Hiya,
Another root for grammar is the Irish gaelic word, "glam," meaning curse as
in satire. It was used in a ceremony called the "glamdichenn," which took
place when a king didnot properly pay a poet for the verse the poet had
written for him. In a Middle Irish treates on versification called
"Cormac's Glossary," the revenge against a stingy patron was done the
following way:
"First there was fasting on the land of the king, and a council of thirty
laymen and thirty bishops and thirty poets as to making a satire, and it
was a crime to prevent the satire after the reward for the poem was refused
[by the king]. Then the poet himself and six others, on whom the six
degrees of poets had been conferred, had to go at sunrise to a hill-top on
the boundary of seven lands, and the face of the ollave [chief poet] there
toward the land of the king whom he would satirize, and the backs of them
all toward a hawthorn which should be on the top of the hill, and the wind
from the north, and a slingstone and a thorn of the hawthorn in every man's
hand, and each of them to sing a stave in a prescribed metre into the
slingstone and the thorn, the ollave singing his stave before the others,
and they afterwards singing their staves at once; and each was then to put
his stone and his thorn at the butt of the hawthorn. And if it were they
that were in the wrong, the earth of the hill would swallow them up. But if
it were the king that was in the wrong, the earth would swallow up him and
his wife and his son and his horse and his arms and his dress and his hounds."
So at the root of all grammar one finds the ill-treated poet.... Cheers,
Charlotte
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