“Can you believe just how crazed people were about English grammar in the 18th and 19th centuries?” From the Grolier Club, an off- and online exhibition from the collection of Bryan Garner, Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar (1711–1851).
Among the writers whose works are on display (with Garner’s commentary): Ann Fisher, the first grammarian to declare that the masculine pronoun includes the feminine; Rowland Jones, who believed that Welsh was the key to language before the incident at Babel; and Lindley Murray, who cautioned against ending a sentence with an adverb, a preposition, or “any inconsiderable word,” as I discovered when tracking down a source for the non-rule that one should not end a sentence with it.
Yes, I once had a student who had been taught that in high school. And another who had been taught that each paragraph should have an odd number of sentences, because odd numbers are pleasing. Can you believe it?
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Grammars galore
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I think this calls for an Oulipo-style exercise in which every paragraph will have an odd number of sentences composed of an odd number of words made up of an odd number of letters.
That’d be very pleasing. : )
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