{"id":11453,"date":"2010-10-13T08:55:07","date_gmt":"2010-10-13T15:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11453"},"modified":"2010-10-13T08:55:07","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T15:55:07","slug":"its-kind-of-sad-how-wistful-this-makes-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11453","title":{"rendered":"It's Kind of Sad How Wistful This Makes Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Eileen Reynolds, writing at The Book Bench<\/a>, offers a brief review of Grammar-Land: Grammar in Fun for the Children of Schoolroom-shire<\/a><\/em>, 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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, it does not matter to me,\u201d continued Mr. Noun, without taking any notice of Serjeant Parsing. \u201cIt will make no difference to me;\u201d and he turned away, with his hands in his pockets, and began to whistle a tune.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does matter to me, though,\u201d said Pronoun, \u201cfor I have to alter my words according to the case they are in. I<\/em> is only in the nominative case, me<\/em> in the objective; we<\/em> is nominative, us<\/em> objective; he<\/em> nominative, him<\/em> objective, and so on. You cannot say \u2018look at I<\/em>;\u2019 you must say \u2018look at me<\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLook at me,\u201d echoed Serjeant Parsing, in the same quiet tone: \u201cme<\/em>, Objective Case, governed by the preposition at<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cQuite so,\u201d continued Pronoun, turning to Serjeant Parsing. \u201cI am objective there, I cannot help it; I must be objective after a preposition.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cross posted on The Poetry in the Politics and the Politics in the Poetry<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}