The global marketing of English exploits the addictiveness of grammar in much the same way as the tobacco industry exploits the addictiveness of nicotine.
Scott Thornbury

Hello, everyone. My name’s Tim and I’m a grammaholic.

It all started at infants’ school. Our teacher, Miss Hatcher, told us what a verb was. “It’s a doing word, Timothy, and stop doing that to the hamster.” I rushed home and told my mother. Then at junior school we did parsing. Even now I can recall the heightened excitement, almost sexual really, when the English teacher told us how to parse a sentence: subject—verb—object.

The other lesson I enjoyed was Latin. All those tenses, voices, moods, declensions, cases. Of course, I was destined for language teaching.

Most teachers are not addicts, but there is usually one in every school. I clock the dog-eared personal copy of Swan on their desks. Eventually I show them mine and then there is a quiet, unspoken understanding. Other teachers talk loudly about collocations and functions, but we grammaholics keep our heads down. Ours is a sort of Freemasonry, really.

In class you have to be careful. You cannot just come straight out with it and say, “In my opinion mastering grammar is the only way to learn a language.” The ELT Thought Police will pounce and, before you know it, you will be attending re-education workshops at International Hut, Barcelona on the Lexical Approach. However, you can always find a few students with the same interests. I like to slip them a few worksheets after class.

The trouble is, like all addictions, it causes too much pain in the end. I hardly notice what people are telling me—I am too busy thinking about their syntax. When my partner finally said, “I’m leaving you,” I replied, “Of course, the present continuous for an event that is already determined.”