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Kentucky English
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Last summer's vacation took me home to Kentucky and up to Shaker Village near Lexington for a restful few days imagining a life of spiritual focus, discipline, and simplicity. But Harrodsburg being only a few miles south, the vacation also included a stop at one of the earliest settlements west of the Appalachians—Fort Harrodsburg. The museum near the recreated fort tries to cover the Federalist period that followed the frontier days and dabbles in just about every other period to the extent it's been given random antiques that are somehow bits of Kentuckiana. One such remarkable specimen hangs at the end of a sunlit corridor on the second floor—"Clark's Grammatical Chart." It hangs there without explanation, but a reproduction you can sweet talk out of the staff without trying very hard says the chart was used to teach grammar to school children in Eastern Kentucky before textbooks were widely available.
I've pondered this chart for a year now thinking about "visual literacy" (a subject explored early on in the Forum—Volume 1, Number 3, 1992) and what our representations of knowledge say about our attitudes toward what we think we know. Could anyone really learn English grammar from this chart? I guess maybe, with the right teacher, or if the pupil already knew English pretty good. Maybe we ought to have put Clark's Grammatic Chart on the Voyager spacecraft we sent to the edge of the universe instead of that drawing of a naked man and woman, that is, if we really wanted to communicate. After all, English remains the most powerful language on the planet, if only because it shamelessly steals everybody else's vocabulary. Nobody at the Kentucky Department of Education or the Kentucky Historical Society seems to know anything about the chart. But there it hangs, an artifact of something. I wonder what. | ||||||||
