I vaguely remember diagramming sentences in Jr. High English classes.

Is this skill still taught in schools?

MKK

David -- I believe the "S" comes after catastrophe, making it plural. Unless you're talking about stepping in something that the dog's owner didn't clean up. ; )

I've found having *some* way of mapping a sentence to be invaluable not only in translating Cicero but also in untangling the really complicated prose that some of my writers have produced.

The Dave Barry quote, and the Gertrude Stein one, incidentally, seem to appear in *every* discussion of sentence diagrammes -- they were the header quotes in my introductory linguistics textbook.

Any AI that could diagram sentences would certainly pass the Turing Test.

I WANT THE T-SHIRT!

This can be blamed in part on one Mrs. Judith Harvey, late of Spitler School, Baldwin-Whitehall School District, Pittsburgh, Penna. (6th grade). I think of her frequently, and with gratitude.

Unless I missed the meaning of the sentence.

I think I'm getting a headache....

"Things overturned" seems to be the main clause and "that made the obscure obvious" is a subordinate clause, modifying "things". This would probably be shown like the "for which it stands" bit in the Pledge diagram, although not having really studied grammar in years, I'd have to puzzle a while over how to show the relationship between "obscure" and "obvious". I think "by overturning" modifies "made", but that's part of the obscurity of the sentence.

You could also make a case that Rachel is right, but to make a diagram of that sense plain you have to infer words. If you use "are themselves", as she does, then "are" is the main verb and the clause "themselves overturned" is the object. Since neither "are" nor "themselves" is in the original sentence, you'd need to mark them off in parentheses.

I would do the diagram but diagramming in ASCII is a pain. I've done it. I've even acquired a bit of a reputation on the Stumpers List for it. But I'd sooner avoid it if I can, and maybe from now on I'll just refer people to the page at http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm Thanks, Teresa (and Claire)!

Yes, I had diagramming, at least three years of it (thank you, Mrs. Tharp, Mrs. Wiley and Mrs. Painter*). And it was helpful when I learned foreign languages (indirect objects, etc.), though diagramming a heavily inflected language might be somewhat different.

But the real value of diagramming is much like that of Venn diagrams -- it helps you sort out the logical relationships of the ideas. I don't think I realized how important this was until we got computer databases at the library. Now I use Venn diagrams, which I also learned in junior high (we had "the New Math"), to explain Boolean searching.

*Sixth, seventh and eighth grade, at Grandview Elementary in Ardara, Pa., and Irwin Jr. High, Irwin, Pa., both in the Norwin School District east of Pittsburgh. (The years would have been 1961-64.) Neither school exists now. Grandview was still standing but boarded up last time I was over that way, and the old junior high building has been demolished. It had originally been built in the 1920s and was seriously outdated, but it was home to a lot of memories, including some good ones.

I'm not sure I'd have had much more use for the formal version of it, though. I've never had much trouble sorting out the internal mechanisms of sentences. Learning Venn diagrams was a bit more useful, but it's the same sort of thing: What modifies what, what excludes what, where do they overlap, and how much can it tell you?

Things overturned.
When they did, other things became obvious.
The other things had been obscure.
This change was directly due to the overturning.

So, "Things (that made the obscure [things] [become] obvious (by overturning)) overturned."

I took two or three reads through that, the first time I read it, before I could figure out what it meant (of course, as TNH points out, I had the advantage of context). I was awestruck by the sheer elegance of it, because it's self-referential in a weird way: as comprehension of its meaning slowly dawned, I could feel the very thing it described happening in my brain - as the sentence moved from obscure to obvious, there was a sense of mental objects changing orientation.

BTW, while 'obvious' is an adjective in that sentence, 'obscure' is functionally a noun: 'the obscure' like 'the beautiful', 'the wealthy', or 'the dead'. In English you can just make an adjective into a collective noun by sticking 'the' in front of it...go, English!

Translate that into Spanish, and you'll see how this feature helps make English wonderfully compact.

“White House press briefing room sound equipment” is one of those little clues that tells you that despite its overlay of Norman French, English really is a Germanic language.

I love Dave Barry's take on the American Revolutionary war: British soldiers would march out in the pretty uniforms and spell out words on the battlefield while the Americans hid behind trees and shot at them.

The reason the Brits lost was because they hired Hessian mercenaries, and it took so long to spell out words in German that they were all killed off.