Essay / Avant-Garde

Gollum Diagrams a Sentence

When your main line of dialogue is “my precious,” it’s not easy to diagram your sentences. But Gollum will try. And Freddy Age Eleven will take a break from his English homework to illustrate it.
Crumpled papers litter the floor, with “papers about to be crumpled” on their way. Meanwhile, the page taped to the wall has the attempt at diagramming:

“Precious” is the, um, direct object, modified by “my.” (It) and (is) are both understood. Meanwhile, “gollum” can be interjected just about anywhere with equal grammatical precision.

Poor little Smeagol. Grammar is tricksy.

Phoebe Age Nine has also recently investigated the Gollum mythos, and also considers him an apt instructor and explainer. Here he is at a chart demonstrating which of the rings is his own precious:

The Sanders art community has been going through a season of many Gollum drawings. One of the earliest is here:

And after much practice, here is the state-of-the-gollum-art from Freddy Age Eleven:

Now isn’t that precious?

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