User:A. di M.
Sláinte! -1682 days to the end
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Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright.
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye.
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
― William Blake (1794)
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Note carefully that I am NOT taking the view that if you can find any instances of something then it's grammatically OK. Many people write quite badly. In 44 million words there will be quite a few typographical errors, and some grammatical slips as well. But what I'm saying is that when you find, say, tens of thousands of relevant instances and an eighth of them have some property P, that's way too many for anyone to suggest that property P signals ungrammatical status. Journalists do commit occasional slips; but not thousands and thousands and thousands of systematically similar and easily detectable ones, in a mere 44 million words.
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The take-home lesson that I wish we could send to all your past students is not just that there are areas of grammar where the rules don't define a simple cut-and-dried answer that holds in every case; it's that although grammar is thought of as being like religious teaching on morality — where you get told by experts about the content of the eternal rules that you should obey — it is in fact more like a science discipline like chemistry or biology. The grammatical world is complex, and not to be oversimplified or approached through a haze of prejudice or dogma, but you can do experiments to find out what the world is like. That's the key point that linguists are concerned to make about studying grammar. Without (I hope) throwing away the sensibilities of the humanities, they apply to the study of grammar some of the methods of science.
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