endnote n.64: trivium, quadrivium, and the hard-ass
at nodes of hoary classicality like Oxford and Cambridge U. during the time of Samuel Johnson—more or less the original grammato-lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass—and that the trivium makes you take grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then if you’re still standing you get the quadrivium of math, geometry, astronomy, and music […] or better yet Dr. A. M. Incandenza’s updated version of same, with its prose updated and typos eradicated and argument rather more keenly honed
Context
The endnote explaining E.T.A.'s trivium/quadrivium talk: grammar is literally first among the liberal arts here, Samuel Johnson gets canonized as the ur-prescriptivist, and the recommended pedagogy monograph turns out to have been revised by Dr. A. M. Incandenza herself — "typos eradicated," naturally. The Johnson-as-hard-ass line seeds Hal's own "If you want prescriptive specificity you go to a hard-ass" at pp. 899-900 (see the spine).