In seventh grade, my class met the Grammar Police, captained by Mrs. McCarty, who had taught school for approximately a century but had lost no enthusiasm for the English language. Every day she filled blackboards with sentences labeled “Diagram and Analyze.” Analyzing meant labeling every word as noun, verb, adjective, etc., a tedious process when her sentences got imaginative:

“Two men and a dozen sheep struggled up the path leading to a dilapidated house that stood at the edg...