Scott,
Thank you for a thoughtful, measured posting, as well as your kind words. I first misread your "gangster's funeral" as "grammarian's funeral," pace Browning (http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2832/). The verses
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business--let it be!--
Properly based Oun-- 130
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.
seem appropriate. Ll 130-31 require a little Greek, but the point is clear.
He was an easy man to parse.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2010 10:33 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Contents of part one of ATEG Digest - 26 Aug 2010 to 27 Aug 2010 (#2010-137)
I would like to make a few comments.
1. This is the Assembly for the Teaching of English GRAMMAR. Although some of us (myself included) are interested in the problems and processes of TESOL, I try to avoid introducing TESOL issues although I will comment if someone else does. As a linguist my background is structural; my dissertation dealt with discrepant subcategorization of nouns in English and Spanish (establishing matrices with mass, count, and limited count nouns); my field of highest interest is diachronic Romance linguistics (I am a charter member of Société Internationale de Diachronie Française) with diachronic English linguistics as a distant second. The linguistic subfield of diachronic onomastics, particularly anthroponomastics, occupies most of my research time--almost none of the above is pertinent to ATEG.
2. Grammarians are often interested in and sometimes trained in linguistics; I freely confess that very little of my training in Chomskyian and post-Chomskyian grammar has had any impact on my understanding or appreciation of grammar. I read "Syntactic Structures"
in 1957 (my Freshman year of college) and was not at all impressed--although I liked the "Crazy green ideas sleep furiously" and used that concept in having students diagram similar sentences from Lewis Carroll, et al.
3. If we disagree, there is no need for insults. Herb and I have some irreconcilable differences on grammar; however, I find him a gentleman as well as a scholar. If you find that someone is aggravating the tone of the discussion, tune that person out or just delete. I will confess that, when certain persons introduce a topic, I simply delete the entire discussion.
Remember the hypostatic law of controversy: connect a teacup and the Atlantic Ocean and the water will rise to the same level in each.
CONTROVERSY MAKES EQUALS OF THE WISE MAN AND THE FOOL AND THE FOOL KNOWS IT.
4. I no longer review grammar books: my mother always said that if I cannot say something nice about a person, do not say anything at all. For most of the grammar books that I have seen recently, I am reminded of the evil gangster's funeral. When the time for eulogies came, no one stood up.
Finally his barber stood and stated, "He was an easy man to shave."
I only review books on medieval topics now. I just finished _Medieval Philosophy_ and am working on _The Other Europe in the Middle Ages_.
Scott Catledge
P.S. As a humourous aside, I wrote 'ecologues' in lieu of 'eulogies' and did not catch it until I reread my posting--a 'cerebral flatulation' as my dear old mother used to say. I can imagine what certain persons would have said had I not caught it. "Gotcha" is not a nice game for gentlemen or ladies--unless done with a smile.
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