A Very Short Essay on Random Grammars

Back when I was learning to teach English to second language learners, I was exposed to the concept of "random grammars." This is an important piece of compelling evidence that humans have grammar hardwired into our brains: We do not come across people speaking in absolute nonsense. Even our errors tend to fall into basic grammatical structures. For example, a child may say, "I runned around the house," because she hasn't learned the conjugation of the irregular verb, but she will not say, "The around runned I house." Though the combination of possible words is very large, there are many sentences which have never been uttered because they don't fall into basic grammatical structures.

This could create the false impression that humans are likely to reuse the same sentences because we are bound by grammar, but as a publisher I learned just how rare repetition is even in properly constructed sentences. Authors and editors, asking me to make changes, would often say, "There's an error on page X in Y paragraph." I learned to ask them to copy the erroneous sentence into an email instead. Using the "Find" feature, I could get to the sentence much more quickly because, in the whole of a novel, in a hundred thousand words, the same combination would almost never repeat. That's not because authors use random grammars. We don't. It's because the combination of correctly written sentences really is that varied.

I reflect on this now because, as I prepare myself for tomorrow, I speak aloud a strange sentence and then realize that particular sentence may never have been spoken before and may never be repeated despite being grammatically correct. The sentence obeys all the rules of grammar, but it may be unique in all the world. There is a metaphysical, even, dare I say, existential significance to this realization. Despite all we have in common, not just life experience but shared vocabulary and shared rules of grammar, we still experience the world in a completely unique way. And while the quality of being unique might seem valuable in many circumstances, it is also incredibly isolating. We communicate as best we can to try to bridge the gap, to reach out, to connect with others, yet even language itself reminds us we are stretching and struggling and striving to make this contact because we are completely alone in a universe of individual experience. And I feel that loneliness acutely now.

The probably unique sentence? "How should one dress when going to the courthouse in the midst of a global pandemic to sign the divorce paperwork?"