The Missing Part of Speech at Schoolhouse Rock!

Members of Generation X, please feel free to sing along:

A noun's a special kind of word,
It's any name you ever heard,
I find it quite interesting,
A noun's a person, place, or thing.

Oh I took a train, took a train to another state.
The flora and the fauna that I saw were really great.
When I saw some bandits chasin' the train.
I was wishin' I was back home again.
I took a train, took a train to another state.

If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons on ABC in the 1970s and '80s, it's likely that you know this ditty by heart. Just as you know that you can "tell them 'bout it with adjectives," visit "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly" to "get your adverbs," and "eat this or that, grow thin or fat" at--where else--"Conjunction Junction."

In three-minute animated segments, Schoolhouse Rock! introduced a generation of youngsters to the basic parts of speech, along with such varied topics as the women's rights movement ("Sufferin' 'til Suffrage"), the solar system ("Interplanet Janet"), and the national debt ("Tyrannosaurus Debt").

But if you were among those young Schoolhouse viewers, your introduction to the parts of speech was unfortunately incomplete. Full credit to Schoolhouse Rock! for covering nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, as well as pronouns, conjunctions, and interjections. But one part of speech was inexplicably missing from the lineup.

It was not until 1993, almost ten years after the original series had gone off the air (and you, presumably, had long since quit watching Saturday morning cartoons), that Schoolhouse Rock! composer Bob Dorough got around to celebrating the achievements of the "Busy Prepositions":

Nine or ten of them
Do most all of the work
Of, on, to, with, in, from
By, for, at, over, across
And many others do their jobs,
Which is simply to connect
Their noun or pronoun object
To some other word in the sentence.

So now you know why you were a B student in school--just one part of speech short of an A.

If you're feeling nostalgic for Schoolhouse Rock! despite this prepositional letdown, you'll find all 46 programs on the anniversary edition DVD. Alternatively, if you simply want to review your grammar, visit our less lyrical but still lovable Basic Parts of Speech (prepositions included).