A Third Round of Grammar

From the First Book in English Grammar by George Payn Quackenbos (1868).

p. 66

EXERCISE.

       Parse all the words:—If I were you, I would be a better girl.—Try [agrees with its subject you understood] to do your duty.—Blessed be the peace-makers.—Love all men, hate none.—To steal is base.—To tell the truth, if you were to fail, I should be glad.—Take care lest thou go astray.—What care I whether thou stay or go?

***

THIS is my attempt to "parse" the first sentence, with a format like the one that the First Book in English Grammar's writer has set forth:

*

I, simple personal pronoun, first person, singular number, masculine or feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb were.
If I were, intransitive verb, subjunctive mood, imperfect tense, first person, singular number, and it agrees with the subject I.
You, simple personal pronoun, second person, plural number [in those days], masculine or feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb were.
(— Rule, (from p. 34), "A verb that has no object takes the same case after as before it, when both words refer to the same person or thing.")
I, ditto; the subject of the verb would be.
would be, intransitive verb, potential mood, imperfect tense, first person, singular number, and it agrees with the subject I.
a, indefinite article, and it relates to girl.
girl, common noun, first person, singular number, feminine gender, nominative case, the subject of the verb would be. (Rule above.)
better, common adjective; good, better, best; in the comparative degree, and it relates to girl.

*

Finishing the questions is still a little shaky. After I guess the answers, I leaf around in the textbook frequently to verify them. — It brings me back to the Christmas-time King William's College Quiz motto: the better part of knowledge is knowing where to find it. (If that is indeed the motto, remembered correctly.)

A Second Morsel of Grammar (and Thoughts)

SECOND PERSON.
  

.	Singular.	Plural.
Nom.	Thou,	you, ye,
Poss.	thy, thine,	your, yours,
Obj.	thee;	you, ye.

I'M FINICKY ABOUT using language properly in professional contexts — newspaper articles and non-self-published works, especially, and there I might even be particular about specifics like using 'data' as the plural form — only the plural form — of 'datum.' ('Professional contexts,' I think, must be stressed, since it would be rude and mean to scrutinize the merest text message of everybody and exclaim "'Tis an illiterate!" at every tiniest flaw, simply since I am personally so fastidious that I even purposely avoid contractions sometimes.)

But it's also grating when high-faluting language, ironically or not, is misused. That's why I think it's important to further the right kind of high-faluting language, and find it helpful to have this table at hand. (Besides, if I write historical tales for amusement, I want to have a scientifically right approach to the language of the time. But I wonder in this case how much the written and vernacular grammar changed from the Middle Ages to the 1860s, when the textbook that I am reading and where I found this grammar table was published. A 15th-century 'thou' might be quite different.)

**


Naturally I make mistakes of ostentatiousness, too; and perhaps there is an unnecessary element of elitism in the claiming of language by the ivory tower, which is also why I think that my education de-emphasized it. (I do still like the idea of thinking of language consciously, in particular contexts.) Thirdly, I think it's often true in my experience that anyone who tries to rectify someone else's orthographical mistakes or grammatical deviations, makes a mistake themselves. Maybe it's a part of Murphy's Law,* or maybe it's instant 'karma.'

Lastly, I think that rules of grammar generally are a half-lost cause, at least for a generation or two. With the retirement of copy-editors and subeditors from the newspaper and publishing industry structures, there may be fewer models of 'proper' language in perpetuity. Although, as I read somewhere, the anarchy of spelling presently can hardly be worse or really different at all from the anarchy that existed in Samuel Johnson's childhood. As I learn about old 'listed buildings' in parts of England, I've read lots of examples of different spellings for the names of towns and people — which might be an archivist's and historian's headache, but tends to be sorted out in the end — and maybe today's similar kind of chaos will be built into a temporary Tower again — if only for reasons of practicality — after all.

*****

Source: First Book in English Grammar, George Payn Quackenbos (1868). At Google Books.

[Revised May 12.] 
Edited to add: * (In fact, it is called 'Muphry's Law,' which I've learned in this comment thread.)