I Love English Grammar

My most passionate love (for a nonhuman) is for form-class grammar. Everything has a place based on its form, and every form has its place. Those who have seen complex diagrammed sentences know the beauty of which I speak.



Like a river that divides itself to feed many villages, diagrammed sentences separate each piece for separate enjoyment in its assigned place. In a sentence, everything belongs somewhere. It's made for it's place. Sometimes it's made for two places, but even unnecessary words have a place, even if it's a floating dotted line.

The floating dotted line upon which I spend my career teeters perilously over the causes—important well-formed words of substance—for which I claim to work so hard: invisibly helping nothing above the overstretched clouds of a writer's salary.

Oh to be a colon, semicolon, or a snark! To fully escape the constraints of a diagrammed world where I am less than an adverb. Nobody would miss me—not a poor little dot, with only a tail or accompanying spot.

But where the real world falls and rises, the people there will need me. In a place where nothing is meaningful, I am a savior. Yes, in the real world I must mean something.