grammarland-parsing

What a delightful book is Grammar-Land. I only wish I had first encountered it while in school learning grammar. Every chapter has an awesome initial illustrated capital letter. The book is worth reviewing just for the fun illustrations.

Subtitled "Grammar in Fun for the Children of Schoolroom-shire" (yes, that's "in" not "is"), this book introduces the Parts of Speech in story form. Each part of speech is represented by a character who is pleading his case for ownership of his words.

The charm of this book makes me want to quote extensively from it to fairly represent it. Let me see if I can give you an idea of it, enough to make you want to read it for yourself.

Our kings and queens, and emperors too, have all to obey Judge Grammar's laws, or else they would talk what is called bad grammar; and then, even their own subjects would laugh at them, and would say: "Poor things! When they were children, and lived in Schoolroom-shire, they can never have been taken to Grammar-land! How shocking!"

The parts of speech start quarreling about ownership of words and are called before Judge Grammar to defend their ownership of disputed words or explain whether they are stealing one another's words. They also disagree concerning whose words are most important. Judge Grammar calls on Serjeant Parsing and Dr. Syntax as counsellors.

The exercises for the students are far from dry and boring. For example, while the Judge recesses to lunch off a few pages of dictionary, the Schoolroom-shire friends are to fix these verses by replacing nouns with appropriate pronouns.

Little Bo-peep has lost Bo-peep's sheep,
And does not know where to find the sheep;
Leave the sheep alone till the sheep come home.
And bring the sheep's tails behind the sheep.

I'm sure this textbook taught while entertaining many school children. I would not be surprised to find that Dr. Seuss was influenced by this book. Doesn't this remind you of his verses in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish? or of Thing One and Thing Two in The Cat in the Hat?

A beautiful thing, an ugly thing, bad things, good things, green things, yellow things, large things, little things; and so you can say, one thing, two things, some things, any things; and also, this thing, that thing, these things, those things.

The conversations among the characters are entertaining as well as educational. For example:

Dr. Syntax rose and said: "The first person is always the person speaking, and the second is the person spoken to. Let every one in the court say, 'I am the first,' and we shall all be right, and all satisfied."

"I first, we first," they all shouted; "and you, you, you, only the second."

The noise was tremendous, and the Judge, finding himself only one against a number, thought he had better turn the subject; and clapping his hands loudly, to call for silence, he called out:

"But if we are all firsts and seconds, pray where is the third person to go?"

"Oh, the third person," said Pronoun, contemptuously, "is only the one we are talking about. He may not be here, so it cannot matter if we call him only the third person."

Hmm. Perhaps Abbott and Costello studied with this book before creating "Who's on First?"

Or this:

"Yes, my lord," answered Serjeant Parsing, "that is my way, and therefore, of course, it is the best way. My way is always the best way. Now there is a sentence all ready for you: My way is always the best way. I'll find the nominative before you can dot an i. 'What is
always the best way?' Answer, my way is always the best way; - so my way is the Nominative."

"But you asked 'what?' not 'who?' there, Brother Parsing," remarked the Judge.

"Because way is a thing, not a person, my lord. When we are talking of a thing, then we ask 'what?' instead of 'who?' If you said 'the pudding is boiling in the pot,' I should say 'what is boiling?' not 'who is boiling?' for I should hope you would not be boiling a person in a pot, unless you were the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk."

There are many more gems in this book as well as an opportunity for a solid grounding in grammar. I hope this enticed you to give it a look. May you enjoy it as much as I did.

This post was contributed by WebRover, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.