From whence does the grammar come?

I got thinking -- actually, this little comic got me thinking -- about where we get our grammar. Sure, English mugs grammar from other languages, but where do you and I get our grammar?

In school -- high school, elementary school, middle school -- I didn't learn grammar in English classes. I was able to fake it, however, because of my mother.  My mother had gone to junior high, elementary, with the nuns. Yes, the nuns.  The ones that smacked you with rulers when you misspelled something.

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. But they were definitely big on the grammar.

And so I sort of got the feel of grammar through osmosis. Mother's nuns and reading a lot of books to pick up other stuff.

But I did learn parts of speech in high school. But not in English classes. In French classes. So I can tell you what verb tense is being used ... but odds are I can only tell you it's name in a foreign language.  Passe compose. Imparfait. Plus parfait. I'm only take stabs at what these things are called in English.

In college I learned more style than grammar. No, really, I learned thought and development of thought. Any grammar and style I garnered were accidental.

In my less than one semester of law school, I learned how to use a semicolon.

In my writing MFA program I learned style, clarity, specificity. And some other weirdness.  Useful weirdness. I got grammar told to me in a  I can't believe you don't already know this sort of way.

It wasn't until Odyssey Writing Workshop that I learned comma rules in a meaningful way.

Odd that.  It wasn't until I took a voluntary course focused in science fiction and fantasy that I finally learned how grammar rules work (and thus had the ability to explain them to someone else).

Where'd you discover grammar? Did you have to mug anyone to get it? Beat any foreigners?

Edited to add: I guess this becomes even more strange when I consider that I got my most recent job on the various degrees I have, but that job expects me to teach grammar -- something which my degrees taught me, but didn't teach me well enough to teach someone else.

Fall is Coming

Screw the Starks and all their winter is coming dourness. Fall is coming! Fall is here!

It's 60 or 70 degrees outside and the leaves are starting to change and the air smells mossy -- of cut grass and crushed leaves and rain all mixed into one.

Ah, fall, how I love you!

Now, whether or not you capitalize the names of seasons has been a point of contention between my father and I over the past year. He says you must capitalize them as they follow the proper name rule. But I was all skeptical.

Turns out the discrepancy comes from the fact that the rule has changed.


It used to be the rule to capitalize Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall -- or Autumn if that's the way you lean. But that rule has largely gone out of favor. so unless the name of the season is part of the proper name of something (like Winter Olympics) then it gets denied status and is relegated to the lowly lowercase regions (like summer school, or spring break, or wintertime).

Darn English, always in flux like all other spoken languages. If only it was dead like Latin, we wouldn't have any of these problems.
Image Credit: Mal B

Grab-bag

Writing by hand makes us smarter  ... and Margret Atwood can't touch type. Who knew?

National Coffee Day was on September 29. Totally missed it. The good people of America were handing out free coffee around the country, but I was too mired in my 10 Day Slog Through Hell to notice. But I did belated find this article from CBS on the day. Apparently "heavy caffeine consumption" is six or more cups of coffee a day and can lead to health problems. Guess that means my 3-4 cups a day makes me an addict but not a junkie ... or something.

They think they've found the honeybee hive killer -- and since the NYTimes only ran this article on October 6 of this year, all those idiots who previously told me that "oh no, they've figured it out," can stuff it. People are so full of shit. More accurately, they love speaking authoritatively about things they know nothing about.

Speaking of which, it's just a few weeks until elections and the advertisements abound, in my area they're almost all of them for the State Senate race. Except there's going to be a sharp decrease in them. Not because the Republican candidate agreed to stop her smear campaign and step up and take the Democratic candidate's positive campaigning pledge, but because the Democratic candidate passed away suddenly on Monday causing the Republican party to yank all of their negative print and TV ads. Apparently, it takes a death to get through to them this campaign season. (Update: in my mail today there were 3 smear campaign mailers)

This guest blog at Nathan Bransford's blog is wonderful. Covers a lot of ground and several different ways of thinking about the first pages of a novel.

And a little bit of love and one sad orphaned comma from Reasoning with Vampires:

Alot is better than you at everything

Fun with grammar, fun with Alots.  I particularly adore the sad Alot in the comparative statement.

In love with an essay

Check out Alexander Chee's essay "Annie Dillard and the Writing Life." I'm in love with this essay. I plan on saving it and giving it to my creative writing students to read ... when I eventually have creative writing students to whom I assign readings.

And, interestingly enough, Dillard, though Chee, finally articulates a reason for literary writers disliking gerunds. Previously it had been one of those "just avoid such-n-such" rules that I had headed but not understood.

Not All is Well in the Land of the Cat

I have a cone-kitty.


Ash and Rosie appeared to be doing fine after they come home from surgery on Tuesday. They came home with pain meds that I squirt into their mouths and thankfully both cats don't try to gack it back up. Rosie sleeps more and doesn't play as much, but still plays. Ash ... Ash was immediately back to normal. Pouncing around, chasing things, chasing after me and cleaning stuff like mad.

Ash loves to clean people who are petting her. She loves to clean Rosie. She cleaned a stuffed penguin in my house before I got Rosie although Ash might still clean the penguin when I'm not looking.

She has now cleaned her incision site open. Oops. On Tuesday night it looked pink and raw. On Wednesday morning one of the incision areas had a yellowish covering too it, but it looked dried not oozing so I was hopeful when I left for work. Returning from work Wednesday afternoon three or four sites were oozing the same lovely yellow goo. Yuck. Poor kitty.

The vet's office called to check up on her, heard the situation and asked me to bring her back in. In we went and they stitched her back up (glued her back up, technically), gave me antibiotics and another bill. Oh, and the e-collar.


The cat funnel, or e-collar, has to stay on her for ten whole days! Ten days of a sad, disoriented kitten bumping into things and scraping her cone on walls and floors because she can't figure out how big it is. I've also had to redo her food and water dish so that she can get her head in it. The kibble is now in a porcelain tart pan because it has a lip to keep the kibble in, but the lip doesn't bump the funnel and prevent her from getting to the food. Poor, sad, hilarious cone-cat.

Workshop was last night. I. Went. Down. Hard.

The characters are flat, the narrator is underdeveloped, all the characters are underdeveloped, the slangy-patois style of narration is intriguing but way too overdone. It needs commas badly ... and that was the first five minutes.

How can one professor say all that and still make me feel hopeful and enlightened? I have no frickin idea how she did it but she did. She completely ripped the story a new one and yet I still feel all sorts of rosy about the prospect of rewriting it. Perhaps because she ripped the story not me. No ... come to think of it ... she ripped into me, my style, my choices, what I had done, not the story. And still it was the most pleasant beating I've ever taken.

It was great.

It was extremely enlightening as to what I was doing wrong that I hadn't been able to pin down. The professor is very different from the one I had last fall; she's much more hands on and prescriptive. She finds your problems and tackles them to the ground. And, oh baby, do I have problems. But I knew this. Among other things, I'm terribly excited that she's told me -- in front of the entire workshop -- that I am in desperate need of commas. Yes. I knew this; I just had no idea where to put the comma. I can punctuate formal writing well enough, but it's when I'm attempting to get a "flow" in a more casual, (hopefully) artistic piece that I lose all sense of right and wrong usage.

I wasn't terribly thrilled at students who decided to beat into the ground a fault already discovered, diagnosed and prescribed treatment. Not really a fan of that.

But the thing I was nervous about -- the inclusion of the real life violinist -- was completely cool with everyone. Apparently it's very "chic" now although it's not something anyone would have ever thought to do thirty years ago, or so my professor tells me.

More Grammar Flummoxed

Grammar and Style Point

So back in the day I gave my students this sentence

It felt chilly after the jacuzzi.

and said what's wrong with it? We teased out the issues of not knowing what "it" was, of the fact that you can't "after the Jacuzzi" and the fact that "it felt" was wimpier than simply going for the jugular and saying "it was."

I explained that while they may have been taught to avoid to be verbs in high school (one kid stated that it was a point off for every to be verb in each paper), that there were no hard and fast rules like that in the real world, and that sometimes things just are and need to be expressed that way in order to create credible narrators.

To which a student raised his hand, "What if we want to create an unreliable narrator?"

At the time I didn't have a response and I just canned the question by telling him to save it for his creative writing classes not his comp credit.

But I've never forgotten that question.

I tell myself that if I had been more on the ball I would have pointed out the differences between an non-credible narrator and an unreliable one. That an non-credible narrator tells you things you don't believe because the reader believes the narrator is an idiot, whereas the reader doesn't believe the unreliable narrator because the reader has been tipped off that something is astray.

Notable unreliable narrators in 20th century literature: Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Solider, Anita Shrive's All He Ever Wanted, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. (List woefully short.)

In the first two examples there is something amiss with the narrator. The narrator starts off asserting things that we believe, but as the dissertations go on we realize that he is (in both cases) completely deluding himself as to the reality of the situation. In The Handmaid's Tale, like in many distopias, the narrator is forced into a position on unreliability not because of a mental delusion but because what limited information reaches her is heavily filtered by those in power. She only knows -- and therefore we only know -- what they want her to know.

Yet, with all of these examples, the narrator asserts what little facts he or she knows. Despite the delusions of grandeur and self-importance, all notions are presented as fact. And if we were to go by tone alone we would say they are credible narrators. They report well what they perceive without sounding wishy-washy, but as a source of information they are unreliable. Thus making an important difference between the It felt and the It was camps.

Grammar Unflummoxed

First, I'm thinking of getting a cat. Don't know if I should. That's her in the picture. She's six months, a major lap cat, she's been fostered not kenneled so she's clean and clear on the disease front ... and there's someone else vying for her! Yikes! Do I really want a cat?

Grammar stuff:
Thank you to everyone who tackled the yucky sentence that typifies what I'm seeing in freshmen writing.

It seemed chilly after the jacuzzi.

Turns out, thanks to Jes making me look it up, that Jacuzzi is a trademarked proper noun so for starters Jacuzzi should be capitalized. I argue that jacuzzi's trademark is going the way of Kleenex though.

Thronesquest was absolutely right identifying the first style error: "the main problem I see with this is that I don't know who is feeling chilly or who was in the jacuzzi." Right on TQ.

I asked my students what is "it" in this sentence. Some of them scoffed and said "the air" but at the same time someone else opened her mouth and said "the weather" and that set them off listing all the possible its. It could have been the water of a pool or lake, it could have been the speaker's skin. My favorite suggestion from my students: "the mood."

Point being that unless the sentence directly proceeding this one makes reference to the air or the mood, the reader is left to guess as to what that "it" could be.

The second style point Jes hit on: "But wait. 'Seemed'? Well, was it or wasn't it? Surely the narrator knows. I think this might be a bogus attempt to avoid the dreaded 'was.'"

"To seem," or "seemed" in this case, is one of those wimp out verbs. We already understand that "chilly" is an approximation, that there is no standard for what is chilly and what is not save the opinion of the speaker so saying "it seemed chilly" is a wimpy approximation of an approximation.

Using phrases like it seemed I was right, it felt like dancing with a bear, there were like two police cars, or we were rather upset, just dance around the actual emotion or action. Jes brought up avoiding using "was" too frequently, but honestly, sometimes the narrator just needs to step up and take control of the situation, build his or her authority and say this is exactly how it was. Go for the jugular. Say "it was chilly." Come on, take that sentence and shake it until it tells you it believes that what you say is what is really going on.

There's a reason we use the phrase tell it like it is with so passion in our culture.

The actual grammar mistake in the sentence no one specifically IDed however everyone fixed it in their rewrites.

It is physically impossible to after the Jacuzzi. You can't after the Jacuzzi. That clause, phrase, chunk (whatever) needs a verb! There has to be an action.

Something can come after the Jacuzzi physically, but that's a spatial relation not a temporal relation as the sentence implies. We muddy the waters of "come after" by using it to refer to to-do lists or agendas ... which makes it seem like one event is coming after another time-wise, but really the reference is to the next physical item on the list not the time doing or discussing that item will take.

In the original sentence we assume "to be" in that second phrase simply because we're trying to make sense of the sentence. "It was chilly after being in the Jacuzzi." We're used to making these assumptions because in spoken English the speaker rarely gets things right the first time and we're very forgiving of that -- particularly if they have hand gestures and a physical context to go with the sentence -- but in writing you have to give the reader everything in the words themselves without any external help, which, when you think about it from a learner's stance, is extremely difficult because our first learned communication has all sorts of props available to us to use. Goodness, how many times in France did I point to an object and say comme ca simply because I had no idea what the word was?

Grammar Flummoxed

I never particularly thought of myself as "the grammar police" or even as particularly savvy. I adore books like Words Fail Me and Eats, Shoots and Leaves because they always have new things for me to (re)discover in them!

But compared to my students I'm the Martha-frickin-Stewart of words. Don't even get me started about their shifting verb tenses. I'm actually amazed by the sheer ability to shift tenses back and forth that many times and still believe there is a coherent narrative -- does that make me the Grammar Nazi? I don't know. At least I don't have a mustach like the Soup Nazi.

Grammar Nazi's DIY sentence of the day:

It seemed chilly after the jacuzzi.

Two style issues and one grammar/logic error in the above. Can you find everything needed to rewrite the above a stronger, more articulate sentence?

I was going to answer it right here, right now, but I think I'll leave the comments section open and see what people have to say about the sentence before going all English teacher on it.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007

from http://www.m-w.com/info/07words.htm as refered to by GrammarGirl in her podcast

Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you've selected hasn't found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it's now been awarded—might just improve its chances. This year's winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team"—again stemming from the gaming community.

Merriam-Webster's #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:

1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

w00t! I won the contest!

Oh this stuff is priceless.