# Blatant lies you were told in school **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [June 22, 2007, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970 "2007-06-22T09:08:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Secret\_Volcano\_Lair](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Secret\_Volcano\_Lair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Secret_Volcano_Lair)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/181 "2007-06-26T04:58:51Z")
The word “history” is a combination of the words “his” and “story”. I had more than one teacher tell me this. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/182 "2007-06-26T05:30:50Z")
[QUOTE=Secret Volcano Lair] The word “history” is a combination of the words “his” and “story”. I had more than one teacher tell me this. [/QUOTE] Of course it isn’t. Any idiot can see that would make “hisstory”. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Hostile\_Dialect](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e495f1/32.png) [@Hostile\_Dialect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hostile_Dialect)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/183 "2007-06-26T06:25:52Z")
**Indistinguishable** , I’m sorry to say you’ve pretty much left me in the dust here. We’ll pick this back up after I get myself a degree or two. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/184 "2007-06-26T06:29:46Z")
[QUOTE=fetus] **Indistinguishable** , I’m sorry to say you’ve pretty much left me in the dust here. We’ll pick this back up after I get myself a degree or two. 😉 [/QUOTE] Oh, no, you see, all I did was smush the word “his” up against “story”. “Hisstory”, get it? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/185 "2007-06-26T06:51:49Z")
A few further comments about the definition-of-nouns issue: (1) If someone is reasonably bright, and is taught “nouns are people places and things” in 2nd grade, and in 2nd grade learns what the noun in the sentence “the cow is blue” is… is that person, in high school, when asked to find the noun in the sentence “rest is useful”, going to suddenly turn into a quivering babble of self-contradictory confusion, and say “but in second grade they told me that nouns were people places or things! Waaah! They lied to me!!!”? (2) Even if it WERE 100% a lie that nouns were people places or things, just starting to talk about the very idea of words falling into different categories and playing different roles (and I’d hope that a good teacher would, at a fairly young age, point out some examples like “the book is good” and “I will book a flight” to point out that the same word can be both) is an imoprtant step towards getting children to think ABOUT language, not just IN a language. If a vastly superior theory of linguistics develops which renders the concepts of subjects and verbs totally obsolete, that won’t mean that teaching them to children won’t be useful. ---
**Author:** ![Hostile\_Dialect](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e495f1/32.png) [@Hostile\_Dialect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hostile_Dialect)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/186 "2007-06-26T06:53:54Z")
[QUOTE=Indistinguishable] Oh, no, you see, all I did was smush the word “his” up against “story”. “Hisstory”, get it? 🙂 [/QUOTE] I was talking about the noun debate. I get “hisstory” just fine. But in our little debate you raised some points that I just don’t have enough experience in linguistics to answer in my own voice yet. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/187 "2007-06-26T06:58:34Z")
[QUOTE=fetus] I was talking about the noun debate. I get “hisstory” just fine. But in our little debate you raised some points that I just don’t have enough experience in linguistics to answer in my own voice yet. [/QUOTE] Aw, man, and I even debated with myself over whether I should just remove the smiley in my last post, thinking it particularly unnecessary, but I guess I’m just subtler than I think… ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/188 "2007-06-26T12:19:21Z")
Two more cases in which it’s useful for kids to have a rudimentary idea of what a noun is: 1. Subject-verb agreement. It’s helpful to be able to point out what the subject of a sentence is (especially in difficult cases such as, “The group of dogs chase[s] the little boy”) when discussing what the verb should look like. 2. Pronouns. Kids are terrible about writing stories in which the pronouns contain no antecedents. Having a word for a noun makes teaching them to avoid this habit much easier. Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2007, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970/189 "2007-06-26T18:31:30Z")
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness] 1. Subject-verb agreement. It’s helpful to be able to point out what the subject of a sentence is (especially in difficult cases such as, “The group of dogs chase[s] the little boy”) when discussing what the verb should look like. [/QUOTE] Your example using the collective noun “group” isn’t very clear-cut; in different dialects, and even in different situations within a dialect, that verb can go either way for agreement. But, at any rate, this is definitely a case where one needn’t be taught anything formally at all; one can simply appeal to one’s intuition about spoken language to guide one’s written language. By seven years old, native speakers already have subject-verb agreement unthinkingly down in their speech (and speech comprehension), _without_ any formal training [consider that even illiterate and uneducated people regularly speak with the same level of subject-verb agreement fluency as others, even if they couldn’t formally analyze the concept]. To make this translate over to writing, a less natural and less practiced medium of communication where the likelihood of production errors is much greater, I think one should simply emphasize the need to make sure that written sentences “make sense” as spoken utterances; it seems to me this approach is much _more_ concrete, to a young child, than the introduction of the abstract concept of subject-verb agreement (and all the further abstract concepts, like grammatical person, verb inflection, etc., which are necessary for elucidating it). Problems with this bootstrapping would arise if the student’s native variety of English is one with different subject-verb agreement rules from Standard American English (or whatever the relevant standard is); for example, if the student is a native speaker of AAVE. In these particular cases, naturally, extra measures must be undertaken, just as must be done for students whose native language is not English at all, though of course to a lesser degree. But I’m not going to open that can of worms right now. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blatant-lies-you-were-told-in-school/408970.md?page=9)