(you) | Call | Me \ Ishmael

February 26, 2014 6:08 PM

The first sentences of notable novels. Diagrammed. From Pop Chart Lab (previously).
posted by davidjmcgee (50 comments total)

Both the Chandler and the Cervantes would make really great nerd t-shirts.
posted by benito.strauss at 6:15 PM on February 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

Oh man, this takes me back to around 1986 and 1987--8th and 9th grade English class. Mrs. Ross, a taskmaster. I actually kind of liked diagramming, but we must've spent half our time in that class doing so, and there was so much emphasis on making straight, clean lines with our ruler, and lots of erasing and redrawing, that we didn't do much actual reading in that class. Diagramming is an interesting tool, but it shouldn't form the basis of an English class. I can't imagine any English teacher still doing this today.
posted by zardoz at 6:37 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Man, it's been so long since I diagrammed sentences that I forgot -- or maybe never learned -- that expletives just sort of hover in space. How appropriate, somehow, for Orlando's diagram to have a disjoined element that floats freely amid the rigid categories that pin down the rest of the words to their prescribed functions.
posted by kewb at 6:39 PM on February 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

Only damn 'F' I ever got was because of motherfucking diagramming motherfucking sentences!

NO I AM NOT STILL PISSED ABOUT THAT! WHY DO YOU ASK?
posted by edgeways at 6:56 PM on February 26, 2014 [7 favorites]

I love Chandler's writing and I would absolutely wear such a t-shirt.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 7:08 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

I will count myself lucky that I have no idea what it means to diagram a sentence.
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:17 PM on February 26, 2014 [8 favorites]

Yeah, I've never heard of this practice before.

Are there underground clubs devoted to it.
posted by Sebmojo at 7:32 PM on February 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

Sentence diagramming was how people analyzed grammar before the invention of syntax trees in the mid 20th century. It is still taught in American middle schools for some reason.
posted by Phssthpok at 7:47 PM on February 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

Diagram me like one of your French sentences.
posted by SollosQ at 7:52 PM on February 26, 2014 [17 favorites]

has diagramming sentences ever helped anyone? math kids who are into english? english kids who like math? anyone?
posted by es_de_bah at 8:09 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

In the Peter Pan one, isn't "except one" appended to the VP in error? (Feels good to be 1989 again.)
posted by mahorn at 8:19 PM on February 26, 2014

I loved diagramming sentences. I was even good at it. An absolutely useless skill, of course, like many things I am good at.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:28 PM on February 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sentence diagramming was how people analyzed grammar before the invention of syntax trees in the mid 20th century.

Language Log has a nice article/manifesto praising syntax trees, specifically the Penn Treebank. Here's a parser you can try online! The results aren't quite as sexy as the ones in the FPP, but I'm pretty sure that with a talented designer they would clean up rather nicely.
posted by narain at 8:29 PM on February 26, 2014 [8 favorites]

I will count myself lucky that I have no idea what it means to diagram a sentence.

I have no idea, either.
posted by crossoverman at 8:30 PM on February 26, 2014

OK... so aside from making interesting design art out of famous sentences, what is the actual purpose of sentence diagramming supposed to be? What information is the diagram supposed to convey and/or clarify? Does it serve any purpose whatsoever, no matter how esoteric, outside of a classroom? Inside of a classroom, what is its ostensible pedagogical purpose and how does it purport to serve that purpose better than more practical and generalized techniques like reading and writing practice? In short, why?
posted by Scientist at 8:31 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

I assume that its notional purpose is to force students to parse complex sentences and demonstrate that they understand what functions the different words are performing.

Sob.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:37 PM on February 26, 2014

Scientist: I think the effect it had on me, regardless of intent, was to help me learn what part of speech a certain word was, and how it affected the meaning of a sentence. Does it matter that a verb goes wherever a verb goes? I didn't think so. But I did come away from the diagramming with a better idea of what roles an adverb or article or preposition could play in a sentence.
posted by papayaninja at 8:38 PM on February 26, 2014 [5 favorites]

It's a useful when learning why language works the way it does. I never found it "fun" per se, but I liked the insight I got from the exercise.

My Jr. High English teacher introduced us to Poe by having the class diagram the first sentence to The Fall of the House of Usher, which made an ungodly mess on the blackboard. I was just a little disappointed not to see it here.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:04 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Trees/diagrams can help with understanding complex or convoluted sentences; at least that's what I use them for in my work as a translator.

Also, that's not how Don Quijote starts. It goes:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor

But that's actually the first sentence of Chapter I; there's a bunch of stuff before that, including a prologue and some preliminary verses.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 9:04 PM on February 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

I never diagrammed sentences -- learning grammar explicitly was out of favour when I was in elementary and high school, so I learned it all via French classes and Mad Libs -- but I did do a lot of syntax trees in university.

And it's really an effective basic tool for being a better writer and better understanding sentences more complex than SVO. You can manage without it, and many people pick up most of the knowledge just in reading. But if you really understand grammar, you have another tool to use when you are trying to make a specific impression, and another tool to use when you are trying to understand what is being presented to you.
posted by jeather at 9:05 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Only 4 notable novels are by women, apparently.
posted by NoraReed at 9:45 PM on February 26, 2014

"Them's fightin' words".
posted by neuron at 9:50 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Monday, stony Monday: "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor"

Even though I've been fluent for a few years now, I've never actually looked at Cervantes in Spanish (I'd read parts of Don Quixote in English, years back). Looking at that sentence, it's suddenly obvious to me why he's so highly regarded. It's really, really beautiful, both the choice of words, and, maybe most of all, the rhythm and flow of the thing.

I think I need to go read the whole thing in Spanish now. Thanks.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:54 PM on February 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

Fear and Loathing still has the best first sentence, even broken down, bled and dissected.
posted by philip-random at 10:01 PM on February 26, 2014

narain, I love the one you've created. I love how it trips down to the word 'ice', and how it puts into contrast the precise/analytic academic dissection with the lush, dreamlike sense of memory and setting you get in One Hundred Years. Awesome. I'd get that on a poster.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:08 PM on February 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

And the diagrams aren't very telling: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"; if you make a syntax tree, the parallelism between "in possession of a good fortune" and "in want of a wife" is obvious. But it really doesn't show in the diagram.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:11 PM on February 26, 2014

Speaking of diagramming lexical units (though it kind of requires a grasp of Japanese grammar to enjoy): this is pretty great?
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:28 PM on February 26, 2014 [3 favorites]

Hang on, I think I've got it. Top, red, fish, eat, cat?
posted by narain at 10:40 PM on February 26, 2014

Okay, so the way that works is, you have the modified noun 頭が　赤い　魚を　食べた　猫　(broken down as it is in the image there). Japanese modifies nouns by basically putting a grammatical sentence in front of them ("the bus that just stopped in front of the station" would be, essentially, "the just-stopped-in-front-of-the-station bus"). So you have different ways of combining these five lexical units:

頭が the head (has particle indicating "grammatical subject of clause")

赤い is-red

魚を fish (has particle indicating "direct object of clause")

食べた ate

猫 cat

So you get a variety of different ways of interpreting these, from "the cat that ate a fish with a red head" to "the head [is] a red cat that ate a fish." It's a bit easier to follow if you're familiar with Japanese grammar, natch.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:24 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

In other news, the magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami.
posted by mannequito at 12:12 AM on February 27, 2014

I learned diagramming from Mrs. Saevre, in a one-room country school in southern Wisconsin. Can't say I liked it at the time but I will say, looking back, it's a great way for a writer to get his Hemingway going.

Subject-verb-object, and all the other bits need to earn their place.
posted by lometogo at 1:13 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Had never heard of sentence diagramming before, thought it was something like phrenology for novels, saw this poster yesterday, ordered a copy on the spot. It's like taking a microscope to Stefanie Posavec's Writing Without Words project and leaving the words in.
posted by Hogshead at 2:41 AM on February 27, 2014

I fucking hated diagramming sentences, not least because my high school grammar teacher had a policy of calling on a person and not moving on to someone else until he or she got it right, no matter how long it took. She would get nastier and nastier as the minutes wore on, and it was fantastic for an awkward teenager who was already nervous about speaking in public. (BURN IN HELL, MRS. MORGAN.)

Then I minored in linguistics for my undergrad degree and discovered syntax trees. They were so much simpler that I may or may not have wept for joy.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 3:25 AM on February 27, 2014

Whatever else its faults (and it was California in the '80s, so it didn't resemble the austere torture chamber it is most popularly conceived as), I am grateful that I went to a Catholic elementary school, where learning grammar (and diagramming sentences) was an unquestioned part of the curriculum.

It wasn't until I started learning Spanish in my (public) high school that I discovered that the first instruction most of my peers had in how languages work (parts of speech! tense! mood! clauses!) was in learning a foreign language as a teenager.
posted by psoas at 3:29 AM on February 27, 2014

Inside of a classroom, what is its ostensible pedagogical purpose and how does it purport to serve that purpose better than more practical and generalized techniques like reading and writing practice?

To follow up on papayaninja, reading and writing practice is great for students who are naturally intuitive about language but not especially helpful for the majority who benefit from having things explained clearly. (IANAEIP*)

I'd actually say the best example of why is short-but-semantically-dense, rather than long-and-complex sentences. In the sentences

[I ran down the stairs.]

and

[I ran down the mailman.]

the word "down" has a very different semantic function and it's generally easiest to explain this in terms of the underlying structure of the sentence: with a diagram or syntax tree. In the first sentence, "down" is the head of a prepositional phrase indicating direction; in the second, "down" is part of a complex verb (implying reckless driving), with "the mailman" being the unfortunate direct object.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to draw the respective diagrams.

*I am not an expert in pedagogy.
posted by psoas at 3:52 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Ha. I had the exact opposite experience as psoas.

I started at a public elementary school that had completely abandoned diagramming years before. Then I went to a Catholic school where a deep understanding of the practice was assumed for all students. I ended up getting booted from the honors track in English entirely because I hadn't been exposed to this arcane, pointless, eighteenth-century nonsense.

Not that I'm still bitter about it or anything....
posted by graphnerd at 3:54 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ha, one pre-20c work (excluding the ones in translation), and that's by Jane Austen, famous for the compactness and ease of her sentences? What a pussy. I want to see somebody tackle Fielding/Johnson/Dickens. Or Bulwer-Lytton, mmm.
posted by Bardolph at 4:03 AM on February 27, 2014

The first time I ever wished violent harm upon a teacher came when we diagrammed sentences. A less helpful or productive task I could not imagine.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:46 AM on February 27, 2014

This takes me back to 1998 and that six-hour grammar exam I had to sit as part of my undergrad degree. We had started out diagramming quite innocuous sentences, but soon our professor moved us to phrase structure grammar. Those parse trees are mean mofos - we weren't expected to just identify subject, verb, object but also detail how the various noun and verbal phrases were interlined. The sentence constructions got more and more intricate. Sub-ordinate phrases, oh my god.

This was the one course that either made you or broke you into tiny, tiny pieces. Lore was that if you passed that six-hour exam, you were golden. You were sure to get your BA (later pretty much also your MA). Nothing would ever be this hard ever again.

Today I'm really glad that I persevered. I get why the English language (my second language) works the way it does. I look at languages in a whole other way - I see tiny details and can move words about to make my sentences more effective. But my god, don't ever ask me to diagram a sentence ever again.
posted by kariebookish at 5:13 AM on February 27, 2014

Mr. Whitmore at my high school was accused of pedagogy back in '81, but our minister testified on his behalf.

I remember diagramming sentences as an exercise that clarified what the main moving parts of a sentence were, and to this day when I read some convoluted (and like as not, ungrammatical) rambling, I think I subconsciously diagram, or at least sus out the main subject, object, and verb, in a usually futile but generally amusing attempt to see what the main thing is they were trying to say.

(^ yeah - diagram that, Mrs. Winona)

There was also a funny moment that I dimly remember from a press conference in the early '90s during the Gulf War - a reporter asked a general some rambling non-question, and the general's first response was "I'd like to try to diagram that sentence some day."

(I know, you had to be there)
posted by randomkeystrike at 5:25 AM on February 27, 2014

He messed up the first line of The Time Machine. It should be:

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) [...]

(and not "to him").
posted by pracowity at 5:40 AM on February 27, 2014

I think the Lolita opener isn't actually a sentence. This page claims that there's an implied "is the", so: "Lolita, (is the) light of my life, (and the) fire of my lions." Adding those words doesn't make sense with the punctuation, and changes the meaning of the words.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 6:31 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sadly, I read the bowdlerised version of Lolita that doesn't feature any lions.
posted by ersatz at 6:37 AM on February 27, 2014 [11 favorites]

The diagrams can highlight some of the natural ambiguity of language—or actually, they fail to highlight it, forcing a naturally (and perhaps deliberately) ambiguous sentence in to one particular reading. That is, it highlights it in the sense that it may point out to you a reading you had not considered before.

Case in point: Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

As diagrammed here, "on the edge of the desert" is modifying "Barstow." It only indirectly tells you where they were inasmuch as they were around Barstow, and Barstow is on the edge of the desert. That is, as diagrammed, the sentence might also be notated:

We were (somewhere) (around Barstow [which is] on the edge of the desert) when the drugs began to take hold.

This differs from the way I had always read it, which would be more like:

We were (somewhere around Barstow) (on the edge of the desert) when the drugs began to take hold.

That is, I had always read "somewhere around Barstow" and "on the edge of the desert" as modifying "were." But that reading would be diagrammed differently than what is shown here.

It hadn't occurred to me before that the former was a possible reading. I can't say it's wrong, although the latter still seems more natural to me. So the diagramming of the sentence is good, in that it reveals a reading to me that I hadn't thought of before, but bad, in that it doesn't acknowledge my preferred reading. And especially bad if the ambiguity was deliberate on Thompson's part.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 6:54 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sadly, I read the bowdlerised version of Lolita that doesn't feature any lions.

The movie had a Lyon.
posted by pracowity at 7:03 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

One advantage of tree diagrams is that they more easily reflect the way words change in use. A word we think of as a noun can act as an adjective, for instance. I love tree diagrams.
posted by not that girl at 8:00 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ugh. Worst waste of time in my 7th grade English class. Teachers should be fired for wasting students time on shit like this.

To me, sentence diagramming is the product of a math geek who hates language and came up with it out of resentment.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:00 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Hah! Back in my day we didn't have such fancy things as Middle School and had to go to Junior High School.
I loved diagramming, but I always preferred the mechanics of a language over having to do something useful with it, like writing (or in the case of foreign languages- learning vocabulary and actually speaking it). I think it helped me to understand the structure, but now I've got to go learn about syntax trees...
I was surprised when a younger friend said that she had never done it in school, ever.
I was most interested here in seeing how a gerund was diagrammed. I don't think I had seen that symbol before.
posted by MtDewd at 9:01 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sadly, I read the bowdlerised version of Lolita that doesn't feature any lions.

Time for a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-style remix, I guess.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. HOLY JESUS FUCK LIONS."
posted by davidjmcgee at 11:34 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

I learned diagramming from my high school French teacher, Mr. Dixon, who used it to great effect to get a bunch of kids to better understand both French and English by comparing how sentence structures were pinned together. The differences and similarities can make so much more sense visually when you're lost cognitively. Later, when I was wrapping up my BA in French, I threw in a diagram of my title on the title page of my senior thesis. My lead professor loved it and asked if I'd had Mr. Dixon in school.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 12:34 PM on February 27, 2014 [5 favorites]