For ita and Ms. Belle:

Paint it pink

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.

The Power of Books

Photo... art thingie.

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.

(2) I shit you not -- he uses commas instead of periods to make the ellipses.

I've seen that around the interweb,,,,,,,it's weird.

Finally, as "it's" being misused is my biggest pet peeve, I have no problems with this description.

Yeah, I've been seeing this problem more and more. Or else it's annoying me more than it used to. Mostly I see it on geeky computer sites like Slashdot and Digg, but I've been seeing it crop up more company websites too.

ION, Spock's mom had died: [link]

Jane Wyatt, the television actress best known to SF fans for playing Spock's mother in the original Star Trek series, has died, the Associated Press reported. She was 96.

Wyatt died Oct. 20 in her sleep of natural causes at her home in Bel Air, Calif., her publicist, Meg McDonald, told the AP. She experienced health problems since suffering a stroke at 85, but her mind was sharp until her death, her son Christopher Ward told the wire service.

Wyatt played Amanda Grayson, the human mother of the starship Enterprise's half-Vulcan science officer, in the original series episode "Journey to Babel" and reprised the role in the 1986 movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

To the broader audience, Wyatt was best known as Robert Young's TV wife, Margaret Anderson, on the 1950s series Father Knows Best.

[link]

I see "it's" and "its" being misused everywhere, including in the scholarly pubs I edit, and it drives me mad. Haven't yet seen ,,,,,, for which I am grateful.

Something I see so often that I start to question my own understanding--it's the 80s, right? Not the 80's? That apostrophe keeps popping up when whatever's being pluralised seems a little outside the norm. ICBM's, and all that.