Monday, October 26, 2009

Back off, grammar cops!

This just came in from Salon.com:
Memo to grammar cops: Back off!
A new book on the history of "proper" English says you're just stuck up
By Laura Miller

"Passions run hot when the discussion turns to language," writes Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch in his sprightly new history of the notion of "proper" English, "The Lexicographer's Dilemma." "Friends who can discuss politics, religion and sex with perfect civility are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique." Ain't it the truth? My favorite call-in radio program regularly invites "word maven" Patricia T. O'Conner to come on and talk about new and old figures of speech. O'Conner clearly prefers to marvel over the language's diversity, but the half-hour is inevitably eaten up by people kvetching about their pet peeves, more often than not some barely detectable error or non-infraction that makes the caller apoplectic -- such as the phrase "gone missing," which is "perfectly standard," according to Lynch. But who am I to mock? I, who have gnashed my teeth countless times over the dangling participles that abound on NPR!
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Friday, October 23, 2009

Diagram This!

Ashley, Ben, Colby, Destiny, Shevlyn, and Tyler have accepted the challenge of diagramming more complex sentences. They have begun by diagramming compound subjects, compound verbs, gerunds, present participles, past participles, appositives, and understood prepositions. Presumably, they can diagram every sentence in this carefully composed post!

1. Playing and dancing with my son Angus this morning exhausted me and energized him.
(Steve Benton, Diagram This!, first page)

2. “At a distance he can see the tall line of a dozen or more aqueduct arches, commencing suddenly, suddenly ending; coming now from nowhere, now going nowhere.” (James Gould Cozzens, Morning Noon and Night, last page)

3. “Stealing watermelons on dark and rainy nights was a pious duty when I was a boy.” (Donald Day, Uncle Sam’s Uncle Josh, 5)

4. “Repudiated, embraced, attributed, claimed, it turns up everywhere, changing shape with the times.” (Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom, XI)

5. “Emboldened by his father’s reaction to Zhivago, Sergei produced Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle and Cancer Ward and George Orwell’s 1984.”
(William Taubman, Krushchev, 628) That's Kruschev, without feathers, in the image at left.

With the exception of the first example, these sentences come from Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2006).