The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.
Conventions of Written English
Most young Americans will know most of the contents of this section fairly well. Our schools have done a good job in teaching the technical components of the language arts. Our elementary and secondary textbooks are replete with discussions of abbreviations, dictionary use, punctuation, and parts of speech. Yet these textbooks are not always consistent among themselves in the matter of nomenclature. Should a noun be called a substantive, a nominative, a type-one word, a thing-word, or just a noun? Although there isn’t a clear answer to this question, there is a clear need for consistency in our textbooks and schools. It is pointless to confuse a student who comes into a new school district with a whole new set of descriptive terms about language. Language terms are, of course, essential for teaching language arts, but there is no excuse for making the terms difficult and confusing. Linguistic scholars and theorists agree that grammatical terms and categories are inherently arbitrary; there is no one right way to analyze language. The chief reason to analyze it at all is to create a shared vocabulary for talking about language in teaching the language arts.
One of our purposes in including this section of our dictionary is to help students by encouraging standardization of the vocabulary we use in teaching about language. Because we are convinced that there is little to choose in pedagogical usefulness between substantive and thing-word, we have chosen to adopt only the most widely shared, and hence most traditional, terms. Thus, in this section a noun is a noun is a noun—not because traditional grammatical terms are best, but because standardized terms are best. The traditional grammatical vocabulary is completely adequate to the task of teaching reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the highest level of excellence. The notion that novel terms from modern linguistics can advance the teaching of these arts is a superstition that no profound scholar of the subject would be willing to argue.
