Creator
Percival Leigh
Title
The Comic English Grammar.
Coverage
London
Publisher
Richard Bentley
Date
1840
Subject
Illustrated by John Leech.
Description
Leigh (1813–1889), a Scottish surgeon, relinquished his medical practice to become a comic writer. One of the original staffers at Punch, he also wrote The Comic Latin Grammar (1840). He liked similes: “We would have every preface as short as an orator’s cough, to which, in purpose, it is so nearly like.” Some of the humor still works: he says that although a pronoun is “a word used instead of a noun, we did not mean to call such words as thingumibob, whatsiname, what-d’ye-call-it, and the like, pronouns.”