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Definition and stakes

Clara Erskine Clement Waters,  Venice (1893)

“ What a miserable instrumentality is language! A tone of satiny flesh, a luminous shadow on a bare shoulder, a flickering light on floating silk, attract, recall, and retain the eye for a long time, and yet there is but a vague phrase with which to express the charm.... ”
Source: Gutenberg

Portrait of Elizabeth Rundle Charles Elizabeth Rundle Charles,  The Ravens and the Angels, with Other Stories and Parables

“ I said, in a voice trembling at once with indignation and awe. "You are forgetting yourselves altogether. You are nothing but Things, any of you. And we are Persons. It says so in the Grammar. We are Persons, the least of us, even a little child like me! What would become of any of you, I should like to know, if some of us did not take care of you?" ”
Source: Gutenberg

Percival Leigh,  The Comic English Grammar (1840)

“ To verbs belong Number, Person, Mood, and Tense. These may be called the properties of a verb; and like those of opium, they are soporiferous properties. There are two very important objects which the writer of every book has, or ought to have in view, to get a reader who is wide awake, and to keep him so:—the latter of which, when Number, Person, Mood, and Tense are to be treated of, is no such easy matter ”
Source: Wikisource

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