As to his own academic training, there is ample testimony that he appreciated the main classical authors whom he read in the gymnasium at Cassel; but it was refreshing to hear and to read various utterances of his against gerund-grinding and pedantry. ❋ Unknown (1906)
As to the former, I took pains to guard the institution from those who, in the higher education, substitute dates for history, gerund-grinding for literature, and formulas for science; as to the latter, I sought to guard it from the men to whom ` ` Gain is God, and Gunnybags his Prophet. '' ❋ Unknown (1905)
In the junior year matters improved somewhat; but, though the professors were most of them really distinguished men, and one at least, James Hadley, a scholar who, at Berlin or Leipsic, would have drawn throngs of students from all Christendom, they were fettered by a system which made everything of gerund-grinding and nothing of literature. ❋ Unknown (1905)
Its single course in classics and mathematics, through which all students were forced alike, regardless of their tastes, powers, or aims; its substitution of gerund-grinding for ancient literature; its want of all instruction in modern literature; its substitution of recitals from text-books for instruction in history -- all this was far short of my ideal. ❋ Unknown (1905)
My disappointment at the instruction; character of president and professors; perfunctory methods in lower-class rooms; ` ` gerund-grinding '' vs. literature; James Hadley -- his abilities and influence, other professors; influence of President Woolsey, Professors Porter, Silliman, and Dana; absence of literary instruction; character of that period from a literary point of view; influences from fellow-students. ❋ Unknown (1905)
The studies which interested me most were political and historical; from classical studies the gerund-grinding and reciting by rote had completely weaned me. ❋ Unknown (1905)
Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles"; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself: "Have I read through Lilly?" ❋ Rusell, George W E (1904)
He was wont in after life to speak of this time with bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund-grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. ❋ Tuckwell, Rev W (1902)
ADMIRABLE CRICHTON, double Blue and double First at Oxford, weary of gerund-grinding at a fashionable preparatory school for £500 a year, charming conversationalist, expert auction-bridge player, is open to accept partnership in well-established financial house on the basis of four months 'holiday a year and genuine week-ends -- Friday till Tuesday. ❋ Various (1898)
From the trials of gerund-grinding and fagging and flogging a temporary relief was afforded by the Coronation of ❋ George William Erskine Russell (1886)
Occupied in that way, an august National Assembly becomes for us little other than a Sanhedrim of pedants, not of the gerund-grinding, yet of no fruitfuller sort; and its loud debatings and recriminations about Rights of Man, Right of Peace and War, Veto suspensif, Veto absolu, what are they but so many Pedant's-curses, 'May God confound you for your Theory of Irregular Verbs!' ❋ Thomas Carlyle (1838)
'gerund-grinding' of Thomas Carlyle -- but could have inspired them with love of learning, at all events such as were capable of being so inspired. ❋ George Gissing (1880)
