Is the phrase "She grew her business" grammatically correct?

Grew is correct, raise is not, but it is probably better to say “Her business grew,” rather than “She grew her business,” since growing a business is not usually a one-person effort. Even with a sole proprietorship, the customers, for instance, play a role in the growth as well.

Accurate and grammatically correct are completely different things. :/

Grammatically speaking the sentence is fine. You can also say people grow tomatoes, nothing wrong with that usage.
But I have a feeling that what they actually mean is “expand”.

Accurate by whose authority?

From my perspective, if someone uses “grow the business” and their meaning is understood without the other person correcting them, then it’s ‘correct’. Ultimately, the judges of whether a word is semantically and socially acceptable are the people who use or reject a word. Any dictionary worth its salt these days is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

‘Grow’ in a Collins Dictionary of English (see entry #12).

I recall in the early 90s, people used to get extremely pissed off about the verb to ‘text’ someone.

A> I’ll text you later!
B> [gnashing teeth] RAWR!

But what if that question is on a test? What if students answer “grew” just because of what they keep hearing? @Fyrius “expand” sounds good. Should the students who answer “expand”, or “raise” get an incorrect?

You miss the point, @flo – if it’s in a test, then you answer the way that your teacher taught you to answer – it’s unfair, after all, for you to be tested on something that you haven’t been taught!

The issue is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using any combination of sounds/symbols to represent meaning. There is, however, good reason to achieve commonly agreed standards: sounds are represented by letters in English, certain combinations of sounds and letters are broadly accepted to represent certain meanings.

The Japanese word for ‘car’ is kuruma (although written in a different way with different representations of the sound and concept). It doesn’t mean that Japanese speakers are wrong when they use it – it’s a different language from English.

I suspect that part of the problem here is that you dislike the term. I’m not much of a fan of it myself, but “grow the business” is in pretty common usage – common enough to appear in a dictionary.

@flo
Is this an English language proficiency test? If not, all that matters is whether the students are thinking of the right thing, and how they write it down is of secondary concern.

@the100thmonkey is right. “Just” the fact that the students keep hearing this idiom, and the fact that everybody says it that way, are adequate reasons why this usage is fine.
Language is a memeplex. People copy stuff from each other. That’s the way it is and the way it always has been.

“Grow the business” is right down there with “gifting” to my ear. It immediately reduces my estimation of the speaker’s intelligence.

It may be technically correct but I think it sounds like empty jargon from a cut-rate business seminar.

@jaytkay
I think your heuristic for determining stupidity is liable to give you a lot of false positives.

It’s not only “grammatically correct”, but it makes perfect sense, no matter what others have been saying. Yeah, there may be ‘better’ ways to say what you want to say, but no one should have a problem with comprehension.

So, if a student is struggling in English class, and if the answer to this question makes the difference between getting a passing or failing mark, then what? Should she fail?

If it’s in a test, then you answer the way that your teacher taught you to answer – it’s unfair, after all, for you to be tested on something that you haven’t been taught!

Moreover, I would suggest that if the teacher marks it wrong, you could simply point them to the dictionary entry I put up earlier.

@the100thmonkey What if the teacher and the test marker are different people from different areas let’s say.
The teachers are very likely teaching:
I do the ‘teaching ’ you, you do the ‘learning’.
My parents do the ‘raising’ of me, and I do the ‘growing’.
So if the question is Correct or Incorrect: ‘She grew her business’, explain why.
The students with the answer ‘Incorrect’ have the explanation to support it. The ones who answer ‘correct’ don’t have an explanation. I don’t know if The dictionary says it is used a lot in everyday language’ is an explanation. when it comes to a Grammar test.

@CyanoticWasp You mentioned comprehension. Most people can communicate with each other even if they don’t speak each other’s language, so it is not a comprehension thing.
@the100thmonkey for most people.it would be unpleasant to have to go to the teacher pointing at a dictionary.
Should I have put ‘vocabulary’ instead of ‘grammar’? I struggle with English too.

Yes.

Merriam-Webster also says it is OK, despite my objections :-)

transitive verb
to promote the development of
“start a business and grow it successfully — J. L. Deckter”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grow?show=0&t=1289859688

@flo – it may be unpleasant, but if it made the difference between passing and failing a class, I know I’d do it.

I think you’re just wrong in suggesting that the students who answer “incorrect” have a justification for it. To my mind, at least, you haven’t provided a sound one.

Questions:

> Why and how do languages change?
> Why are Spanish and Italian so similar?
> Why do Spanish and Italian bear more than a passing resemblance to French?
> Why does Catalan have expressions that are closer to French than Spanish?

So, this test you’re talking about is a test about your understanding of English grammar?
In that case, if you’re a second language learner and your teacher has presented you with this sentence and asked you whether it’s proper English, I suppose perhaps the answer she wants you to give is that it’s wrong. So that’s what you should say in order to get her to give you a passing grade.
It’s possibly not part of basic standard English, the shallow sample that second language teachers would teach their pupils.

In practise, however, I think you’ll find that the English language is nothing if not flexible, and verbs like “grow” acquiring a new usage is nothing out of the ordinary.

I’m going to post some generative linguistics 101:
Grammar is not just a set of rules people made up one day. Grammar is a subconscious part of the human mind.
Nobody really understands everything about how grammar works yet; that’s why linguistics still has work to do. But we all have grammar in our heads, so we just use it.
Grammatical correctness is a matter of consistency with your mental grammar. If you try to interpret a sentence and your mental language systems turn up an error message¹, then the sentence is grammatically incorrect, probably. In other words, a usage is incorrect if you can’t use it at all.
That means that if people use it often and without effort, it’s not grammatically incorrect, at least not according to their version of English. Their grammars can deal with it, so it’s fine.

[ ¹ To illustrate what the experience of a grammatical error message is like, read this:
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? ]

@Fyrius – I like your answer, but for ”... part of basic standard English, the shallow sample that second language teachers would teach their pupils”.

I am an EFL/ESL teacher! I really, really try to present the language in an underivative fashion – classroom language, indeed any acquisition of the L2, emerges from the discussion, which is informed by the backgrounds and motivations of the learners.

We don’t all use textbooks.

@the100thmonkey
Haha, I’m sorry.
Yes, I was sort of sketching a stereotype. Still, surely you have to at least start at the basic standard stuff, before you can ever teach the alive and ever-changing language use you see in the wild?

Well, maybe not. At any rate, I think you have the right idea about when to follow the rules and when not to.
It’s nice to have your cynical generalisations proved wrong once in a while.

Good luck to you, @the100thmonkey. I attempt sometimes to teach elements of English as a first language to graduate engineers with thirty years of professional experience following twenty years or more of schooling—all in the United States. I know how damned difficult that can be, so I can only imagine the ESL stuff…

Thanks all for you answers.
By the way some of you did answer the same question (but differently worded) a few days ago. It was mine. but question was rejected because it wasn’t clear enough, it didn’t have enough details. @the100thmonkey I think you were one of them. Did you get your answers back?

What I am learning from this thread is that there is no need to go to school to learn correct English. That there is no such thing. EDIT: ...especially if “raise is not correct” as @GeorgeGee wrote. That it is a big waste of time.

Bad lesson. There is every reason to go to school to learn English. You can learn a lot of English from reading, but then the question is, “what to read?” Mark Twain’s English was good, but the dialect you might pick up from some of his more popular works would seem ridiculously out of place today… and make you sound like you grew up in the back woods. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s where you’re really from.) William F. Buckley also wrote magnificently well, but if you emulate him then you may give readers and listeners the mistaken impression that you’re a Yalie. Again, Yale’s not a bad place, if you really went there.

Unfortunately, most spoken and written English these days when it’s not “scholarly” is so rife with error that you’d wonder if any of us had ever had any education in the language. Well, some of us have, and that shows from time to time. And some of us just slept through those classes, and that seems to show all the time.

So it helps to go to school and learn the lessons there from a good teacher, and be guided by a structured curriculum and wide reading list. And then listen to another good teacher, too. That’s what probably helps the most: having an assortment of good teachers.

@CyanoticWasp by the way I added to the above. I am just refering to everyday present day language. Nothing to do with scholary. Take the example I gave.
-Are people concerned enough to put extra work in dumbing down themselves just so they don’t give readers and listeners the mistaken impression that they ’re a Yalie?
-What do you say to “Grew is correct, raise is not”

Depending on context, either “could be” correct.

To give you an example, my daughter actually started a business of her own this year—really. So it would be entirely proper for me to say, “she grew her business.” She did; she grew it from nothing.

On the other hand, if she had bought a business from someone else after they ran it down, and made a successful transformation, it would also be proper to say that “she raised that business.” To “raise from the ashes” is a common expression, so I like “raised” in that context, but “grew” would still fit.

Trust me on this: if you’re listening to people “in business” they don’t need to make any conscious efforts to dumb themselves down. I have a lot of respect for a lot of people in business to get their business done… but in general business-speak is only one step above political-speak in terms of awfulness.

Growing is what the act of getting bigger. I’m not sure about the word “act”
Raising is what people do to help people and things people get bigger, whether it is from scratch or from the ashes. “grow” and “raise” have different meanings
Can you imagine “You learned me something” or “You surrendered me”? Why confuse people? Just because a lot of people speak incorrect English.
What about “I grow tomatoes in my garden? That is not business-speak.
ADD: Whether you had a baby and raised it or you adopted an abused orphaned child, you are raising.

Well, this brings us to another topic that’s related, but not the same as “grammatical” correctness. And that’s “usage”.

One of the definitions of growing, and a common one, is “to raise”. So in common usage saying “she grew cabbages” is equivalent to “she raised radishes”. Those are both grammatically correct and correct usage. Even “she learned radishes” is correct, if she was studying them, and “learned about” them.

You’re correct in scoffing at “you learned me something” if you mean that I taught you, but I could easily “surrender you” to the police, for example, if I knew that they were looking for you and could deliver you to them.

Usage isn’t grammar.

With a word like “grow” there are transitive and intransitive meanings of the verb. Intransitive verbs don’t have an object. That is, in another way of saying, the verb “acts on” the subject.

So “I grow,” in the intransitive sense of the word “grow” means that I get older and I mature. One can only hope. But in the transitive sense, “I grow a business,” means that I… um… expand it. And I guess this brings us full circle now, to where we started.

Holy hell, are you still going on about this?
To grow has more than one definition. It’s not only the process of becoming larger, it’s also the act of nourishing something so as to help it develop. Among other things.
No, you can’t use exclusively intransitive verbs as if they’re transitive. But to grow is not one of those. It has both transitive and intransitive meanings.

Why do you still insist on believing there’s something wrong with this usage?

@CyanoticWasp is there a word for pointing someone to the police by the way?

@flo: I think you’re just not ready to accept that some people don’t speak or write the way you do.

That’s fine, but you don’t do yourself any favours whingeing about it,

Grow is intransitive just like die is intransitive, because it is not an action word, and, there is no object. At least if the word raise didn’t exist then there is no choice, but it does exist.

@flo if you’re going to argue with us about the words we grew up with, then there’s no point in continuing the discussion. Grow is one of many verbs in English that can be either transitive or intransitive, depending on context and usage.

Tell you what, those who want to learn are welcome to and will get all the help they can get to increase, raise or grow their understanding. Those who think they know it all should probably do some more reading and listening.

I’m outta here.

@flo
Are you a troll, or just terminally pig-headed?

When it comes to something like a beard, allowing something to grow without actively doing anything, I can see something there. Maybe a different word for that?

It seems that @Fyrius has grown tired of the conversation.

It’s a copular verb too.

You’re wrong, @flo – grow has both transitive and intransitive forms, as well as a copular form that links subject and predicate, an adjective in the case above.

Grow tired is correct, because it is intransitive. The OP is about “she grew a business”.

Something just for future passersby.
http://www.fluther.com/104903/do-the-schools-teach-debating-in-english-or-any-language-in/

(Unfollows question)