I pan fried some of the Honey Baked ham this morning to go along with chocolate & caramel chip pancakes. We've almost used up enough ham so that I can make split pea soup later this week.

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Health~ma to your mom, Theo, and coping ~ma to you.

Go Hil! You're going to rock!!

In meme news, I have spent four days grading, have more to do today, and have to go back to work tomorrow. I am an idiot for putting this all off until the last possible moment. Grr.

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shoving it haphazardly into random plurals makes the Baby Jesus cry.

omnis I can forgive. It's the so-called "professional journalists" who keep abusing it that have been making me nuts and contemplating doing things that would end up with me in an orange jumpsuit with side-slash pockets.

My mother, a lifelong communications/PR professional, has started using quotation marks for emphasis. Like so:

I'm eating Trader Joe's chocolate-filled cereal bites, and I "love" them!

I try to explain to her that she should damn well know that using quotation marks in that way makes it look like she means the opposite of what's in quotes.

She yelled at me and told me that I just don't understand. At which point it officially became Freaky Friday.

(And I *am* eating Trader Joe's chocolate-filled cereal bites, and I *do* love them.)

You know you are in a room of brainiacs when grammar causes some of the most heated discussions.

Be glad you weren't around for the Gerund Wars. Very, VERY glad. Seriously.

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You stay up there with people who appreciate that, like your parents, God and Ayn Rand.

And you hand me the perfect example of the serial comma being a Good Thing. I can't tell if you are comparing someone's parents to God and Ayn Rand, or you're giving me a list of three (parents, God, Ayn Rand). Or maybe my fever has eaten my BRAINNNZZZ.

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I confess, lasy week I looked up the areas of Israel and Gaza Strip. According to the CIA factbook, Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey. And Gaza Strip is roughly equivalent to (2) Washington DCs side by side. I can't imagine trying to hide military air flights. Fixed wing or not.

Huh. If you'd asked me, I'd have guessed that New Jersey was smaller than Washington DC. Shows how good a grasp I have of geography!

Omnis, I am sorry for being rude - apostrophes are a sort of soap box issue for me.

I second amych's recommendation that you DON'T worry about the exceptions - there are hardly any exceptions. The basic rule with regard to apostrophes is this:

Contraction

We are lazy bastards, we English speakers, and we like to squish words together. When we do so, the apostrophe is a little pointing finger that indicates where the missing letters should be. Thus

Fay is a bitch

becomes

Fay's a bitch

with the apostrophe pointing at where the letter i should go.

Possession

If something belongs to somebody, you can either express this in a roundabout way:

This is the explanation of the girl

or you can use an apostrophe:

This is the girl's explanation.

Easy.

Now, if more than one girl were busy trying to explain things, we'd have the word girls instead of the word girl. And, logically, following that rule you'd think it should look like this:

This is the girls's explanation.

But since we are lazy bastards we don't bother with adding the extra s at all, aince there's already one sitting right there at the end of the word, and instead we just put in the apostrophe to indicate possession AND contraction at the same time.

This is the girls' explanation.

Basically, any time you see an apostrophe you can quickly check what job it's doing. Is it a little finger pointing down at where a letter got stolen, like in don't or isn't or o'clock (of the clock)? If not, then it must be indicating possession. You can check that by rewriting the sentence:

The dog's dinner

becomes

The dinner of the dog.

While

The dogs' dinner

becomes

The dinner of the dogs.

Okay, shutting the fuck off and getting washed to go start teaching the people I'm supposed to be teaching, rather than being annoyingly didactic at innocent grownups. Monday morning, and I am Jetlaggia, Queen of the Jetlag people. Fear my bloodshot eyes and stumbling gait.

edited because abbreviation isn't the same as contraction. Duh.

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And you hand me the perfect example of the serial comma being a Good Thing.

This was Nutty's quote in favour of it. It is in fact the perfect example of why the serial comma is not a good thing, as
a. It's not difficult to work out the intended meaning, and
2. It's hilarious.

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Patiently waits for Fay's explaination of the difference between "it's" and "its".

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Patiently waits for Fay's explaination of the difference between "it's" and "its".

It's a pronoun, so the rules work differently in its case.

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If you'd asked me, I'd have guessed that New Jersey was smaller than Washington DC.

Huh. Interesting. NJ is a state, DC is a city. I'd bet that NJ contains at least one or two cities bigger than DC. (edit: and after quickly looking up some numbers, I think I'd be wrong about that. Newark is smaller than I'd thought.) (And I'd also bet that I could name just about nothing on a map of the UK. Well, I know where Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland are, and I've got a vague idea where London is, and I think I could also roughly place Stonehenge and Dover.)

DC is actually a somewhat confusing area of US geography. It's not actually in any state -- it's the city of Washington, District of Columbia, where the city and District boundaries are exactly the same.

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throws things at Tom

t Secret apostrophe font

Dude, see what Amych said about the "99% of the time" business? I was trying to go with that, because poor Omnis is clearly letting the fact that he knows there are occasional exceptions to the rule make him feel that there's no guessing what the whacky apostrophe might do next - when in fact, it's pretty damn consistent! So I wasn't going to make it any more complicated than it needed to be! Do not fill the poor guy with fear and loathing of the apostrophe!

But if you want my explanation for WHY there's an it's/its issue, my teacherly take on that is: shit happens.

Tra la la la.

whistles

Nice weather we're having lately.

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