Grammar Source: EnglishpediaBring your curiosity and your questions and let’s figure out our weird language |
Seen in my hometown of Rowland Heights, Calif.
Actually, I’d frequent this place if there were any truth in advertising. Why not quaff a gin and tonic while getting your haircut?
However, the owners clearly meant salon.
The sign behind it is also interesting. With vin in the title, I was expecting a wine shop. instead, the place sells traditional Chinese dresses.
0 Comments Every year, English teachers from across the country submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country.
Here are last year’s winners:
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
I’ll answer that question for you. Yes, you do, if you’re human.
What subvocalize means is that you mentally "fill in the blanks" as you’re writing, but your reader will not be able to do the same when he or she reads it. There are many reasons that we all leave "holes" in our writing, including haste, exuberance and lack of experience.
Nonetheless, there is a cure for subvocalizing and thus making your writing understandable only to you. That cure is to leave the writing in the computer, or sitting on the table, for a day or more if you have the time. After you’ve slept on things, you’ll wake up and read your writing and realize you skipped along too hastily and left some matters unexplained or incompletely explained.
I’ve written about the ideal writing process before, but an article I stumbled upon today reminded me of the need for "curing time" in writing, so my thanks to the author of that article, Richard Kallan.
I was watching an ESPN telecast when the host brought on a PR expert in reclaiming one’s reputation. The subject, obviously, was Roger Clements and his string of lies ever since he was revealed to be a ‘roids monstrosity.
This PR guy said there was a six-step process to recover one’s reputation and that the first two steps were "truth" and "honesty."
"There’s a difference?" I kept thinking.
So I looked up the two words:
Truth is defined as "the true or actual state of a matter" by dictionary.com (the first meaning given). Honesty is defined, first meaning, as "the quality or fact of being honest; uprightness and fairness."
So, I assume what PR guy meant was that, first, one had to begin telling the truth, and second, one had to adopt a policy of always telling the truth.
I still think the two are redundant since, if you adopt either truth or honesty as a policy, you’ll achieve the same goal.
However, it’s highly unlikely that Roger Clements has any intention of telling the truth or adopting honesty. Deceit is his only mode other than bullying others.
I saw that on a sign on a store as I exited the freeway yesterday.
At least they got the first part right: "Lost Our Lease." (Actually, very few lose leases; they just refuse to pay the higher price tag.)
Find the error in this sentence:
"On July 4, 1776 a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence was presented to the Continental Congress."
Answer: The rules of English grammar dictate that you use a comma after both the day and the year, and the second comma is not optional.
Now this sentence:
"He grew up in Phoeniz, Arizona and still lives there."
Answer: The rules of English grammar dictate that you use a comma after both the city name and state name, and again the second comma is not optional.
These rules are so often abused that when I see someone who correctly uses the second comma, I figure that person probably knows English grammar pretty well. Either that, or s/he is just comma happy.
Either the Curse of the Billy Goat is at it again, or my eyes were deceiving me. I just watched a clip of the Chicago Cubs’ unveiling (on opening day) a statue to the great Ernie Banks.
Banks was famous for saying, "Let’s play two." Fittingly, the Cubs decided to put that saying on the pedestal holding Banks’s statue. However, and here’s where I’m not sure if I saw things wrong or if Mr. Goat has prevailed again, they spelled it (in all caps), "LETS PLAY TWO," with no apostrophe.
Thats no good.
First, we had bloviate, and now we have popinjay on The O’Reilly Factor.
The two are fairly intertwined. Here’s the definition of popinjay: "a person given to vain, pretentious displays and empty chatter; coxcomb; fop."
In other words, any politician or political commentator.
I attended the Los Angeles Dodgers-Boston Red Sox "historic" game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum last night, which you can read more about on my blog Le Food News, and the most memorable part of the evening was the ridiculous prices being charged for mediocre food and drink. Worse, people were actually paying the prices!
One walk around the place, and you can tell the Coliseum is run by a government entity. I couldn’t resist taking this photo to prove what I’m talking about.
Surely, any enterprising private owner out to actually make money and provide a pleasant experience for his or her patrons would at least try to use proper English (and maybe Spanish and Mandarin translations as well), but here we have above every Coliseum entryway the admonition "Don’t Crowd"–except they uniformly forgot the hypen.
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