French Lesson
Letter from Stephen MacKenna to Stephen McKenna (October 29, 1927), in Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, ed. E.R. Dodds (London: Constable & Co Ltd, 1936), pp. 247-249 (at 248):
Jamesy Stephens and W.B. Yeats once hired a Frenchman to teach them French together: he began with a quarter of an hour on the rules for the agreement of past participles: Jamesy at last broke in "Excuse me, M. Dupont, what is meant by the agreement of the past participle?", and W.B. said "I was just going to ask you, Monnshure, what is a past participle?"
I don't know whether this is "cool stuff" or not, but it was"seen on the web" -- and I think it's funny. Why is it funny? I don't really know, but I'm guessing that it's funny because none of us is so very far removed from our original "innocence" about the meaning of traditional grammatical terms. It's the foggy feeling that I often have when confronted with a linguistic terminus technicus (often enough when confronted with one I've seen several times). This is the sort of experience that has led me relatively recently in my long years to the conviction that understanding a text or an utterance in an alien tongue is not fundamentally a matter of grammatical/linguistic analysis.
