Where would we be without words? They are inseparable from the rest of created things— everything that came into being simply because He Said. God used His creative words, words that were fruitful and multiplied, and then kindly gave them to us. All we had to do with words was tend them, subdue them, have dominion over them and use them wisely. Like everything else, we blew it, and now we are having one doozy of a job getting them under control.

Words, no longer exclusively lovely, orderly and life-giving expressions, have run rampant. Some are barbed, some false, some twisted and too many are poisonous. Grammar gardeners have no illusions about mastering all these wild words. Our task is a singular one. We keep words and everything they generate in functional order.

Examine a word carefully and you will see it is composed of small organisms called letters. A bunch of words in a certain order along a stem of almost any length is called a sentence. Wherever these organisms thrive and grow as they were meant to, you will find cultivators of syntax, spelling and phraseology.

Welcome to the Garden of Grammar, where a weed is never a we’d and we don’t use fewer manure because less will do. Be warned. The labors are ceaseless and under-appreciated. The personal satisfaction, however, is enormous. If you aspire to grammar gardening greatness, if you find yourself longing for additive-free words, pure punctuation, and irony-balanced soil, pull on your gardening gloves. We are heading to the plots of punctuation, paragraphs, parlance and linguistics, where tense isn’t a feeling, subject and verb always agree, and you can use your active voice.

Next in our garden tour: Apples to Apple’s