A little-known American headmaster deserves to be remembered for his tongue-in-cheek grammar lessons
Research for a book I’m writing has taken me down some obscure linguistic byways, the latest of which has been the discovery of Andrew Ingraham, an American teacher and writer of whom I’d never heard until stumbling across a brief mention in the long out-of-print The Use of English (1962), by Randolph Quirk.
His tiny Wikipedia entry lists just two facts about Ingraham (1841-1905): he was headmaster of Swain School, and “he is credited with the invention of the Gostak concept” (of which more in a moment). He deserves to be remembered for both.
Swain School of Design, now part of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts, initially offered free courses in language, literature and other subjects to local people who would otherwise not be able to afford higher education. In his Swain School Lectures, published in 1903, Ingraham produced a tongue-in-cheek list of nine categories for the uses of language:
1 To dissipate superfluous nervous energy.
2 To direct motion in others, both men and animals.
3 To communicate ideas.
4 As a means of expression.
5 For the purposes of record.
6 To set matter in motion (as in charms and incantations).
7 An an instrument of thinking.
8 To give delight merely as sound.
9 To keep grammarians busy.
With the possible exception of No 6, these still hold true more than a century later. I am particularly fond of No 8, which I take to cover everything from favourite words to poetry and song.
Swain School Lectures also unveiled Ingraham’s Gostak concept in his phrase “the gostak distims the doshes”, an example of how one derives meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if it is semantically meaningless. In other words, native English speakers would recognise “the gostak” as a noun phrase and the subject of the sentence, “distims” as a verb, and “the doshes” as another noun phrase and the object of the sentence.
If this concept sounds familiar, it may be because it is similar to, if less sophisticated than, the much better known sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957): “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, which he contrasted with “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless”, pointing out that the first is nonsensical but grammatical, while the second is nonsensical and ungrammatical. The difference between Ingraham and Chomsky’s examples is that the former used invented words, while the latter used real ones (including adjectives and an adverb). Chomsky was demonstrating that human speech does not follow statistical models – his grammatical sentence remained so even if no one had ever uttered it.
To return to the Gostak concept, it has spawned a science fiction story, an interactive game and a sonata for prepared piano. CK Ogden and IA Richards, who introduced it to a wider audience in their influential The Meaning of Meaning (1923), call Andrew Ingraham “an able but little-known writer”. But not forgotten.
via Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/feb/15/mind-your-language-andrew-ingraham
