Ladies, I'm shocked! Do you mean you never sat in a fascinating English lesson parsing sentences? Starting simply with subject and verb, then building up via subject and object to subject and predicate (the whole lump of stuff that comes after the verb) we parsed to our hearts' content on a weekly basis.
Mr Doherty, our lovely, soft-spoken Irish teacher of English, was a favourite, and we would have enjoyed copying out the Bible for him. He introduced us to Pygmalion and Gerald Durrell, Macbeth and debating. We had him for just a year, when we were 12-13 years old.
In computerspeak I have always assumed that when something fails to parse, it means that the grammar of the code is not being read properly. But I could so easily be wrong.
Val, I think we are of the same generation. You brought back memories of my face melting into my desk under such 'parsing' interrogation. Seriously, I was lucky to have a wonderful, enthusiastic English teacher, who gave me an excellent foundation for my chosen career.
ReplyDeletePS: Sitting here waiting for the clock to strike eight!
julie...
ReplyDeleteParsing-I've never heard that word before. As for predicates, prepositions, I have no idea. It's been over a quarter of a century since I've had English class.
For me it's over 30, Julie, but some things stay with you, especially when you had an inspriational teacher.
ReplyDeleteWe did do that charting of the sentences, but I never heard the American teachers use the word "parse".
ReplyDeleteThere are many Greek children
ReplyDeletewho know more about English grammer than their counterparts
in England. I know this because they have me peering at them over the top of my glasses if they don't do their homework.
News to me - and I LOVED English lessons. Must have slept through those bits!
ReplyDeleteI really thought 'parse' was blog-speak for 'Hey, you're gonna get pissed off now!'
We did that but it was called diagramming...the torture of my life.Math made more sense than that and I HATE math!
ReplyDelete