Abstract

The history of the grammatical metaphor in the West begins in ancient Greece, with the naming of the rules that govern human speech, and continues up to the present day. The Stoic philosophers produced fantastic psychological and metaphysical justifications of their word “case” and its subdivisions “upright” and “oblique.” Lucillius wrote an epigram in which grammatical terms are given a sexual interpretation. Medieval poets, noting the literal meanings of such terms as casus and declinatio — both signifying “fall” — drew elaborate comparisons between grammar and the story of Adam and Eve: original sin is referred to as “the first declension,” and Adam and Eve are “oblique” nouns that fell away or “declined” from God. In 1414 the duke of Exeter wrote to Henry IV that “Scotland is like a noun adjective that cannot stand without a substantive,” and again in 1658 the Scots were referred to contemptuously as “those northern adjectives, not able to subsist without England.” In 1783 an anonymous writer in Gentleman's Magazine asked, “Can any of you all impart a rule to conjugate the heart: To shew its present, perfect, future