To those for whom the term is significant at all these days, the word" grammar" usually evokes memories from childhood in which a teacher intones obscure terms like" relative clause" and" participle", practices the mysterious art of" diagramming sentences", and tries to explain why most of what we say in day-to-day speech is either incorrect, improper, or at the very least misleading. It is hard to believe that, until quite recently, the study of grammar enjoyed a central and well-accepted role in education, a status gained with the establishment of the classic liberal arts curriculum in the late Middle Ages. Grammar was, along with Logic and Rhetoric, one of the subjects in the Trivium: the core group in the seven arts. The importance of the" Big Three" is reflected in our modern term trivial, which originally applied to knowledge regarded as so basic that it required no argument. Any educated person could be assumed to know it.

In an earlier time, studying grammar primarily meant studying the grammar of Latin and Greek, and was justified on those grounds. Access to the classical languages meant access to the root cultures of the West, their literature and science. Even regarded in and of themselves, Latin and Greek were viewed as" special languages": models of clarity, logical organization, intellectual subtlety, economy of expression, and so on. Studying how these languages worked was viewed as something very close to studying the principles of logical, coherent thought itself. When modern languages were analyzed, it was always on the model of Latin or ancient Greek.