My 1950s miseducation in English.

[Lionel Mandrake]

8. You have interesting things to say, as always.

A couple of observations: This group is not very active, but you seem to monitor it constantly. My OP was mostly a story about my past. Your reply was likewise mostly about your past.

The sentence diagrams inflicted on me in public school were nothing like those in linguistics, and they had nothing to do with learning Latin. There was no Latin instruction in my junior high school. The Latin teacher in my high school refused to die, so Latin was an option, but, like the vast majority of college-bound students, I chose something else. I took French and hated it. In college I took German and hated it. Much later, I got interested and actually learned a smattering of these and a few other languages. When I did so, I learned some English grammar for purposes of comparison.

My Greek teacher used to say: "Who loves you? The definite article!" My Latin teachers, alas, couldn't say anything of the sort, nor could your Russian teacher(s), for these languages lack articles. Eventually Latin developed them, but by then it was no longer Latin.

Aspect as distinct from tense was never part of the curriculum in my English classes. Nor were syntax and semantics. The purpose of grammar was never discussed. It was always presented as gospel truth, not an after-the-fact construction. Whatever it couldn't explain was by definition an idiom, i.e., unexplainable.