7

Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog
The Quirky History And Lost Art Of Diagramming Sentences

For the record
I cannot, in fact, spell.

I’m fairly certain that this is the basis of my love of sarcasm & my possibly charming- possibly obsessive use of swear words.

And although I regularly slaughter words and am abusive to all sorts of punctuations & grammar, my love of language (ours & the others that I tempt international incident by endeavoring to learn) grows increasingly as the years go on.

Perhaps its this love & the inherit guilt I feel for my involvement in it’s slaughter that I was drawn to this weeks pick; a lovely, vivid elementary-wall-blue coloured cover with stark, white dashed lines.
True-

I had this romantic notion that held within it’s pages would be my language salvation; that upon completion, I would no longer be a slaughterer of language, but at the very least a language warrior- willing and ready to destroy my former language debaser -and hopefully, a sentence diagramming terror, feared by my friends and family, uninvited to holiday parties.

Alas.*

Amazingly, none of these exuberant expectations were enough to ruin the brilliance of this charming story & the magnificently non-eccentric people who make up the history of sentence diagramming.

The author, Ms. Kitty Burns Florey, is an editor by trade & a word nerd, it would seem, by her birth into the catholic school system.
In this book, she has put together a magical foray into the world of language that is both whimsical & sincere.

She takes the time to meander through great author’s creations as an illustration that sentence diagramming is meant to illuminate the architecture, the inherit beauty of words built upon each other, forming complex & poetic sentences- not, as may be believed, a means to creating great writing or even great writers.

Her story & homage to her teacher Sister Bernadette; her emphatic & structured love of diagramming are beautifully woven into a narrated history of this much beguiled art.
And this little ode to grammar makes for an amazingly great read.
Something that I would recommend to anyone who has a love for grammar.

Which, I have to add, if you are reading my posts
I question sincerely….


*I am still an editors worse nightmare (or perhaps, their most beloved child, as I am likely their industries bread & butter- I have no illusions about my language catastrophes…)