Posted on May 30th, 2007 by grammarblogger
Am I getting more cautious or just older and nearing Alzheimer’s?
I find myself more and more checking the spelling and meaning of words at dictionary.com. The latest example came when I wanted to e-mail a couple of friends about catching a baseball that went into the stands at a game I attended.
On one e-mail I wrote about catching a "fowl ball," but by the time I got to the second missive, I was scratching my head, so I looked up fowl and foul. Foul was the clear winner, but the momentary confusion is what had me worried.
I had clearly caught a foul ball and not a bird. I guess as time wears on me, it becomes clearer why people have such a hard time with the English language.
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Posted on May 28th, 2007 by grammarblogger
Okay, so I’m borrowing this from Stephen Wilbers, who writes a syndicated column on English grammar and mechanics. This is a story of wordsmithing gone awry, as you’ll see.
Right after World War II, Sears developed a device to turn a bathtub into a shower. A hose went over the faucet, which connected to a shower head that you attached to the wall with a couple of screws.
The copywriter came up with this tagline to emphasize ease of installation: "Two screws and you’re ready for a shower."
Indeed.
Tags: Stephen Wilbers
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Posted on May 26th, 2007 by grammarblogger
I’ve written about linking verbs before but never named the complement that completes a linking verb sentence. This would be the famous predicate nominative.
Let me give you an example: "I am Gary." The verb am is a form of the verb to be, which shows a state of being and therefore cannot take an object, so it must take a predicate nominative, which is Gary in this case.
Another example: "His favorite book is Exodus." Can you name the subject, verb and predicate nominative in here? Book is the subject, is the verb, and Exodus the prdicate nominative.
Remember linking verbs show state of being, as in these examples, or simply link the subject with a modifier, as in, "This soup tastes good." Soup is the noun, tastes the linking verb, and good the modifier.
In these examples, the nouns (Gary and Exodus) and adjective (good) are functioning as a nominative (subject) following a verb (predicate), thus the name predicate nominative. In a way, then, there are two subjects in each of these examples, which are joined by linking verbs.
Tags: predicate nominative, linking verbs
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Posted on May 24th, 2007 by grammarblogger
Maybe I went to school in the 19th rather than the 20th century, but I was always taught that enthused was a bastardization of the noun enthusiasm, in other words what I would call aNotWord.
However, dictionaries at least partially disagree, saying it is indeed an American bastardization of English but one that is now commonly accepted in speech and in most writing except the most formal.
That’s me, I guess–most formal! LOL
PS Anyway, it’s great to be back up online. I had about two days there when the server went down and even after things were restored, my site didn’t work. I’ve been hacking away ever since to get functionality back, but here I am at last! It’s good to be back.
Tags: NotWord
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Posted on May 21st, 2007 by grammarblogger
Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles District Attorney who tried and convicted Charles Manson, has come out with a 1,612-page book, with an additional 954 pages on a CD-ROM, defending the lone-assassin theory on the murder of John Kennedy.
I certainly haven’t read the tome, which is called Reclaiming History, nor will I since I have no desire to revisit the old arguments about how Kennedy was killed. What fascinates me is that anyone would be so motivated to spend years, maybe decades, reading, absoring, supporting and refuting every piece of evidence and every theory on the most famous assassination of the 20th century.
If you recall, Bugliosi also penned Helter Skelter about the Manson cult and subsequent trial. At least there, he had first-hand knowledge.
Now, if he had any knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, he’d know that it was carried out on the orders of Fidel Castro.
Case closed. (LOL)
Tags: John Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Vincent Bugliosi, Charles Manson
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Posted on May 19th, 2007 by grammarblogger
Somehow I got on this horoscope e-mail list a while back. Usually I ignore the e-mails but today decided to take a look and came across a word I had truly never seen before: quincunx.
Dutifully, and feeling rather inadequate, I looked up quincunx in the dictionary. Here goes the definition: “an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle.”
If you’re a Capricorn and come across a quincunx today, turn the other way.
Tags: horoscope
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