Friday, June 15, 2007

In the beginning was grammar . . .

Not sure where this originally comes from, but I really appreciate it, having majored in English Ed and Spanish and having been a Spanish teacher for five years...

In the beginning was grammar . . .

1. In the beginning my English teacher created nouns and verbs.

2. And the verbs were without form and voice; and darkness was upon the face of the deep—my teacher.

3. And she said, “Let there be grammar”, and there was grammar

4. And Teacher saw the verbs and laughed and said that it was good; and she divided the bright students from those who remained in darkness.

5. And Teacher gave the bright students A’s and kept the others after school. And the homework and the bell were the first day.

6. And Teacher said, “Let there be a sentence in the midst of the words, and let it divide the nouns from the verbs.”

7. And Teacher made the sentence and diagrammed it on the board; I looked and saw that it was so.

8. And the Teacher called the sentence declarative. And the capital and the period were the second day.

9. And Teacher said, “Let the noun words in the sentence be gathered together unto one piece, and let the verb words appear; and it was so.

10. And the Teacher called the verb words predicate; and the gathering together of noun words called she the subject; and Teacher was that it was good.

11. And Teacher said, “Let the predicate bring forth modifiers, the transitive verbs yielding objects, and the intransitive verbs yielding complements after their own kind, whose place is in itself, within the predicate.” And it was so.

12. And the predicate brought forth modifiers, and transitive verbs yielding objects after their own kind, and intransitive verbs yielding a complement whose place was in itself, after their own kind. The Teacher saw that it was good and confusing.

13. And the active and the passive were the third day.

14. And Teacher said, “Let there be modifiers in the firmament of the subject to further confuse and divide the students in the classroom; and let them be for proper nouns, concrete nouns, mass nouns, collective nouns, pronouns, and abstract nouns.”

15. “And let them give meaning in the subject and enhance the predicate.” And it was sooo . . . confusing.

16. And Teacher made two great words: the greater word, adjective, to rule the noun, and the lesser word, adverb, to rule the verb; she made the conjunction also.

17. And Teacher set them in the sentence in order to make it difficult to diagram.

18. And to make it easier for her to divide the bright students from those who remained in darkness; and Teacher saw that her system was good.

19. And the phrase and the clause were the fourth day.

20. And Teacher said, “Let the verbs bring forth abundantly the many verb forms, the gerunds, infinitives, and participles; the subjunctives; the auxiliary verbs, the linking verbs, and the phrasal verbs.”

21. And Teacher created moods for every living creature that moveth, and tenses for all time, and voices after their own kind. And Teacher saw that it was indeed good.

22. And Teacher blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply in complexity, and fill young minds with bewilderment, and let the bewilderment multiply into chaos in their minds.”

23. And the lecture and the English test were the fifth day.

24. And Teacher said, “Let the nouns and verbs bring forth living sentences after their own kind, book reports, essay questions, and English themes for the students to write”, and it was very so.

25. And Teacher made all these things for the freshman English student to do, and everything that creepeth into her mind she gave to them to do; and Teacher saw to it that it was good.

26. And Teacher said, “Let us make one project in our image, after our likeness: and let the product have dominion over the other projects, and over every subject of the college student.”

27. So Teacher created the research paper in her own image, in the image of Teacher created she it; boring and difficult created she it.

28. And Teacher blessed it, and Teacher said unto the research paper, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the supply of dropouts, and subdue the remainder of the college students, and have dominion over the other projects, and over the other subjects, and other every single grade that the students receive.”

29. “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth into the classroom, wherein there is life, I have given every rule and principle for good English”, and it was so.

30. And Teacher saw everything that she had made, and behold it was very good.

10 comments:

EricW said...
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EricW said...

Had I been drinking a cup of coffee, I would have spit it out several times on my keyboard. Hilarious! (Which means that if I find this funny, I must really be geeky.)

I tried to "link to this post" on the class blog, but I must have done it wrong, or mis-edited it (maybe I should just leave the post alone and put the blog page in the URL/html code? I don't know). I don't know how to "link to this post" properly. ;^(

G. Telford-Armstrong said...

I am not an English teacher nor do I play one on television, but this did bring back a lot of memories of diagraming sentences. What a hoot!

Steve Robinson said...

Do kids still diagram sentences? I didn't REALLY get English grammar and diagramming until I took NT Greek. My Greek teacher made us diagram Ephesians 1:3-14 in Greek. I think that is demonic. :)

EricW said...

s-p said...
My Greek teacher made us diagram Ephesians 1:3-14 in Greek. I think that is demonic. :)


You're right, it is demonic ... which is why I'm going to have the students in my NT Greek class diagram it (including the textual variants) at some point. I expect not a few of them will subsequently jump off a bridge. ;^D

Steve Robinson said...

Be sure you give them a large piece of poster board or butcher paper to diagram it on. I had to tape several pieces of notebook paper together by the time I was done to get it on "one page".

EricW said...
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EricW said...

s-p: FYI - David Bryan Wooten is in the class, hence my note about this!

Yeah, a roll of butcher paper might just about do it. ;^)

P.S. I just emailed you (via Our Life in Christ) and this blog owner a .gif image of a diagram of Ephesians 1:3-14. Enjoy!

Rhology said...

17. And Teacher set them in the sentence in order to make it difficult to diagram.

I liked that part a lot.

Eutychus, that's just plain mean!

Email it to me too!

EricW said...

rhology:

The diagram is all in Greek, not English.

I'll look up the file on my PC at home and email it to you.