Which Witch is Which?

Today I was reading papers for the "grammar" side of things, and one of the writers kept using "witch" instead of "which".

The first time it popped up, I underlined it and said "ooh, witch!" and drew a picture of a witch's hat and broom.

The second time, I underlined it and said "a witch! scary". Then in the margin I wrote "witch/which" and using arrows to indicate the word to which I was referring "This one is a noun" and "This one is a subordinating conjunction". I'm sure you can guess where the arrows went.

I circled a few more misuses. The last instance of "witch" in the paper, I drew another witch's hat and broom. I almost drew a black cat, but then I thought maybe it was going over the line.

I wonder if the writer ever confuse the two again...

(PS: Rory returned tonight! Yay for returned kitties).

I am THE GRAMMAR MASTER

Well, sort of.

I stumbled upon this grammar mastery test on my daily Internet visiting. Since I pride myself on such things as my mastery of the trickier rules of Standard American English, I took it. I scored 48/50. Not shabby, though far from perfect.

As I was taking it, I actually noticed several problems. A few of the answers were identical, allowing me to rule them out, if I didn't quite know for sure. That must have just been whoever set up the test.

Something else was bothering me about this test, however. And then I realized--the sentences were designed to trip up the test-taker, not as representatives of good written English. Some of the sentences were far too complex and convoluted--if one of my students were to write like that test, I would scold them.

That's when it dawned on me about grammar education--we often teach students in a way that they should not write or would not use language. No wonder students often have a hard time grasping certain grammatical concepts. Grammar studies often operate in a vacuum, and students have no way to bridge from the abstract world of proper grammar to actual ways of speaking and writing. They can't make the connection, especially when we teach them using sentences that are unconnected to their daily modes of discourse.

Part of what I'm going to address in my thesis is the disconnect between freshmen composition and students' future writing. Students take freshmen composition, believing that they'll never again use those concepts, never making the connection between the skills taught in composition and the skills they need to be effective writers in the workplace. I hope I can find a way to bridge this gap, and help students be better writers and communicators.

Amusing Bad Grammar?

I've recently gotten hooked on this site, which is funny in this quirky way that I can't describe. I have to thank the Grammar Vandal for getting me to click over.



Why is it so funny? I don't understand. Is it because the poor spelling and funny ways of phrasing the captions are intentional? Part of it is the cute pictures of "kittehs" and other creatures paired with the captions.

I think I love it for the intentional use of poor spelling and grammar, and for the utilization of IM-speak. I've always enjoyed satires, and this one combines funny captions, cute picture of kitties, and satire. After all, if a person wrote in the manner of the image above, would they even be able to recognize perfect grammar if they saw it?

My roommate makes fun of me, but I like this site. What do you all think about it? I know it's the blogosphere craze right now, but I can't help but feel that it's popular for a good reason.

Fun With English

I'm the sort of nerd who gets a kick out of certain words and phrases, especially when they convey an unintentional joke.

Take this phrase:

It was an unexpected surprise when a pair of baby twins was born at 12 midnight.

Do you see the joke?

Today's browsing was particularly fruitful in the usage department. Did I ever tell you that one of my favorite books ever is the Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (Thanks Noel for talking about that in class once.) I was particularly distressed when I moved to my current city, and I discovered it was missing from my library. I am excited because it is required reading for one of my classes in the fall. Well, in my browsing today I stumbled on this essay by George Orwell, which is both on the same lines as Strunk and White and applicable to today's politics. Here are his rules for writing:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I'm a big fan of clear, concise writing, so I like these rules. And the essay is pretty good too.

Another site I discovered with the Fun with Words site. I'll be checking that one out in a bit more detail later.

And finally, courtesy of my pal Secret Knitter, comes a link to an NPR story about a grammar vandal. A grammar vandal? I want to be a grammar vandal! I'll be listening to that here shortly, so hopefully it's good.

Well, enjoy the Fun With English Day!

The Apostrophe War

I had a brief hiatus. My brain was not feeling up to thinking up something to write, so I didn't, but here's a new post.

Lance and I took a trip for a wedding this weekend (I was a bridesmaid). We made a gas stop, and I decided to take the opportunity to use the bathroom before we got on the road for the three hour trip. While in the ladies room, I noticed an amusing conversation on a sign from the management. It ended with "Thank's". I chuckled over this for a minute, but I was also amused by some handwritten comments on the sign.

Someone had taken a pen and scribbled out the obviously wrong apostrophe and wrote "NO APOSTROPHE". Someone else had later scribbled "Who cares?" The third (or possibly fourth) conversant added tartly, "The small percentage of Americans who are actually educated".

There's a weird tension that I run across in the attitudes toward being educated. For example, my mother always wanted me to use proper grammar so I wouldn't sound uneducated (and perhaps have ignorant parents), but she would mock or deliberately misunderstand any signs I showed of participating in higher education. (She hates discussions, for example, which I think are integral to academia). If you don't speak standard English, you could be labeled a hick (in Arkansas) and basically be called ignorant, stupid, or uneducated, but if you use a wide range of words, people laugh at you for being a nerd or a show-off.

Gerald Graff in Clueless in Academe (and probably some of his other books) addresses what he sees as America's anti-intellectualism. Aren't we a nation that prides itself itself on being full of working men (and women) who pull themselves up? Isn't that a part of the American dream, to go from nothing and work hard to make yourself into a success?

People want to be successful, but they don't want to be seen as too smart or intellectual. My mom called me an egghead because I got some of those glasses with the dark frames. It was a slight insult, an acknowledgment that I was purposefully adopting the nerd look (if that's what I was doing). My brothers and parents used to either imply or directly state that though I was "book smart", I had no "common sense", as if those things were mutually exclusive (I believe I was naive at that point in my life, but I'm fairly sure I've got a good measure of sense along with my book-smarts).

In one of my education classes, our professor asked us if we'd rather be highly gifted or of average intelligence, or if we'd rather deal with students with genius-level IQ scores, or those with below average scores. I immediately said that I'd rather be highly gifted, and that I'd rather work with intelligent students (but praise those who have the patience and love to work with students who are not so privileged); however, to my shock, many of my other classmates said that they would not like to have a high IQ because people who did were unable to socialize properly, were somehow outside of society, were nerds who didn't live in the same world they did, even though our professor told us that research shows that those with a high IQ are usually highly socialized, able to move successfully in the world, and typically function as normal individuals. But those students could not get out of their minds the image of the nerd: the awkward, unsociable individual who is out of touch with pop culture and society, the one who plays video games and chess, and wears dark heavy framed glasses and pocket protectors.

There is a strong anti-intellectual streak in American culture. Perhaps that's why we have the president that we do.

However, the apostrophe war in the bathroom stall gives me (a little) hope that people do care about education, about being intelligent citizens. We may not all be grammar nerds (or nerds in general), but we can still care about the "life of the mind", improving ourselves through education, and being intelligent, capable individuals who can make the world better.

I'm Smarter Than My Computer

Grammar Check and I are both lovers and enemies. Like Spell Check, Grammar Check is both a useful and debilitating feature on Microsoft programs. Usually I roll my eyes at the suggestions Grammar Check gives me, (and occasionally yell "That's not a frackin' fragment!!), but in the end I feel good because I know things that a computer can never know.

Grammar Check reinforces that language is more complex than even a machine can understand. See, while language has rules that a programmer can use to define language in a system, language also has exceptions to those rules. And a computer has difficulty understanding embedded phrases. So, for example, if I say "Here are the civil engineering summer and fall updated reports", grammar check wants to replace "are" with "is" because logically, the subject of "are" follows directly after, right? And "civil engineering" is singular. However, what the computer doesn't realize is that "reports" (plural) is actually the subject of the verb, thus the verb needs to be plural. But I imagine in order to define such an easy concept (for our language instinct carrying brains) requires impossible programming rules, since it can change on a whim.

That's why Grammar Check and Spell Check have to be used carefully. While they can be useful for catching a misspelled word or an accidental misuse of tense, ultimately computers can only understand the basic logical framework of language. The complexities and twists and turns that we instinctually make as native English speakers is impossible to define for a programmer (though, I hear they are getting closer). When it comes to language and grammar, we are always smarter than our computers (even if we can't always spell properly--but don't forget about those tricky words!)

If you are interested in more about language, I highly recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. He's a really smart, really easy-to-read guy, and as language has always fascinated me, I adored his book.

Grammarians Unite?

A very funny British woman decided to write a book about punctuation, which become the wildly popular Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I remember in one chapter Lynne Truss describes her urge to walk around with a giant red Sharpie correcting punctuation and grammar in signs, especially the apostrophe.

I occasionally have that same impulse. For example, today I was walking back from lunch and I noticed a sign that read "Stamped with Mamas Great Seal of Approval". Did you spot the missing punctuation? It's Mama's Great Seal, after all. People, I muttered to myself, have no sense of punctuation or proper uses of grammar.

Which leads me to the other half of my internal debate: should I get so caught up in others' improper use of grammar and punctuation? Do I side with the language purists who declare that English is going to hell in a handbasket (which apparently has been going on for centuries)--or do I side with the more moderate linguists who say "So? It's language. It's meant to change".

Sometimes I just don't know. Punctuation is a useful tool when employed properly, and I know that I can be confused by misplaced apostrophes or commas, or the lack thereof. The rules are not merely there to give a writer a headache and complicate their already difficult task; punctuation is useful to clarify, separate, and keep phrases where they belong. Remove the punctuation from the previous sentence, and you (my dear readers) would be confused. I would like then to separate the concept of language from punctuation, and spoken communication from writing.

Punctuation assists in clarifying writing in a way that is unnecessary in oral communication. Commas, periods, question marks, etc. provide the pauses, the emphasis, the lilt of speaking. We really cannot do away with punctuation, though in language we can come to accept the current use of "like" (instead of "as", for example, not as a random insertion that teenagers use). Punctuation is not as flexible as trends in language because punctuation fills a need that a different word cannot: it simulates spoken language.

I think in the matter of punctuation, I am going to side with Truss and the unbending grammarians: use it properly. Though I could probably survive if we forever dumped the who/whom distinction (subject/object pronouns!), I would likely perish if I could no longer use the colon or semicolon (don't even try to count how many I've used in this post alone). And the pesky apostrophe? I think we should keep it too. It tells me if people are possessing things instead of being plural, or if a word is a contraction. Terribly useful.

Do you think we should let the poor users of punctuation do away with our useful system? Where do you sit? And if you are obsessed with a piece of punctuation, what is it?

Beware the Big Bad...Grammar?

I've been encountering this a lot lately: people find out that I'm an English person, and suddenly they're commenting that they need to watch how they talk or act embarrassed about their writing. Things of that nature. I didn't used to get that quite as much, but ever since I started my MA program (meaning that my answer to "What do you do?" has changed), I've been getting a lot more of it. But why?

I always smile a little and hurry to reassure the worried party that I am in fact NOT judging their writing or their speaking. (Well, part of my is analyzing their writing and speech, but I tuck that bit away). But here's the deal--why would I critique the way someone speaks? That's just plain rude. I'd hate for someone to start criticizing my eyebrows. And that's what language is--it's a part of us, part of who we are, and part of our appearance. I don't correct grammar (for the most part--usually it's people who I know would want to say things properly, or I'm dating/related to them) because that would be like telling someone their eyebrows are weird.

Everyone speaks proper English--just not SAE (Standard American English), which is the dialect that They selected as the paragon of spoken English. Here's the deal--almost no one speaks SAE. If they say they do, they lie. I say "y'all" a lot, as well as some non-standard phrases, but they are still correct. The listener understands what I am saying.

Anyway, I might occasionally mock bad writing, but usually it is in the context of that person being a professional writer--and doing it horribly. I would never dare to tell someone that is writing for enjoyment or fun that they are punctuating improperly or that they really should capitalize. I can grumble about it to myself, but I would never tear another human being down in such a way. How we speak and write is an intrinsic part of our selves--and probably why people get so nervous when they hear that I am an English MA student. (I wonder: do they suddenly see me as taller? As brandishing a red pen? Or thumping a yardstick?)

It's a weird balance to strike. Just as I have to separate my critical self from my sensibilities that might be outraged by a work of art (Kant!), I have to separate out the part of myself that wants to "fix" writing and grammar and realize that it's better to just let people be free to express themselves. I would never want to be the cause of a loss of self-expression and freedom.

Apostrophes, Apostrophes (and Drinking)

We were quite drunk. Don't gasp, it was a Girl's Night after all, and we had started at Lori's apartment on some fantastic homemade sangria. By the time we made it to downtown, we were happy, buzzy, and giggly--and extracting wedding details from Leanne, the guest of honor. (I had already agreed to make her a guestbook, but when I was sober...)

After some sushi, we went to Common Grounds, a lovely coffee shop/bar. It was raining, but we were cozily inside, ordering martinis and cake. Six girls, six forks, two pieces of cake. And more drinks. I look at the menu, and I see "Martini's". My grammar brain clicks on, apparently not slowed down by my consumption of intoxicating beverages. My mouth, which usually checks such displays of nerdiness, was unequal to the task, and I shouted, "Why is there an apostrophe?" All of us scrutinize the menus, and Sophia declares that I'm right--there shouldn't be an apostrophe in martinis. We banter back and forth about the apostrophe, then dig into cake.

We then head for another bar, where I pick up the beer menu. And there's yet another misplaced apostrophe! I burst out, "Look!" and everyone laughs and me and mocks my nerdiness--but they had said "wheat's, ales, and stouts". They couldn't even be consistent with their apostrophe errors, so I fussed a bit more, the grammar schoolmarm in me raging, generating more laughs all around (including my own). A pineapple upsidedown cake shot shut me up for the rest of the evening, though not before I declared that I would start carrying around a red sharpie to apprise the world of their apostrophe errors.

It just goes to show that one's true obsessions are not slowed down when ingesting mind altering substances.

Allow Me to Quote You a Quotation...

I have something that's been bothering me for while. I used to not care, but suddenly I developed a new grammar twitch that hasn't gone away. It drives me up the wall when people misuse 'quote' and 'quotation'. Here's the difference:

--QUOTE: a verb, TO QUOTE. "He quotes random movie lines constantly."
--QUOTATION: a noun. "He loves movie quotations."

I suppose some of the confusion enters in from a lot of words that are both nouns and verbs. (Example: DRINK. He drinks. He takes a drink.) Also, you can call in for "a quote" on some service (an estimate, if you will)--call in for an insurance quote! So really, it's no wonder that people just use "quote" when they mean the noun "quotation". I really shouldn't get all bent out of shape on it.

But none of us can truly know why the gods decide which things will drive us crazy. And right now, those that misuse quote-quotation are on that list.

"Mistakes Were Made"

I'm sure we've all seen the news about the firing of the prosecutors, which may have been politically motivated. Alberto Gonzales is quoted as saying "I acknowledge that mistakes were made here".

I can't help it; when I see phrases like this, I just want to shred them, deconstruct them, and look at what is going on underneath. He starts with "I acknowledge" which implies that he wants to admit something. It's an active phrase, the subject "I" clearly doing the acknowledging. However, acknowledge implies recognition or the revelation of something previously unknown. It's not admitting--admitting would mean that he was hiding something--it's a realization about a situation.

The "I acknowledge" is countered by the next part: "mistakes were made". "Mistakes were made" is a passive phrase. There is no mention of who made the mistakes. It's a shifty phrase. It's evasive; it's an attempt to appease those who might be out for Gonzales' head. The mistakes were not made by anyone in particular, after all, they were simply made.

Together "I acknowledge that mistakes were made" had a double meaning. It's like he's casting the glamour of taking responsibility without actually doing so. It appears that he's attempting to calm those who are shouting "fraud" without attempting to point out how the mistakes were made or on whose discretion.

The word "here" is an interesting touch. "Here" is one of those directional words that only have meaning in context of the speaker. Is "here" a physical location that Gonzales points to during the utterance? Or is it a figurative "here" that seeks to give the utterance immediacy and accessibility--or serves to cut off those who are not "here" because they are "there" (at least in terms of the speaker). After all if I'm here, you must be there. If it's meant to cut out those that are outside the "here", then the whole utterance speaks a language of hiding, doubleness, and evasion.

A reader or listener who receives this utterance might be vaguely troubled, but not know why. After all, doesn't it seem like Gonzales is recognizing that something wrong happened? But in reality, he does no such thing.

The moral of the story: Don't use passive language--use the active voice in writing and speaking. Unless you're a shifty politician backed into a corner. Then you daily rely upon the passive voice to cover your ass.

Grammar Humor

I always get a kick out of grammar humor. Maybe it's because much of it is so subtle that only someone who enjoys and appreciates the complexities of grammar can get it--a sort of inside joke between grammarians and linguists. Sometimes they are just ironic and make you snort a little. And sometimes people sell grammar humor on t-shirts. And I still enjoy it.

Take "I'm a Noun". I've been tempted to purchase this because it is grammar irony, but keep reminding myself that I probably wouldn't wear it anywhere except to bed. It's the sort of thing that a hipster college kid would wear (not me), but I can still appreciate the humor.

Then there's this one--a lovely play on words. Books are good for you...just like broccoli!

I had a friend tell me that she thought of me whenever she saw this one. Maybe it's because I get a little red in the face when people confuse words like their, there, and they're or your and you're. Or it's and its. (Not that I've never not confused them...but...I'm knowledgeable about the difference.)

Ah, grammar humor. What's your favorite grammar joke?

***This post brought to you by Threadless. Mostly because I'm too lazy to look for other examples of grammar humor.***