Eileen Reynolds, writing at The Book Bench, offers a brief review of Grammar-Land: Grammar in Fun for the Children of Schoolroom-shire, which was originally published in the 1880s by M. L. Nesbitt and which The British Library has recently issued in a facsimile edition. It sounds, from the passages Reynolds quotes, like a really fun book. Here, for example, is Nesbitt on the parts of speech:
They are funny fellows, these nine Parts-of-Speech. You will find out by-and-by which you like best amongst them all. There is rich Mr. Noun, and his useful friend Pronoun; little ragged Article, and talkative Adjective; busy Dr. Verb, and Adverb; perky Preposition, convenient Conjunction, and that tiresome Interjection, the oddest of them all. Now, as some of these Parts-of-Speech are richer, that is, have more words than others, and as they all like to have as many as they can get, it follows, I am sorry to say, that they are rather given to quarrelling.
I have over the past few years taught the grammar class that my department offers, though I have refused to use the text that most of my colleagues use, which is loaded with depressingly repetitive exercises. Instead, I have taught sentence diagramming (or parsing as they used to call it) and I have been gratified and a little bit astonished at how many of my students not only actually enjoy the class, but also tell me that they end up using what they have learned in other parts of their lives. One student, for example, told me she actually used diagramming to prove to her boss that a sentence in a letter he was planning to send out was ungrammatical.
What I think my students enjoy is the sense of control that diagramming sentences gives them; it turns grammar into a puzzle, a problem, something like geometry, and so it becomes a skill that they can master, and I think that the narrative approach taken by Nesbitt in Grammarland probably would probably have the same effect. After all, if you can understand something through a story, then you have some degree of control over what you have understood because you know where things fit into the narrative. (That’s an assertion that I know needs to be unpacked, but I am hoping you will get the drift of what I mean.)
The part of Reynolds post that makes me wistful is the passage she quotes from Nebitt’s lesson on how “Prepositions Govern the Objective Case” because, like her, I have a grammar fantasy in which “every child learns about the objective case and no one utters abominations like ‘Janet baked a cake for Susan and I.'” Here’s the quote from Nesbitt:
“However, it does not matter to me,” continued Mr. Noun, without taking any notice of Serjeant Parsing. “It will make no difference to me;” and he turned away, with his hands in his pockets, and began to whistle a tune.
“It does matter to me, though,” said Pronoun, “for I have to alter my words according to the case they are in. I is only in the nominative case, me in the objective; we is nominative, us objective; he nominative, him objective, and so on. You cannot say ‘look at I;’ you must say ‘look at me.’”
“Look at me,” echoed Serjeant Parsing, in the same quiet tone: “me, Objective Case, governed by the preposition at.”
“Quite so,” continued Pronoun, turning to Serjeant Parsing. “I am objective there, I cannot help it; I must be objective after a preposition.”
Cross posted on The Poetry in the Politics and the Politics in the Poetry.
I learned sentence diagramming in 7th grade (it was awesome!), and though I took latin all through high school and into college, I still for the life of me do not remember what prepositions are unless I sing a little song about latin prepositions taking the accusative case.
Sentence diagramming made me miserable throughout middle and high school. :(
Having been a voracious reader since the age of three, I was fortunate to have developed an instinctive sense of grammatical sentence construction. Endlessly diagramming parts of speech was, for me, painfully slow, aggravatingly pointless, and made no difference whatsoever in my ability to write. Mostly it involved trying not to roll my eyes and scream while my classmates blundered their way through something that seemed blindingly obvious to me. (Patience for others was, and is, not particularly my strong suit.)
On the other hand, as a teacher, I can tell when graduate students never mastered this skill.
And when applied to Sarah Palin speeches, it’s hilarious.
Like you Elusis, I found grammar lessons painful because once you’ve read 1000 books it’s just *obvious*.
I’m going with Elusis & Robert. I was put into remedial grammar in 8th grade because I couldn’t identify the object or subject in a sentence. I still can’t, but the whole reading thing making it obvious works for me.
That said, that book looks wonderful to me & I wish I’d had it when I was 7. (Or should I say I wish I’d had it when I were 7?)
I enjoyed grammar in high school, and I actually find that it was more useful when it was something I already had to know in practice–it taught me to illuminate and articulate the rules behind my fluid, intuitive practice. As a writer, I also think it taught me to look critically at the way sentences are composed on a grammatical level, and find ways to express it more cleanly.
I have an issue with prescriptive grammar, though. It’s useful for me because of how I communicate and what I do. It’s probably useful–to some extent–for everyone to learn the formal rules. But you know, even I find it annoying when I listen to someone talking on a TV show and they use “him” instead of “he” [ETA the important part: and I compulsively correct the person.] Is it even really wrong at this point? Or has the grammar moved on?
We had to do a parts of speech play in elementary school. I still remember bits and pieces, especially the prepositions sung to Pop Goes the Weasel.
We didn’t do much sentence diagramming in English (thank God, I hated it then) but now I find it a curiosity. It’s probably much like music theory; useful for those who get something out of it, but can be bypassed with people who have a natural (or learned) ear for music/language.
One of the first things I tell the students in my grammar classes is that if they were advised to take the class because “it will help improve their writing,” the person who told them that was wrong. Knowing grammar is no substitute for the skill, etc. that comes from reading and writing; and this is sometimes a shock to my students because they have really been led to believe that learning the rules of grammar will make them better writers. Then–and I am sort of cheating here, because diagramming is more about prescriptive than descriptive grammar–I tell them that we’re going to do diagrams but that I am less interested in diagramming as a way for them to learn rules than as a way for them to understand something about how language works, about the way they already use language. I make the point that they already “know” grammar in that they already speak grammatically (from a descriptive perspective) because if they didn’t no one would be able to understand them; and I put the following sentence on the board, The boy hit the dog with the fish, ask them how many different meanings they can find in the sentence and then ask if they can explain how one string of words can have two radically different meanings. When they can’t, I tell them that diagramming will help explain it because it will allow us to illustrate the different structures of the different meanings. This seems to get them interested–not all, of course, but most–and it’s certainly different from how I learned diagramming which, believe it or not, was in third grade. I had a very traditional teacher.
I got diagramming in third grade too, Richard. Maybe we were at the same school. ;)
Diagramming was the one part of grammar that I did like, because I could just rip the sentence out onto the diagram in about eight seconds and then go back to my book.
Most of my teachers were pretty understanding.
I’ve known several writers who actually had an interesting way with language (and an intuitive sense from years and years of reading), but had picked up some incorrect grammatical rules, or had never picked up most of the rules in the first place. Some of them have actually improved their writing quite a bit by sitting down with a book. (Some of the others haven’t done that yet and so critiquing their work is always involves a lot of grammar editing.)
As a general rule, though, I agree.
That said, that book looks wonderful to me & I wish I’d had it when I was 7. (Or should I say I wish I’d had it when I were 7?)
when I was 7 is correct.
That kind of use of were is a rare instance of the subjunctive being apparent in English. It’s used for counterfactuals and hypotheticals.
If I were a man, I’d …
If I were 7, I’d enjoy that book.
But since you’re talking about when you actually were 7 in reality, as opposed to hypothetically being 7 now, it’s was.
Yes, I’m a huge, huge nerd. And speaking of the subjunctive, learning Spanish helped me “get” English grammar in a way I never had before, even though I diagrammed sentences and found it pretty easy. Then I learned an Amerindian language that had a radically different and quite flexible relationship with the parts of speech, and that was a bit mind-blowing.
The book does look quite charming, though.
Chingona is correct. In that case it should be “was”.
I also found diagramming sentences trivial, and never got anything from it. It’s interesting to hear that people did, because it always seemed to me that people divided pretty neatly into two camps: those who found it absurdly easy and got nothing from it, and those who found it extremely difficult, and got nothing from it.
Chingona, when I ran across the subjunctive in Spanish, I had a hard time with it until I realized that it was like saying, “If I were rich, I’d …” in English. Then two things happened: (a) I suddenly knew exactly when to use the subjunctive in Spanish, and wondered why the teachers had gone off on these weird categorical explanations when they could simply have explained it by this analogy to English, and (b) I suddenly understood consciously that English had a subjunctive but that it was mostly hidden, and why “was” and “were” (and a few other pairs) worked the way they did.
Of course, later I came to understand that not every native English speaker used or understood the subjunctive, and therefore teaching by analogy to the English subjunctive would only work for certain people. Much later, I came to understand that use of the subjunctive in English was a marker for class and dialect, and that my assertions about its correctness were a form of unconscious prejudice, and a symptom of linguistic prescriptivism tied to my unconscious beliefs about class and dialect. It embarrasses me that it took me so long to figure this out, considering that in college when I studied Linguistic Anthropology I was given all the tools to realize and understand the difference between describing something and judging it.
And, like you, when I started studying my first non-Romance language, my preconceptions about how languages must be structured got blown all to hell. It was mind-blowing and fun.
Hi, my name’s Grace, and I’m a language geek. (“Hi, Grace!”)
Grace
My name is Robert, and it’s been about ten minutes since I was drawn into a discussion of language.
I knew I should have put a smiley face or a /sarcasm tag there. I always hope, but I’m never clear enough. I’ll never learn.
You were probably the handsome brother.
On the plus side, consider a career in professional poker playing. B/C that came across as 100% straight.
It was a play on my childhood experience of “If I were king or if I was king?” Didn’t the rest of you experience my childhood?
French really helped me understand English grammar. I used to leave my french classes and try to reconstruct equivalent grammatical structures, like this one:
[Today] If I try tomorrow and fail, then irrespective of my failure I will have had an opportunity to try.
[Tomorrow] Were I not to have so easily accepted my chances of failure, then I would have had a better chance at success and my trial might have been successful.
Frankly I have absolutely no idea what all of those tenses are. I don’t think I ever knew their names in English grammar, though I used to be able to use them in French without a second thought.
In English those are collectively known as the conhuh?ctive tenses.
Well, then. Nevermind.