Executive summary (added July 16, 2018): I have had enough of misrepresentation by experts of what other experts have to say about grammar.
An ongoing concern of this blog is the subject taught in school called grammar. See for example
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the previous post, “Writing and Inversion,” about how a supposed rule against the passive voice might be better understood as a rule to avoid certain inversions of order (namely those inversions that add words and torpor);
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the post before that, “A New Kind of Science,” presenting a theory that grammar is properly neither prescriptive nor descriptive, but “criteriological,” because it examines the criteria that we apply to our own speaking and writing;
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an early expression (from six years ago) of some of those ideas: “Strunk and White.”
Grammar causes anxiety. Every aspect of school would seem to cause anxiety in somebody. Decades after they have left school, how many persons have nightmares of missing an examination? Quite a few, it would seem; see the evidence appended to this post. My mother and her brother were such persons, as I learned when growing up. I seem not to be such a person, though I once dreamt of missing a plane.
How much support of current US President Donald Trump is due to memories of belittlement by teachers at school? Similar questions may be raised about
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UK government minister Michael Gove’s saying, “people in this country have had enough of experts …”;
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the rise in Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has perceived a special threat from the Peace Academics.
On that last matter, see my blog essay of March, 2016, “Academic Freedom.”
Polytropy 