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Michael,
Ye gads, yes. Absolutely horrendous. I'm trying to write a book (well,
it will probably end up a long PDF) on English grammar (parts of speech,
inflections, rules of concord), syntax, etymology, etc, since I'm probably the
last person alive to know any of it. (Oops! Sorry, Robert, I was
forgetting you're younger than I.) You would not believe the mess the teachers
in our town high school make of the apostrophe.
C. S. Lewis has an amusing story about a British secondary school student
who was asked to explain "Is Brutus sick and is it physical/To walk about and
suck up the [something] of the dank morning?" (Quoting from memory, which fails
me, and I don't leave my system unattended when I'm online). The kid came up
with the modern sense of "mental"="mad," then posited that "physical" must mean
"sane." Lewis pointed out that if the etymological history were lost (i.e., no
OED), we'd probably accept that as a very likely explanation.
Patricia
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