Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/06/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I'll never forget my English literature teacher at grammar school in my home town,Leeds in the UK. Alan Hadfield was an unpreposessing small chap with a beard, and wore baggy corduroy suits. He proved, to me, that appearances mean absolutely nothing. He had taught on South Sea Islands, in the Amazon Basin, crossed the Andes in a balloon - so why did he end up in an industrial city in the North of England? His explanation was that it was his greatest challenge so far,there being far more illiterate natives in the cities of his home country, needing infinitely more education in the use of their own mother tongue. A true missionary, not the word of God but the words of Shakespeare, Browning and Milton.Not stopping at the classics, he took us to the island worlds of "Lord Jim", "High Wind in Jamaica","Lord of the Flies", now I come to think of it he was reliving his past in those books. I always remember part of one of his strange little sentence constructions, this one concerning two, very probably fictitious, young ladies whose essays he had corrected: "Mary, where Jane had had had, had had had had." There was much more, but this fragment just stuck in my mind. A wonderful gentleman who was so different from the usual authoritarian 1960s teachers, he took us on wonderful journeys into, and through, books, revealing the hidden mysteries and joys to be found in the printed word. I'm sure that, without his help and commitment, I would never have found access to the books of such brilliant authors as Lawrence Norfolk and Umberto Eco. Douglas Marc James Small wrote: > At 09:16 PM 6/6/05 -0400, Tina Manley wrote: > > >>I'm normally a stickler for good grammar and punctuation. My pet peeve is >>that most people today, even professional writers, don't know the >>difference between lie and lay. > > > > Tina > > "Lie" and "lay" give me problems on occasion, and they shouldn't, as I have > a working knowledge of Old and Middle English and of the Indo-European > which came before. My mother and father never had a problem with them, and > the difference is in the English teachers they had in school. > > They enjoyed years of the demanding, stiff, formal, grammar-intensive > English teachers who simply required that you get it right to the point > that it was, in the end, simpler to come over to their side than to > continue fighting a losing battle. Patience, persistence, and perfection, > and they knew and taught them all. > > I am 55. My English teachers were all budding literary critics with one > exception, my 11th grade English teacher, Miss Barbara Sipe, and she was > damned by a literary-criticism curriculum through which she still tried to > teach us real grammar and real syntactical relationships, and I will > cherish her lessons for a long time. > > It was only in graduate school that Donald Kagan pulled me aside and gave > me an hour's lecture in his office of just how to write a paper -- before > you submit it, go over it in the mindset of your most bitter enemy, hoping > to find grammatical howlers he can point out to make you seem a fool. That > lesson stuck, and stuck well. (I have been chewed up one side and down the > other for the content of my two books and many articles, but no one has yet > found a grammatical mistake in the lot.) Kagan also taught me that > "hopefully" is an adjective and that it is not a replacement for "I hope > that". > > There was an English teacher in a local High School here in Roanoke who > seems to have been much akin to Miss Sipe: several of her students have > commented on her setting them right on grammatical absurdities. One of her > students, a real estate agent who is a good friend of mine, taught me the > correct pronunciation of "harass", as well, though the common pronunciation > seems justified historically. > > Marc > > msmall@aya.yale.edu > Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir! > > NEW FAX NUMBER: +540-343-8505 > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > >