The Simplified blog

Who rules grammar anyway?

Another book with some grammar lessons is Jasper Fforde’s ‘The Well of Lost Plots’ (Hodder and Stroughton, 2003, pages 80 and 81).

Admittedly, these are very weird grammar lessons: Fforde reveals various ‘grammasites’, such as Nounfish who look like angler fishes, but have definite articles instead of lights sticking out of their heads and who ‘swim the outer banks of the Text Sea, hoping to attract and devour stray nouns eager to start an embryonic sentence’.

Then you get bookworms who ‘take words and expel alternative meanings like a hot radiator… without them words would have one meaning, and meanings would have one word…' .

And then there are Verbisoids. ‘Once the Verbisoid extracts the verb from a sentence it generally collapses; do that once too often and the whole narrative falls apart…’

Converbilators create verbs out of nouns… ‘mostly by appending ize or ise but sometimes just by a direct conversion, such as knife, lunch and question’.

As the character notes, 'these are ‘necessary – but can’t be allowed to get out of hand’.