I regret to report that grammar schools no longer teach grammar. It is considered as retrograde as observing that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer war or insisting that boys and girls are not interchangeable. But it is no coincidence that our loss of true grammar preceded our current confusion over the meaning of “boy” and “girl.”
Grammar’s primary concern is with the relationship between language and reality. As the scholar Sr. Miriam Joseph puts it, grammar refers to “how the intellect uses language to translate reality.” If we sever the connection between language and reality, true grammar is impossible, and our use of language becomes solipsistic. That the connection has been severed is evident in the transgenderism phenomenon, which can only take root in an ungrammared culture such as ours. Without reality, our intellect has nothing to translate, and language roams freely in a Willy Wonka world of “pure imagination.”
