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By Dennis Baron

Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It’s one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn’t quite fit the way we’re used to viewing things.

That’s exactly what happened to a student in Ohio when his English teacher decided to play the noun game. To the teacher, the noun game seemed a fun way to take the drudgery out of grammar. To the student it forced a metaphysical crisis. To me it shows what happens when cultures clash and children get lost in the tyranny of school. That’s a lot to get from a grammar game.

Anyway, here’s how you play. Every student gets a set of cards with nouns written on them. At the front of the classroom are three buckets, labeled “person,” “place,” and “thing.” The students take turns sorting their cards into the appropriate buckets. “Book” goes in the thing bucket. “city” goes in the place bucket. “Gandhi” goes in the person bucket.

Ganesh had a card with “horse” on it. Ganesh isn’t his real name, by the way. It’s actually my cousin’s name, so I’m going to use it here.

You might guess from his name that Ganesh is South Asian. In India, where he had been in school before coming to Ohio, Ganesh was taught that a noun named a person, place, thing, or animal. If he played the noun game in India he’d have four buckets and there would be no problem deciding what to do with “horse.” But in Ohio Ganesh had only three buckets, and it wasn’t clear to him which one he should put “horse” in.

In India, Ganesh’s religion taught him that all forms of life are continuous, interrelated parts of the universal plan. So when he surveyed the three buckets it never occurred to him that a horse, a living creature, could be a thing. He knew that horses weren’t people, but they had more in common with people than with places or things. Forced to choose, Ganesh put the horse card in the person bucket.

Blapp! Wrong! You lose. The teacher shook her head, and Ganesh sat down, mortified, with a C for his efforts. This was a game where you got a grade, and a C for a child from a South Asian family of overachievers is a disgrace. So his parents went to talk to the teacher.

It so happens that I’ve been in a similar situation. We spent a year in France some time back, and my oldest daughter did sixth grade in a French school. The teacher asked her, “How many continents are there?” and she replied, as she had been taught in the good old U.S. of A., “seven.” Blaap! Wrong! It turns out that in France there are only five.

So old dad goes to talk to the teacher about this. I may not be able to remember the seven dwarfs, but I rattled off Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America, and South America. The teacher calmly walked me over to the map of the world. Couldn’t I see that Antarctica was an uninhabited island? And couldn’t I see that North and South America were connected? Any fool could see as much.

At that point I decided not to press the observation that Europe and Asia were also connected. Some things are not worth fighting for when you’re fighting your child’s teacher.

Several of my friends are self-proclaimed grammar nerds. Yay for them, but diagramming sentences seems like torture to me. I don’t want to think about it unless I have to, or unless I’m listening to School House Rock. Are you a grammar nerd, or a non-grammar nerd?

Here’s a grammar cheat sheet for all the non-grammar nerds, with links to School House Rock videos! (Note: this is a really simple cheat sheet. For more information, watch the School House Rock videos and grab a copy of Elements of Style.)

Adjectives: used to modify nouns

Adverbs: used to modify verbs

Conjunctions: connect words, phrases, clauses, and sentences

Interjections: words and phrases that express emotion (set apart from the sentence with an exclamation point or comma)

Nouns: a person, place or thing

Prepositions*: link a word or phrase to other words in a sentence (usually indicating a spatial relationship)

Pronouns: replace a noun or proper noun

Subjects and Predicates: The subject is a noun (who or what the sentence is about). The predicate is a verb (the action the subject takes).

Verbs: express action, being, or state of being

What’s your favorite School House Rock song? Mine is Conjunction Junction (the noun and verb songs tie for second favorite).

* I don’t remember the preposition song/video, which is probably why prepositions are easier for me to use than define.  Do you remember the preposition song or video?

The Lemony Snicket books are coming out in paperback soon. This is a good thing. While I loved the original hardcover design, has any other librarian noticed that for all their eye-catching loveliness they last about as long as a well-used tissue? A Series of Unfortunate Events has few flaws inside their covers, but on the outside they all fray, tear, fade, and turn unbecomingly fuzzy after one or two reads.

So. Paperbacks. This is a good thing. They may actually last longer than their hardcover equivalents. But listen to what Fantagraphics Books discovered about all this:

Tales Designed to Thrizzle creator Michael Kupperman has landed a sweet gig, contributing a series of original strips titled "The Spoily Brats" to the new paperback editions of the best-selling A Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snicket. From the preview sample, it looks like just exactly the combination of Snicketry and Thrizzlishness that you would expect.