adverb vs. adjective

School House Rocks!....well, it rocks!

Almost 20 years after I was supposed to learn the difference between an adverb and an adjective, a two minute cartoon thought me more than I knew from a classroom.

Why was that?

I gave it some serious thought and came up with the following reasons:

1. I must have been in the cloak room that day, or week... or year. I too went to catholic school for a while and my desk seemed to prefer the view in the closet. My teachers, happy to oblige an aging desks wishes, were happy to make sure it spent most of its time there. I, evidently, was just along for the ride.

2. I have a cleared train of thought as an adult. Ok, maybe a more fair translation is that I give a crap now.

3. My teacher, much like me after actually learning the difference, realized that it was even more crap that you differentiate the two.

The english language has been around in some form for over a thousand years. At some point in time, someone had to sit down and classify each kind word. Noun, verb, and so on. Then they come to descriptive words. They didn't break down nouns into objects that move and objects that don't. They didn't break verbs down into movements that animals do and those they don't, but for some reason they decided to break down the descriptions of those things into several families. Madness! And I am sure that the bunch that first named all these things received some sort of medal from the king or queen at the time for contributions to society.

You don't have to know the proper name of a word to use it properly... I doubt the grammar convention had happened before Chaucer put quill to parchment, so why bother bogging our kids down with pointless classifications that truly have no use after 4th period english?