For Who The Bell Tolls

Ever since Lynne Truss’s marvellous affirmation of the uses of punctuation in Eats, Shoots and Leaves books such as this commentary by David Marsh have almost restored some sense of the importance of grammar to the linguistic world as English-speakers use it.
Time was when we were all taught the difference between an adjective and an adverb, when parsing and analysis were part of any pupil’s education, when conjunctions, participles and even gerunds (although I never quite got those right) were ritually explained and examined and when even pronunciation had its place in English as she is spoken. Much seems to have been banished when it was decided by well-paid and highly educated idiots that the most important thing about language was self-expression.