Words at Work
The naming of parts
 When you spend a lot of your time writing about language, it starts to take on a life of its own. I was first visited by the parts of speech (oops, sorry - word classes) about 10 years ago, after half a bottle of particularly nice red wine. I woke up at two o'clock in the morning to find Norman Noun sitting on the edge of the bed. He suggested I should pop down to the office and write a story about him; and he and his friends have been living with us ever since.
Norman is no trouble at all. He just potters round the house sticking labels on everything. But some of the others can be rather a handful. Vera, the Verb, is often hyperactive, for instance, and Angelica Adjective can be very gushing - it gets a bit much.
My favourite is Ashly the Adverb, who looks like a young Trevor MacDonald. Ashly has a mission to provide details on the how, when and where of everything that happens. Whatever the event, he'll be there with his little reporter's notebook, putting you in the picture: "Today, yesterday ... here, there ... and finally ..."
You can meet Norman Noun and friends in the BBC Schools TV series "English Express" and on "The Grammar Video: Language Knowledge", available from BBC Education. They also feature on coloured wallcharts(with accompanying teaching notes and poems) available from PCET Wallcharts, 27 Kirchen Road, London, W13 OUD (Tel: 0208 567 9206 Fax 0208 566 5120).
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