Better Speech, Better Americans. [Box title: American Speech Games: Nouns - Pronouns - Verbs - Adjectives - Prepositions].

Milwaukee, Wisconsin: American Speech Game Company, (1922). Box: 4 x 13-1/2 inches. Each pack of cards: 3-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches. Red box printed in black and gold; yellow, tan, blue, turquoise and pink boxes of cards. LACKING the last four cards of "Game of Nouns" ("book" 15), else complete. Toning, wear and light spotting to box lid; tear to one apron of bottom of box; scuff to front of "Noun" box, and light wear in general to boxes of cards; a few bumped corners to cards; light offsetting to verso of some cards. Very Good overall.

Boxed set of five educational games of cards utilizing different parts of speech -- nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions -- issued during the early years of the Better Speech Movement, which lasted from roughly 1918 until 1930. As Katherrine H. R. Healey notes in "'Speak the Language of Your Flag': Speech, Language, and Oralism During the First World War," efforts by nativists to explicitly suppress the speaking of foreign languages, especially German, during WWI were often stopped by the U.S. judicial branch, which found that the Constitution protected free speech in any language. However, obverse efforts seeking to promote "Americanization" by encouraging better use of the English language in elementary and secondary schools were widely successful, with the first "Better Speech Week" taking place in Chicago in 1918, and rapidly spreading to other school districts around the country. The week, sometimes called "Better American Speech Week" or "Watch Your Speech Week," exhorted students to "speak the language of your flag," that "better speech makes better Americans," and that "slovenly speech bespeaks a slovenly mind."

Not only were students encouraged to use better English themselves, they were to monitor their peers as if they were potential enemy combatants. As Dennis Baron writes in "National Grammar Day in Wartime," "[s]choolchildren were asked to spy on one another and report instances of sloppy pronunciation, bad grammar, and slang. The worst offenders—whether immigrant or native-born—were tried before the class, summarily sentenced, and interned. The spies who were caught had to write essays describing the error they had made and correcting it. Offenders were also interned as enemy agents, but despite the warning that anyone escaping from detention 'to harm our speech' would be 'shot at dawn,' there are no reports of students actually being executed for crimes against English" (https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/89120).

This game obviously takes its title from one of the Better Speech Movement slogans, and while less darkly menacing in tone than the above threats of internment and execution, still positions the players as competitors seeking to point out the other players' grammatical errors, and in doing so to make them better citizens. Played in the style of "Authors," each deck of cards is comprised of 15 "books", with the last three "books" being the hardest and able to be removed from the deck if too difficult for the players. Each player in turn aims to make as many "books" as they can by asking for specific cards from the other players, using the sentences on the cards, and the player with the greatest number of "books" at the end wins.

Not located in OCLC.