Life, 1915-08-26 · page 19 of 48
Life — August 26, 1915 — page 19: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The cartoon depicts Pope Gladys I granting an audience at the Vatican, surrounded by clergy and supplicants. The accompanying essay satirizes grammar instruction as a useless, superfluous industry that damages children's natural development. The satire's point: grammarians are portrayed as bureaucratic pedants who complicate simple speech with meaningless rules (parts of speech, diagramming, gender, objective infinitives). The author argues that children naturally learn language without formal grammar instruction, and that forcing rigid grammatical analysis upon babies would actually *prevent* them from speaking. "Pope Gladys" likely mocks the authoritarian, quasi-religious reverence given to grammar instruction and its practitioners—treating grammatical rules as dogma rather than practical tools. The Vatican setting reinforces this religious analogy, suggesting grammar teaching functions like institutional religion: unnecessary, oppressive, and sustained by self-interested professionals. This reflects early-20th-century progressive skepticism toward rigid educational formalism.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
POPE GLADYS THE FIRST AN AUDIENCE AT Grammar HE man who invented grammar is, unfortunately, dead. He probably died a natural death, because at the time the enormity of his offense wasn’t realized. He certainly never got what was coming to him. In those days nobody could understand how much damage one man can do to posterity. This is the man that Shakespeare undoubtedly had in mind when he wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them.” Of all the superfluous industries of the present time, can any one be said to approach grammar? Consider the countless women and professors who are earning a living by teaching it. Consider the manufacture of text-books on grammar. It is really awful to contemplate such a vast structure. And then consider how utterly useless grammar is for any purpose whatsoever, and you get, like a flash, a sudden revelation of the marvelous stupidity of the human race. Nobody ever saw a healthy, normal, naturally bright boy or girl who had any use for grammar. Nature knew her THE VATICAN business when she made it impossible for the grammarians to grab a baby before he can speak and teach him gram- mar first. They would unquestionably, if they could, make him learn all the parts of speech beforehand. If they had this power, no properly constituted baby would want to speak, anyway. He would argue that if merely telling what you want and passing the time of day and all that had to be done by a fixed schedule, like a time-table, or as if it was a government affair, why bother about talking at all? The grammarian would get the baby and say: “Now, my young friend, you will soon be in a position to use the word ‘mamma’ First you must get firmly fixed in your mind that mamma is a noun. You must also ask yourself what is its number? Its gender? What does it presuppose and co-ordinate? Has it an objective infinitive, and what is its adverbial complement? Is it governed by any participal, prenatal predicate? Also draw a diagram showing the word ‘mamma’ in its relations to the antecedent. To the relative pronouns.” Fortunately, no grammarian can do this. Providence probably intervened. Babies are compelled to learn how comicbooks.com