Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Being driven to frenzy by the futility of outland interpretation, I at last took up the work of their defense. To do this it has been necessary to make a long study of their idiom and the dialects from which it is compounded, and to reduce their grammar and syntax to a definite working scheme...
...Yacht Club flag. Up to his last illness he wrote sea yarns for the Atlantic Monthly, The Bellman. Modest, despite his immense knowledge and creditable learning, he had a quaint way of submitting his salty MSS. to University-bred employees, "just to have a glance over the grammar and syntax...
...desk consisted of an atlas, a silver spike, and a box of coronas; now one must have at least Roget's Thesaurus and the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The influence of the cloisters is unmistakable. Time-tables may prove unsolvable enigmas, freight rates may offer material for a mathematical genius, but syntax will never suffer as long as the Burlington runs...
Poet Henley once began: "If I were king, my pipe should be premier." "Hail, social tube," sang Dr. Syntax. Moreover, there is an ode, well-deserving of immortality, by one Francis Hoyland: On An Old Maid That Chewed Tobacco...
Esperanto has long been the joke of the linguistic world. Its curious conglomeration of Germanic roots and Latin terminations, its complicated syntax depending upon an accurate inflexion, and above all its bizarre combination of the utterly strange and the too familiar seem to have fitted it peculiarly never to be used. A few pedagogical monstrosities might amuse themselves with translating the masterpieces of other literatures into its artificially simple rhetoric, but that so practically minded a person as a minister of education would try to plant it in schools already overburdened by the attempt to combine the useful...