Our Speech of Many Parts

When I was a sophomore in high school, during the first meeting of a class called “English Grammar,” the teacher asked me to name the parts of speech. I hesitated on a couple of the answers, but here’s what I said: “Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, article, and interjection.” My classmates were impressed, it seemed, that I could remember this information we’d gained three years before.

“No,” said the teacher. “That’s wrong. Anybody else?”