• Home
  • About the book
  • About the author

MADE IN AMERICA

Notes on American life from American history.

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« Christmas Struggle
American Ties (I) »

Grammar Rules

December 27, 2010 by Claude Fischer

Ours is an age of sentences such as “C u 2nite, k?” and “I tweet that’s the way I roll,” from a potential prez. Some even in the literary ranks applaud using the latest vernacular (e.g., here). It seems avant-garde, like treating graffiti as art. Yet, there was a time when Americans of all ranks – from the learned gentry to the self-taught slave – sought to write and speak only in the most proper, authorized form of English. To know the rules of conjugation, declension, proper use of infinitives and other minutiae of grammar was the mark of the educated person. That was what “grammar schools” were for.

A recent article by Beth Barton Schweiger in the Journal of the Early Republic (a fun journal to read, at least for me) describes how important it was for garnering the esteem of others and for self-respect in the 19th century not only to read and write, but more critically, to know by heart rules such as “Conjunctions that are of a positive and absolute nature, require the indicative mood.” And she describes how this veneration of grammatical rules was a vehicle for democracy.

Learning

In the early nineteenth century, American leaders strove to make the people literate and, indications are, the people embraced this mission. One level of literacy was simple reading and writing. The McGuffey Readers, begun in the mid-1830s, taught simple, phonetic  reading, having students sound out sentences such as “the cat is on the mat” (here). But that was “primitive” learning. The refined person rose to another level, mastering the rules of grammar. Lincoln studied grammar books as a young man; so did Frederick Douglass; so did all up-and-coming people, even headstrong young women.

As Schweiger recounts, “common schools that had long taught students only to recite and copy . . . began to teach them how to compose their own speeches and essays. . . . [K]nowledge of grammar – defined as ‘speaking and writing with propriety’  – became necessary for ordinary people.” Grammar was a technical, abstract, and confusing discipline, advanced beyond simple writing perhaps in the way that algebra is advanced over arithmetic. Yet, “how one spoke and wrote revealed character and position as clearly as dress, manners, and family connections. Ambitious people aspired to eloquence in speech and writing,” so they plunged into grammar manuals. Command of grammar prepared them for the next stages, learning composition and rhetoric.

Learning grammar was also “prized because it exercised the memory” and thereby strengthened the brain, even if readers could not understand what they learned. Recent research suggests that this fancy has some truth. The brain is surprisingly “plastic”; reading and similar mental exercises alter brain structure (see here and here).

Lindley Murray’s English Grammar was the premier mental exercise “machine”; the text was studied in city mansions and rural shacks alike. “Nineteenth-century readers picked up a grammar with a single goal: to memorize it. . . .  Understood as a ‘higher subject,’ in the early decades of the century, grammar was taught in ‘grammar schools’ or in private academies that were beyond the means of most people,” leaving them to learn on their own. Traveling instructors of grammar offered crash courses, promising that customers would learn to “parse difficult blank verse, and to correct false language.’’

And what a task it was to memorize grammar! Schweiger provides a sample from Murray’s crammed and detailed book with this atypically short exercise, parsing the sentence “virtue ennobles us”:

Virtue is a common substantive, of the neuter gender, the third person, the singular number, and in the nominative case. (Decline the noun.) Ennobles is a regular verb, active, indicative mood, present tense, and the third person singular. (Repeat the present tense, the imperfect tense, and the perfect participle.) Us is a personal pronoun, of the first person plural, and in the objective case. (Decline it.)

And don’t forget: “The second rule for promoting the strength of a sentence, is, to attend particularly to the use copulatives, relatives, and all the particles employed for transition and connexion.”

mcguffeyreaders.com

Striving

The view that command of grammar was a sign of an elevated mind, good manners, and moral character made learning it all the more attractive to people who felt shut out of the privileged circles — women, blacks, and ambitious rural whites like Lincoln. Fredrick Douglass, Schweiger tells us, was quick to demean his (white) opponents by pointing out their grammatical errors.

Americans in the 19th century came to view being learned as more than mastering simple writing and ciphering. Study of grammar, once restricted to advanced schools for advantaged students, entered lower and lower grades. Its spread shows up in the very way we name schools. In 1846, Schweiger writes, “grammar school” referred to an elite institution that taught the classics. “By 1860, it was ‘a school in rank above a primary school and below a high school.’ By 1900, ‘grammar school’ had become synonymous with ‘elementary school’ in the United States . . . .”

What most of us today experience as oppressive, authoritarian control from above – thou shall not split infinitives – was, several generations ago, a vehicle for mental improvement, popular uplift, and democratization.

Share

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged education, grammar, reading, school |

  • Made in America: Now available in Paperback, on Kindle, and via Google eBook

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 448 other subscribers
  • Comment Back to:

    madeinamericathebook @ gmail.com
  • * 2010 winner, PROSE Award for U.S. History, American Association of Publishers.
    * "A shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life" -- Publishers Weekly
    * "Masterful and rewarding . . . exactly the sort of grand and controversial narrative, exactly the bold test of old assumptions, that is needed to keep the study of American history alive and honest" -- Molly Worthen, New Republic Online
    * "... brave and ambitious new book ...." "Made in America sheds abundant light on the American past and helps us to understand how we arrived at our own historical moment, and who we are today." -- David M. Kennedy, Boston Review
    * "... this book ... already belongs to the prestigious line of works which decipher the singular character of America. It is in itself a mine of definitive information for all those who are interested in American society and its fate in modernity" [trans. from the French] -- Nicolas Duvoux, Sociologie

  • Pages

    • About the book
      • Corrections & Updates
    • About the author
  • Previous Posts

    • How Red v. Blue Became Me v. You: Polarization, Part I
    • The Covid Experience Reveals How Weird America Is
    • Americans Continue to Associate. For What Cause?
    • Slavery, Capitalism, and Reparations
    • Opening Day, 2022: Still Unresolved
    • No Peace, No Justice
    • The Right’s Reaction to Americans’ Leftward Shift: A Supreme Example
    • The Culture Has Moved Left… So the Right has Mobilized
    • Overcoming Distance and Embracing Place: Personal Ties in the Age of Persistent and Pervasive Communication
    • The Death Surge Before Covid-19: Who, What, and Why.
    • Women Rising: Life Stories from the Last Century
    • Whither Big Tech, or When Novelties Become (Regulated) Necessities
    • Opening Day, 2021: Baseball’s Crises
    • First Takes on the Election #2: What About the Polls?
    • The Political Census
    • First Takes on the Election: #1, What Happened?
    • Now for Something Different: Is Sex Wilting?
    • Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)
    • Covid-19: Exceptionalism with a Vengeance
    • Is Left Cancel Culture Cancelling Left Culture?
    • BLM Protests: Surprisingly Successful… So Far. Why?
    • White Liberals’ Political Correctness Could Help Trump Get Re-Elected
    • Asteroidal Change or Glacial Change? Peering Over the Covid-19 Horizon
    • Opening Day Under Covid-19: Do Fans Matter?
    • COVID-19: Balancing Short-Term Solutions and Long-Term Effects. Are There Lessons from 1918?
    • Bernie: The Left is Still Waiting for the Proletariat Vote
    • AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they?
    • One Year Down, One to Go: Still Explaining Trump
    • Lead, Brains, and Behavior: Sociology Meets Biology
    • The Year’s Racial Flare-Ups: Signs of the Future or Signs of a Last Gasp?
    • [Bracket] Political Commentary [End Bracket]
    • Parental Love, Opportunity Markets, and Inequality
    • Brain Twisting, or How We Evolved
    • Opening Day, 2019: Data-Crunching, Inequality, and Baseball
    • Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity is Not the Answer
    • A Christian America? The Talk and the Walk
    • Shareholder Value: Law, Inequality, and the Doubting Justice
    • After the Election: More Polarization or Less?
    • Searching for the Authentic Self (… and Finding Trump)
    • The Politics-Religion Vortex Spins
    • Loneliness Epidemic: An End to the Story?
    • Get by with a Little Help from…
    • Feel-Good or Do-Good Politics
    • Do Americans Tolerate Zero Tolerance?
    • How Can Size of Community Still Matter?
    • Sending a Message by Pollster
    • Loneliness Scare Again… and Again… and…
    • Where Have You Gone, “Alienation”?
    • Opening Day, 2018: Politics, Race, and Baseball
    • Local Cultures
    • Chain Migration
    • Explaining Trump Some More
    • “Okie from Muskogee” a Half-Century On
    • Reversing American Voluntarism
    • National Character? A Reply to Stearns
    • Do We (Still) Value Family?
    • Is Marriage Over? For Whom?
    • Bannon, Brown, and the Identity Debate
    • The Great “American” (or is it New York?) Songbook
    • Is Health Care a Right?
    • Church Social
    • Inequality is about Security and Opportunity
    • Democracy in America, France, and “Hamilton”
    • Opening Day, 2017: Inequality on the Field, in the Stands
    • Voting for the Five Percent
    • More (on) Polarization
    • Americans and the Unassimilables
    • Explaining Trump
    • ***** Hiatus *****
    • The Great Settling Down
    • Election Reflection
    • Is the U.S. No Longer Religiously Exceptional?
    • Technology and Housework: Other Tasks for Mother?
    • Can Sociability Blunt Political Polarization?
    • The End of Good Work?
    • RFD, Media, and Democracy
    • Long Tails, Big Cities, Critical Masses
    • A Woman President?
    • Magazines: 19th Century Internet
    • Friends and “FB Friends”
    • Reversal of Fortune: American Cities
    • Does Education Work?
    • A Tony by Any Other Name…
    • Bernie, Hillary, and Historical Memory
    • Driving Cattle, Driving Exceptionalism
    • Build Bigger Wall? Get More Undocumented.
    • Opening Day 2016
    • Great Again
    • A Celebrity Strong Man
    • Survey Says . . .
    • Veterans and Suicides?
    • Odd Man In
    • The Pace, the Pace
    • A Street Divided
    • A History of Health and Health Inequalities
    • Why Diversity
    • Family Wages
    • What Happened When They Came?
    • The Grandma (and pa) Effect
    • Turkle, Times, Technology, Trauma–Yet Again
    • Just Deserts
    • Cell Phone Etiquette
    • Changing Hearts, Changing Matters, 2011-2015
    • American Self-Creation
    • The Immigrant-Crime Connection
    • Black by Choice?
    • The Marriage Contract
    • Attaining Adulthood
    • Left Out: Working-Class Kids
    • Life is a Stage, or Several
    • Family Farms vs. Americanism
    • Censor This, Political Correctness
    • Opening Day 2015
    • Science vs. Religion… or Science and Religion?
    • Building the Natural Market
    • Dressing Down
    • Untangling the Race Gap
    • Finding Public Relief
    • Surveying Change
    • Snap Decisions and Race
    • Holy-Day Exceptionalism
    • Where Does the “Don’t Shoot” Movement Go?
    • Reporting from America’s “Slums”
    • Racism as Mental Illness?
    • Which University?
    • The “Shared” Economy
    • Of Places Past
    • Long Story of the “Long Tail”
    • The Blameless Only
    • When Epidemic Hysteria Made Sense
    • Latest News on “No Religion”
    • Vocabulary Retrogression
    • American Way-Differentism: More a Club than a Family
    • Do Ideas Matter?
    • Alternative to Empathy
    • Women Dining
    • Too Much Social Science?
    • Ferguson and Social Media
    • Blame Who or What
    • “Libertarianism is Strange” Revisited
    • All Tech Is Social
    • How Ideas Make Themselves Matter
    • Women in Politics 1780-2014
    • Government Works
    • Telling Stories vs. Telling Data
    • Persistence of Race, 2014
    • Selfishness or Self-Awareness?
    • Virtuous Debt
    • Work Hours and the Pay Gap
    • Life in Public, Then and Now
    • Mourning 9/11 Victorian Style
    • A “Friends” Gripe
    • Bible Readings
    • Old Days, Fast Times
    • De-Democratizing?
    • Eco-Puritanism
    • Bring Me Your….
    • Thinking Inequality
    • Which Radical Ideas Come True?
    • Pastime – Opening Day 2014
    • Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?
    • Kitty Genovese: The Emblematic Story
    • Public Health
    • Exceptionalism Ending?
    • Risk-Sharing
    • Folktales of the Policy Elites
    • Male (Job) Insecurity
    • Libertarianism is Very Strange
    • Art and the Machined World
    • The Public Housing Experiment
    • The S-Curve of Cultural Change
    • Artful History
    • Inventing the Social Network
    • American Dream, Twisting
    • Deservingness
    • Place Matters More
    • Squirrely History
    • Atheist Evangelism: “Nothing New Under the Sun”
    • The Giving Season… and Era
    • Cell Phone Science
    • Boo! Americans and the Occult
    • You Call That a Shutdown?
    • More Inequality Updates
    • Political Responses to the Crash
    • Child Labors
    • Word Counts and What Counts
    • Loss of Economic Exceptionalism
    • Learning Sympathy
    • Respecting the Science
    • Economic Equality, 1774 and Beyond
    • Declaring You’re a “None”
    • Extremely Local
    • Robert Bellah
    • Inequality Hits Home
    • The Supreme Court Ducks Immutability
    • Postcard from Paris
    • America’s Religious Market
    • American-Made Ethnic-Americans
    • New Media and Old Manifestations
    • Novel Data: Promise and Perils
    • Immigrants and Historical Amnesia
    • Inequality Update
    • Psychologically Damaged
    • Race in the Eye of the Beholder
    • Getting Smarter
    • Suicide Boom?
    • Tweedledee-Tweedledum Nostalgia
    • Sexual License, Sexual Limits
    • Markets, Prices, and Justice
    • Immigration and Political Clout
    • Is the Gender Revolution Over?
    • Writerly Baseball – Opening Day 2013
    • Back Home
    • Catholic Schism
    • How Material Are We?
    • Unholy Alliance: Laissez Faire and the Church
    • The ’60s Turn 50
    • The Left’s Religion Problem
    • Paying Attention to the Kids
    • We’re # Last!
    • Risk Taking
    • The Elderly and Their Children
    • Guns
    • A Modern “Antebellum Puzzle”?
    • Makes One Anxious
    • Psychological Labeling … and Enabling?
    • The Giving Nation? Philanthropy’s Problems
    • Religion, Politics, and the Sunday Mail
    • The Happiness Boom
    • What Americans Have Been Thinking
    • The Verdict on Class and Voting
    • Panderocracy
    • 9/11 Reaction and Resilience
    • A Cost of Inequality: Growth
    • Obama’s Racial Penalty
    • Choose Your Choice
    • To the Poorhouse
    • The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux
    • The 47% Charge in U.S. History
    • The Survey Crisis
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Execution Songs
    • Spiritual and/or Religious
    • “Who Built That?”: Chance and History
    • Meeting, Mating, and the Web
    • Live Long and Prosper — and Plan
    • Voting Violence
    • Sex and the American Car
    • The Assets Gap
    • Differences Under the Differences
    • Why Americans Don’t Vacation
    • Virtuous Voting
    • Clothes Make the Common Man
    • Driving Blind
    • Geography of Inequality
    • Slavery’s Heavy Hand
    • Gay Vows
    • Explaining Poverty (Again)
    • Out- and Insourcing
    • Still Under God
    • The Loneliness Scare is Back
    • Sunday Pleasures, Private Faith
    • Between Dole and Market
    • Opening Day 2012 – Worldwide
    • Tolerating Americans
    • What’s the Common in the Common Good?
    • End Times and Presidents
    • The Abortion Puzzle
    • The Army of Black Liberation
    • The South Has Risen
    • Can’t Believe It
    • Marrying — Up, Down, Sideways
    • Occupy 2012: Another 1968?
    • Over-Impacted
    • How Bad is “European”?
    • Unique, Sovereign, American
    • The Working Class’s Party
    • Reconstructing Memory
    • Make-Your-Own Religion
    • Consume This
    • Self-Absorbed: Emerson & Thoreau
    • What Works? Votes.
    • Stumbling in the Dark
    • More on Occupy
    • Occupy! Now What?
    • Lost Children
    • Cheerful Yanks?
    • Tolerating Ambiguity
    • New News, Old News
    • Unequal Denial
    • Timing is (Not?) Everything
    • Breastfeeding History
    • What’s a Life Worth?
    • Homesick Blues
    • Summer Break
    • Spinsters No More
    • Missing Tramps
    • City Crime; Country Crime
    • Living Togetherness
    • Naturally Clean
    • Women Graduating
    • Home Owning Dreams
    • Technology and Fundamentals
    • Protected Class
    • Faith Endures
    • American Exceptionalism
    • Buying a Head Start
    • A. Lincoln, Socialist?
    • Opening Day 2011
    • Shaken but Secure
    • Jobs Go and Come
    • Heavy Hand
    • The Big Change
    • American Ties (III)
    • Money and Character
    • Going Out–or Home?
    • Degree Inequality
    • American Ties (II)
    • Ugly or Needy
    • 18th-Century Twitterfeed
    • American Ties (I)
    • Grammar Rules
    • Christmas Struggle
    • Ancestor Worship
    • Was Slavery, Is Slavery
    • Hanukkah or Vanish?
    • Pilgrims, Puritans, Americans?
    • Return on Investment
    • Solidarity, Soldiers, and Baseball
    • Win Stay, Lose Change
    • Why Vote?
    • We’re All Geniuses
    • Caring More or Less
    • Life Begins
    • Equal Visions
    • No Dinner Invitations?
    • Depressing Comparisons
    • Labor’s Laboring Efforts
    • Multiculturalism Lite and Right
    • Who Has Your Back
    • A Natural Romance
    • Alone or Lonely?
    • Sentimental Journey
    • LeBron & the 10th
    • We’re #1 !
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 2
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 1
    • Fighting for the 4th
    • Gentrified Memories
    • Juneteenth: Race? Slavery?
    • Boomer Blues
    • No Longer the Tall American
    • A Crime Puzzle
    • Memorial-izing Day
    • Angry Old White Men
    • Sisters Take the Streets
    • Brooks, Policy, and History
    • Tongue-Tied to America
    • Happiness Happy
    • Inventing Friendship
    • American Individualism – Really?
    • Tax Day: The Government-Enterprise System
    • Opening Day 2010
    • Did “Consumerism” Blow Up the Economy?
    • A Christian America? What History Shows
    • The Myth that Never Moves
    • Good Health, Long Life, and Big Government
    • Announcing the “Made in America” Site

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


  • Follow Following
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Join 448 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: