In the daily grind of the schoolroom, however, these lofty aspirations seemed very distant. Uses of the language, if thought about at all, were deferred to the time when school or university would be completed. In the meantime, grammar rules were explained to the students in their own language, vocabulary lists were learned with translation equivalents, and then sentences— especially constructed to contain only the grammar and vocabulary which had already been covered—were laboriously translated, in writing, into and out of the student’s first language. Such sentences, often bizarrely remote from any conceivable use, have been the occasion for jokes ever since. We have probably all heard references to the apocryphal ‘My postilion has been struck by lightning’ and the infamous‘plume de ma tame’.The phonetician Henry Sweet, a leading opponent of grammar translation language teaching, described them as‘a bag into which grammar and vocabulary are crammed without regard to meaning’ and provided his own parody: ‘The merchant is swimming with the gardener’s son, hut the Dutchman has the fine gun’