Grammar

Finals Metaphor from a friend who is a freshman, off of Facebook:

Brent is starting to see the Christmas lights shining behind the dark clouds of finals!

Since I am collecting real-world examples of metaphors and grammar errors, and because it is so timely, I thought I would post it here.

Why we yawn says, “Yawning is apparently the fan in your head’s CPU.” This metaphor ultimately came from a Discovery article/

This may become a feature on TCE.

“The lady shined.” from The American Spectator

What is the subjunctive? It is a verb tense. People should use the past subjunctive when they have contrary-to-fact clauses, such as those that describe imaginary or hypothetical conditions.

The use of “if” in a sentence, requires the subjunctive tense. Usually we use “was,” but that is incorrect. It should be “were.”

“In a way, she felt as if she weren’t really here, as if the whole thing was nothing but a dream.” from A Message in a Bottle by Nicholas Sparks.

The first if in that sentence is followed correctly by were. But the second is not. Why did he compose one correctly and not the other?

I found one in Nora Roberts’ High Noon. If I find it again, I will post it here.

A wonderful article discussing the need for the comma when a series is being written. A lovely piece. And it is quite readable, too, even for non-English teachers.

Very funny.

it looks like any ordinary comma, and, for the most part, acts like any ordinary comma, except that this comma, plain as it is, does something extraordinary–it guards against the ridiculous.

Commas, much like insults from your significant other’s father, should, if you’re paying attention, give pause. And in doing so, they, by their very design, separate. (My hope is that you’re getting the gist of that as you read this comma-saturated discourse.) The Oxford Comma, specifically, is used before the last item in a series to both separate (thereby denoting equality within the list of items) and to remove ambiguity in the author’s meaning caused by mis-grouped words (eat, cow, and pie, vs. eat cow pie).

Some of your teachers in the past may have told you that the commas separating things in a series simply take the place of all those ands.

is apparently “learnt” in UK English. Check these 500 pages of references in the BBC archives.

I noticed it when I was reading. I wondered if that is an older conjugation. I was not able to find “to learn” listed as a weak verb in Old English with a “t form” ending.

However, yahooanswers thought the same was probably true, but argued it using German. That’s odd.

In the Word Reference Forums they say that “learnt” is preferred in UK, learned/learnt is equal in Canada- but learnt is not often used, and that in the US “learned” is considered educated while “learnt” is considered hick.

It doesn’t give me a definitive answer on whether learnt is an older form of the verb or a newer one, but… I guess it doesn’t matter to anyone but an English teacher or a foreigner trying to sound reasonably smart in the US.

Freshman English at my college requires that you pass the state test at a certain level before you get in. If your scores are too low, you have to pass a remedial course as well as the state test.

Then you are in a Freshman English course. Perhaps mine. It’s a pretty full course. We write five essays: narrative, descriptive, process, compare/contrast, and illustration/definition. We also write two research papers. They are both over the same controversial topic. The first paper is a paper arguing for the side the student disagrees with. The second is a paper arguing for the side with which the student agrees. We also have an in-class essay which is the final.

I have many students drop out. Apparently my version of the class is much more rigorous than others. I have reasons for that, but obviously someone who is not committed to the class isn’t going to stay in.

So, for example, I had 50 students to start with this semester. I have had 19 drop. So I have 31 students left. (Much more manageable class size for an intensive writing course.)

In order to pass Freshman English, a student must not only make decent grades in the course, they must also pass a grammar test. There are 50 questions and the student only has to answer 26 correctly, but many students don’t pass on the first try. Only three tries are allowed. Then I am required to fail the student.

Obviously I don’t want to fail people who are trying, so I set a re-take date, give the students recommendations for tutors, and then go forward. I check their tests. If they still haven’t passed, I encourage them to get more tutoring and there is a second re-take date set. I require that the third attempt be made before the drop date, so that if the student fails, they can get out of the class without failing.

Of the 31 still in class, 9 have not passed their second test. Of those 9, 6 showed up for my grammar review.

I was a bit confused as to what to do for the grammar review. The students who cared had gone to the “wonder worker” tutor that our chair recommended. How was I going to help them? I couldn’t teach them every rule of grammar that they needed to know.

I got copies of the practice exam, which I have been told is “just like” the real test. And I went through the test, talking outloud, saying what I would do if I were taking it. This, as I was reminded today, is called “modeling: the teacher ‘puts his/her mind on display’” (Math teacher at Casting Out Nines.)

It was time consuming. It took about half an hour longer than the test is supposed to take. (They actually don’t time you on the test.)

But I talked it through. And the students who were there all said it helped immensely. We will see. In half an hour I will go pick up their third attempts. Hopefully they will have passed.

Update: Unfortunately, only four of the seven who took the test passed. Three of the students who came to the review did not pass. It was very hard to give those failing notices to the students who did not pass. One cried. And I wanted to cry as well.

Very old joke. Now I know where it is from.

The author Mark Twain proposed in jest that the English word pronounced /fIS/ ought to be spelled rather than , with pronounced /f/ as in rough, pronounced /I/ as in women, and pronounced /S/ as in nation. (8, 10)

fromLinguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages.

I received a paper in which every single word which in some way referred to God was capitalized. It bugged me, so I went looking for rules. I tried Google, “grammar of God” and found some interesting websights, but nothing useful. I switched my google search to capitalization of God and found some answers.

1. God, Allah. The rules about pronouns referring to the deity vary; some reference works state that “He” or “His” or “Thee” are capitalized whenever “God” is capitalized. Some writers always put the pronouns in lower case. Check with your professors about their requirements.

This info from Richmond, edu.

2. a spoof which says you should capitalize words next to words about God

3. Incorrect capitalization of the noun “god”

Well, you say that god exists, but I think Santa Claus is more plausible.

Here, the writer is showing his complete and utter disdain for God by demoting him below Santa Claus, not only with his sentence, but with his capitalization. This is just plain wrong. In this sentence, God is a proper noun, and needs to be capitalized to distinguish it from “a god” as seen in the following sentence (which is correct usage):

I don’t see proof that there is a god.

Incorrect capitalization of pronouns

I know that God is alive because He shows himself to me.

Here, the writer is capitalizing a pronoun to try to convey the massive respect he has for his god above anything else that may be expressed with a proper noun. This is also bad grammar, though it does not introduce the confusion that not capitalizing “God” can (as noted above); it looks like he either has a sticky shift key or meant to break a sentence. Proper usage would be something to the effect of:

I know that God is alive because he shows himself to me

Capitalizing God

4. Capitalization is like italicization or “like” quotation-encapsulation, it is a method of subtly changing the meaning of a word to suggest a different, a “bigger”, an “important” form of it’s use to then subtly change the meaning of the entire sentence.

Examples of capitalization include:

� God - not “oh god, today sucked”, but “Oh Lord, thou art ten pounds of Holy in a Five-Pound-Bag.”-God

� Bad Thing - not “bad doggie, no biscuit!”, but more towards being “Evil”-Bad.

� Good Thing - not “that’s a good way of doing that”, but “this is the Right and Just way to do that”

� Social Engineering - not chatting up a gal to get her phone number, but chatting up a gal to get her friend’s number.

Often, such emphasized terms will be found in notibly brief sentences with abrupt punctuation. This may be seen as the writer directing focus and resolution to the sentence. In speech, one might imagine the speaker crossing their arms and straightening their posture to say things such as:

� Violence is Bad.

� God is Opinion.

from Info Anarchy

5.� The names of religions and religious terms receive capital letters.

We read a story from the Bible about God and Moses.

NOTE:� Pronouns referring to God should be capitalized.� Non-specific use of the word “god” should not be capitalized.

The Bible talks about God and His disciples.

The Egyptians worshipped many different gods.

Some company’s website

6. Religions: Methodist, Catholic, Taoism, Christian, Buddhism, Muslim

Note: Capitalize God only when it refers to the Christian God; also capitalize all nouns and personal pronouns when they refer to God.

Montana Life

Basically I found that most of the authors and sites said that the pronouns etc should be capitalized.

Any thoughts on that from anyone else?

Update: I actually think, after having thought of this for months and months, that I prefer that the title and the pronouns be captialized. It shows respect. Special respect. But apparently the Bible scholars think it should be more normal.

According to the SBL Handbook of Style, which, I am told, is the Bible for Biblical scholars, just as the MLA is the book for English scholars, God and his proper names should be capitalized, but not common titles or any pronouns.

So, Jesus is the Son of God, would be correct. But it is His kingdom of which he is Commander, would not be correct.

Learn something new everyday. There’s a goal to strvie for.

Thanks, Bryan, for the cartoon. Another cartoon for English.