Dr. Walsh ,'Potential'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
My theory about diagramming sentences is that once you've taken a sentence apart that way, you'll retain some concept of the structure of the English sentence.
The comma today appears to be just as random sentence decoration, except here. Bless you all.
Robot thinks humans taste like bacon.
And everything tastes better with bacon...
Yay new TV!
Cute moose.
I never diagrammed a sentence, but my middle school English teacher strongly implied that we were supposed to have done a lot of it before then. I had not. I got by.
Huh. When my parents were in college they did a project trying to differentiate between good and bad wine using some kind of chromatography and failed (they like to tell this story. The bad wine was Fetzer). But an infrared spectrometer works. That's progress I guess.
Scary-ass dolls: [link]
The return of grammar:
I'm earwormed with "SexyBack," only now it's "I'm bringing grammar back...."
I’m bringing grammar back
Those participles don’t know how to act
If you dangle, I will make you crack
Watch me diagram your ass
Take it to the root . . .
I. Love. Vortex.
The comma today appears to be just as random sentence decoration, except here. Bless you all.
I edit the montly newsletter for a group I belong to; most of the articles are written by the president of the group. He abuses ellipses in 2 ways: (1) he uses them all the freaking time, and (2) I shit you not -- he uses commas instead of periods to make the ellipses.
It makes my head hurt and my eyes bleed.
We never diagrammed sentences in grammar school, but then my high school Honors English teacher spent a whole unit on it. At that point, I realized I'd gotten a leg up on my fellow students by having studied German where we'd spent most of our time on the grammar... so even though my retention of any useful knowledge of speaking German is nil, it really did pay off.
My teacher had us diagramming Shakespearean sonnets which presented really interesting problems, because they rely very heavily on Latinate construction which is about as far from modern discourse as you can get and still be intelligible. Suddenly a lot of these poems made sense to me.
I don't remember ever diagramming sentences (but I was fascinated by the concept as seen in the Little House books, same as flea and Sophia), but we were drilled in identifying what the various parts of speech were, as well as the rules of grammar (never end a sentence with a preposition, never start with a conjuction, etc.). Nice to see that the English classes are bringing grammar back, though! From that article:
Grammarians are regarded as a rather grumpy lot. They decorate their classrooms with quotation marks rather than quotations, brood for hours over the staff memo that misuses the contraction "it's" and ply students with unpardonable puns. Greiner, in a recent lesson, elicited groans by invoking Santa's workshop while discussing the subordinate clause.
We're not grumpy--we're precise! We are also fun, as demonstrated by said use of grammar puns. Finally, as "it's" being misused is my biggest pet peeve, I have no problems with this description.