Home » Posts tagged 'father-gerard-hageman'

Tag Archives: father-gerard-hageman

D SAPS DT C CINQ MOC

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I learned most of what I know about English grammar and style in 9th Grade, when I was fourteen years old. My English teacher at Chanel High School was the Rev. Gerard Hageman, S.M. In the first week of classes, he handed out a single-sided mimeographed sheet on yellow paper entitled “Random Rules of Grammar and Style.”

Thereafter, in the frequent themes we wrote for class, there were only two possible grades: 100% or 0%, the latter if we violated any of the rules on the infamous yellow sheet. Since at our high school, all grades were stated as percentages, any mistakes were disastrous to our grade point average. That first semester, I got an 89%—and that was the high grade in our class.

In this blog post, I discuss the first five lines on the yellow sheet, which opened with a strange line that went:

D SAPS DT C CINQ MOC

The line was a mnemonic of sorts. The letters stood for Direct Address (D), Salutation (S), Appositives (A), Parentheticals (P), Series (S), Dates (D), Titles After Names (T), Compound Sentences (C), Contrasting Ideas (C), Introductory Adverbial Clauses (I), Non-Restrictives (N), Direct Quotations (Q), Mild Interjections (M), Omitted Words (O), and Common Sense (C). Late in the game, Father Hageman also included City and State, but it didn’t fit the mnemonic. Maybe that’s why he put it in parentheses.

An appositive is a noun, pronoun, or phrase placed next to another noun, pronoun, or phrase to rename, identify, or explain it. For example: Jack, a real chess whiz, beat me in three moves.

A parenthetical is very much like an appositive. The same example above applies.

Here is an example of an introductory adverbial clause: As expected, Tyler won the race handily.

As for non-restrictives, that refers to clauses which give additional information that is not vital to one’sunderstanding of the sentences. For example: Cleveland, which is situated on the shores of Lake Erie, used to be the seventh largest city in the country.

Ablative Absolute

Posted on by

St Peter Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio

The year was 1958. I began attending a new Roman Catholic high school which had opened the previous year. At the time, there were only a sophomore and freshman class. I was in the latter.

My most memorable teacher was the Rev. Gerard Hageman for English. He was super strict. Some years earlier, he has put together his own summary of grammatical rules which he distributed copies of to the class. Any violation of the rules, and the student received not only a flunking grade, but a zero. Since the numerical grades were averaged out—without any sort of bell curve adjustment—it was possible to get and stay in deep trouble insofar as your English grade was concerned.

Fortunately, I led the pack with an 89% average. I thrived in Father Hageman’s class. Even though I told everyone I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, at the time I did not know that I had no head for the sciences and only an indifferent head for mathematics.

I remember Father Hageman assigned us to write one page essays (graded either 0 or 100—nothing in between). Being a good Catholic, I wrote a whole series of essays on Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate. My writing style was influenced largely by what I gleaned from William Faulkner after reading only The Sound and the Fury and by my class in Latin I.

The only thing I remember clearly is when I actually used an obscure Latin construction called an Ablative Absolute in one of my English essays. The opening phrase of the sentence in question was “Cold sweat covering his dolorous countenance” followed by what I conceived Pontius Pilate was thinking.

Prett6y fancy for a 14-year-old! I guess I’m still the same kind of writer, though I generally avoid obscure Latin grammar. On the other hand, by now I have read all of Faulkner’s novels; so I can copy him with some degree of confidence.