Creator
Rufus Nutting
Title
A Practical Grammar of the English Language.
Coverage
Montpelier, Vt.
Publisher
E.P. Walton
Date
1829
Subject
5th ed.
Description
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1817, Nutting (1793–1878) began teaching at a “female seminary” in Catskill, New York, and soon married one of his pupils. They moved to Ohio and later Michigan, where he insistently taught pupils that the passive voice doesn’t exist in English. Teachers who thought otherwise were causing a horrific “aggregate of injury” because children thereby had lodged in their minds “a disgust, which extends, perhaps, not only to the English but to every other language.” All quite mystifying.