Why is grammar so unglamorous?

The words ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ come from the same root — but that’s pretty much the only thing the concepts have in common.

Photo by Houcine Ncib on Unsplash

I promised you a screed about grammatical terminology — and then I went dark for a while, because I was on vacation and needed to get caught up on Boston Globe work and so forth. But now here’s that screed.

In my experience, most people consider grammar to be at least as mysterious as how electrons flow through wires to deliver electricity. They know they use it in their everyday lives, but they don’t care to know much more than that.

They can probably explain what a noun is and what a verb is, and quite possibly what an adjective is too. But when matters of grammar get more complicated than that, people tend to blank out. For instance, what does an adverb do? Does it modify a verb? Yes, but it also can, Merriam-Webster tells us, modify

an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence, expressing some relation of manner or quality, place, time, degree, number, cause, opposition, affirmation, or denial, and in English also serving to connect and to express comment on clause content.

I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning.

In my copy editing work, I’ve discovered, if I suggest a change in a manuscript and write a comment in the margin like “That adjective is absolute” or “restrictive clause,” the author will often have no idea what I’m talking about and will nearly always let me have my way.

A lot of the mystery arises, I suspect, because grammatical terminology is unintuitive. Is a participle (for example, a word like confusing) a verbal that’s serving as a noun and a gerund (also a word like confusing) a verbal that’s serving as an adjective, or is it the other way around?*

What is an absolute adjective anyway? (It describes a quality that admits of no comparison, like unique in its traditional sense. Or same: Either things are the same or they’re not; they may be more nearly the same but not more the same or the most same.) And does an absolute adjective have anything to do with an absolute construction, or nominative absolute? (No. Absolutely not.)

As for restrictive clauses, they generally modify a noun in a way that restricts its meaning. For instance, in “the swimming pool that is in the park,” that is in the park is more precisely a clause (clause being another not widely understood grammatical term) than a phrase, because it has a subject (that) and a verb (is), and it’s restrictive because it restricts the meaning of swimming pool, as in: “That particular pool. The one in the park.”

A nonrestrictive clause just gives the reader a bit more information about whatever it is, without specifying which whatever it is: “the swimming pool, which contains more chlorine than most these days, is in the park.”

But surprise! The nonrestrictive clause needs commas around it, and the restrictive one does not. Nonrestrictive = has commas vs. restrictive = does not have commas flummoxed me for years, and I’m in the grammar business.

I promise I’m not trying to make this complicated and confusing — it is confusing, and that’s because, in large part, of the terminology. Every day you use the kinds of words and constructions I’m talking about.

“Standard English” may call for you to observe some niceties about them, such as using that as the subject of restrictive clauses and which as the subject of nonrestrictive ones. But even if you don’t bother with such things, you use both kinds of clauses without giving it a second thought.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll understand why I think grammar gets a bad rap. The terminology is off-putting, and that makes grammar seem more boring and difficult than it really is.

Is there a remedy for this problem? If the clever folks who devise advertising slogans and names for new commercial products were turned loose on grammatical terminology, they might be able to come up with a much more inviting set of words.

Or we could come up with the words here. Shall we start with adverb, the poor thing? It does so much more than it lets on. But I welcome any and all suggestions for new clear terminology, and so much the better if it elicits a chuckle.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.

*It’s the other way around.