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Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and interjections are some of the "parts of speech."

I became fascinated with language in the third grade when we started diagramming sentences. To see all those words on lines connected by diagonal lines under lines under lines was a fountain of joy. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle but better.  With a puzzle I could already see the picture I was making. It would never be more than that. Even as a third grader I understood that these words and sentences could become anything I wanted them to be.  Diagramming sentences struck fear in the heart of some of my classmates, but I looked forward to it with eager anticipation. The process made perfectly good sense to me as I saw how adjectives and pronouns were connected to nouns and how adverbs were connected to verbs.  Only with diagramming they were not connected in an abstract sense, but in a literal sense.  "They are connected !  I'm looking at it."

During this language experience in the third grade I began wondering what we would be diagramming in high school. I imagined that we would diagram entire chapters of books.  The spreadsheet would cover pages and pages of words and lines.  It would be extraordinary!  I think we diagrammed some in the fourth grade and that was about it.

The beauty of my education at the College Street Elementary School in Enterprise, Alabama is that sometimes I actually learned something.  In the process of naming each word of sentences and putting it on a chart, I internalized that separation. Not so much when I speak, but when I read and write I can still see that separation to this day  And it still makes sense to me.

Although all of the "parts of speech" are essential to language, I find nouns to be particularly appealing. Although language consists of all of these elements, the world consists of nouns.  The earth and all therein are persons, places and things. Proper nouns relate to people and places that are important enough to be capitalized, but common nouns are more plentiful and just as important. Then there are ideas, such as love and kindness, that aren't things but they are nouns as well. You can't "show me love" as in something that I can hold it in my hand.  But you can definitely "show me love."

Nine years later at the Enterprise State Junior College, in freshman composition class we had an exam that involved two days of class.  On the first day of the exam Mr. Smith gave us all blank composition paper and the assignment was to create an outline for the subject we had chosen.  That was easy.  On the next day of the exam he gave us our graded outline along with more paper and said,, "Write your essay from your outline." That was easy too.

Forty five years later it is still a joy to me to pull from thin air words that express the way I think and feel about things.  Things?  Nouns?  Well, yes nouns, but more those things that aren't things than the things that are things. And the whole experience is so easy with a word processor. That blinking cursor's one directive is "Your wish is my command." And I can not only create words and phrases, but I can backspace, delete, cut and paste to my heart's content.

So is this post  you're reading a person, place or thing? The knee jerk response is probably a thing.  But I'm a person and you're a person, so there are at least two people involved.  And we're both sitting in a place.  What  you see is totally different than what I'm seeing,so this involves at least two places. And if you said it's a thing.  Then what is it? What you read is only a digital image of my thoughts. My thoughts don't exist and your image doesn't either. The letters you see on your screen are nothing more than ones and zeros repeated trillions of times coming to you courtesy of a programmer who used a language that meant something to her, and to the computer and to you.

Programmer? Diagrammer?  Processor? Educator? Which is primarily at work here?  Probably electricity.