and I—.’”

My encounter with President Vriens forced me to acknowledge the existence of “linguistic etiquette.” I was forced to admit, alongside grammarian Patrick Hartwell, that deviating from Proper English may have social consequences—if a person breaks the rules of Proper English he or she may be thought uneducated, unworthy, and, in my case, possibly immoral (109). Some people sincerely believe that grammatical correctness provides a legitimate measure of a person’s character. If I had said, “My companion and I spent six hours helping an elderly woman address her neglected garden,” my mission president would have believed I was a selfless, moral person. However, if I had told him, “Me and my companion spent six hours helping an elderly woman address her neglected garden,” he would have thought of me as self-interested and debased. But why? The only difference is that the first report was grammatically correct and the latter incorrect. Is grammar usage an outward manifestation of internal morality? I don’t think so—but some do. In 1757 Thomas Sheridan wrote, “A revival of the art of speaking, and the study of our language, might contribute, in a great measure, to the cure of the evils of immorality, ignorance and false taste” (qtd. in Nunan 270). Evidently, Sheridan and President Vriens would agree that my saying of my companion and I would prescriptively cure my evil dispositions. Grammar: the savior of world. Maybe that’s what John meant when he said, “In the beginning was the Word,… and the Word was God” (St. John 1.1).

What’s so wrong with saying, Me and my companion were tracting? For starters, me is an objective case pronoun of the speaker—meaning it is the receiver (object) of the action. But me isn’t receiving the tracking; me is doing the tracting. Me (alongside his or her companion, of course) is the subject of the sentence, not the object. For the sentence to be correct, I—the subject case pronoun of the speaker—must replace me. The sentence should read: I and my companion were tracting. But President Vriens would still not be satisfied with this sentence because he, like Rebecca Elliott, author of an easy-to-understand grammar book, believes “it is polite to put yourself second” (20). I and my companion were tracting is correct but not polite. My companion and I is considered both correct and polite.

Maybe, however, if correctness and politeness weren’t so intertwined, people would be more inclined to select the correct pronoun for every situation. With conjoined subjects (two subjects with and or or in the middle) some people, even highly educated people, use object forms. For instance, the sentence, Mom gave the cookie to Jim and I, is incorrect because the speaker is using the subject case personal pronoun when the speaker is the object of the sentence. If the speaker wasn’t so concerned about putting others first, he or she probably would have said, Mom gave the cookie to me and Jim, which is grammatically correct but impolite (remember your English teacher telling you that if you dropped the other person, you’ll “know” which pronoun to use; the same principle applies when you put yourself first). But the speaker has done what most of us have done: internalized the notion that it is always better to use subject pronouns—probably because our English teachers, or mission presidents, have corrected us a thousand times whenever we said, me and Jim. I can hear them now: "It's Jim and I!" For fear looking intelligently inferior, or morally decadent, we do what Barbra Birch calls “hypercorrect” our grammar; we “misapply a usage rule to instances it should not cover” (144). Maybe, if we were more selfish, hypercorrection wouldn’t concern you and I. Or maybe we shouldn’t equate grammar with morality. But I and my mission president never saw eye to eye.


Birch, Barbra. Learning and teaching English Grammar, K-12. Columbus: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.

Elliot, Rebecca. Painless Grammar. New York: Barron’s, 1997. Print.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English Feb. 1985: 105-27. Print.

Nunan, Susan. “Forgiving Ourselves and Forging Ahead: Teaching Grammar in a New Millennium.” English Journal Mar. 2005: 70-5. Print.

Regret

Last week I gave a talk in church about prioritizing. I first established my credibility on the subject by letting everyone know that I had no idea what I was talking about. I referred to last summer when I was so preoccupied with school that I completely neglected my family. One morning I looked in my planner to find a note written in my to-do list by Allison: “Spend time with your wife.” I juxtaposed that story with the time when I was reading for one of my classes when my son, Joshua, anxious to play with his daddy, ran into my arms and sat between my book and me. We laughed and we giggled, we tickled and we played. I was a father and he my son. Preparing my talk allowed me to reflect about what is most important in my life.

But this week I failed to live up to my ideals—I found myself a hypocrite. Wednesday morning came too soon, too abrupt: my son, gagging in his own vomit, woke my wife and me up at 2:00am. In the comfort of my bed, I pretended everything was fine while I listened to my son, tired and confused, as he cried in pain between episodes of violent heaving while my wife soothed his tiny body and cleaned the mess. I slept. Or I tried to, at least. I convinced myself, I have so much to do—I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time for my sick son? Later, I got up to find Joshua burrowed in the caring arms of his mother as they slept peacefully on the couch, an acidic tang hanging in the air. I should have helped. It’s funny, what you regret. I regret not holding my son’s contorting body, his face buried in the toilet, his stomach wringing out his insides like a dirty wet rag.

I should have been there.

For Me, Writing Is....

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog. One of my professors told me that because I’m going to be an English teacher, I need to make a habit of writing. HA! And what have I been doing with the last four years of my life? Certainly not writing. However, I understand her point: I need to make a habit of writing for writing’s sake, not because an assignment compels me to.

I wrote this next piece for one of my classes. I thought I would share it. My class was asked to write about writing, make a collage about writing, and then rewrite the first prompt after establishing a metaphor for writing (did you follow that?). Anyway, despite its unorthodoxy, here is my final product:

For me, sometimes writing is like going to the toilet. Feeling the pressure build up inside me, I walk into the bathroom, unbuckle my pants, and assemble myself on the toilet. After fifteen minutes of pushing and grunting, however, I have nothing to show for my effort. Frustrated—and still not relieved—I stand up, pull up my britches, and, despite the lack of a deposit, flush the toilet. After about an hour or so, when I feel like success is attainable, I head back to the bathroom and try again: ten minutes of struggle bring only two small plops of water. I need help. I open the medicine cabinet, pull out the white plastic bottle with the purple lid, and toss back two capsules of Metamucil. “That’ll do the trick,” I think. I few hours later, with a groan of relief, I flush the toilet; my system is free from all that has been building up inside of me. Writing isn’t much different. I sit in front of a blank computer screen while thoughts and ideas overload my system—but I can’t seem to get them out. I type a few lines, read them, and then delete them. The abstract notions in my mind seem to lose their profundity as they stare back at me from the screen. Frustrated with my wanting prose and absence of progress, I abandon my work. I make another attempt later in the day but with little success. Finally I consult my muse—usually the threat of an encroaching deadline—for motivation. It seems to help because I can finally write. When I finish I’m content to be relieved, but there’s one reality I can’t avoid: my writing is shit.