I took a class in early 20th century American literature while I was a student at the University of Florida. Every essay, book, or article we read struck someone somehow. I got so disgusted by students saying, “What struck me about…” or, “I was struck by…” that I wrote a response paper asking the professor to imagine me striking a student on the head with my Norton Anthology the next time someone said something about being struck. I found a list of world wide web dangerous words today and it reminded me of that class.
Posts tagged “English”
Ending Lists
On list groupings and the correct use of commas
Grammar
“Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools … for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time
Top Ten
I laughed out loud at #4 on the list of Top Ten Ways to Torture Your Professor: Hold fast, to your belief that, liberal and seemingly-random, use of, commas in term papers, makes you look, real smart.
vocab
Not words: acrost, irregardless, nucular, supposably, nother, alot, alright Not verbs: interface, input, impact, itch
The English Language
I really get aggravated when people try to argue their way out of what are really meaningless mistakes by saying that the English language is flexible and there aren’t any hard and fast rules and who cares if they’ve spelled something incorrectly because it doesn’t matter as long as you get it and blah, blah,
Accent
Wicked Good Guide to Boston English
Hate Me for This
A quick lesson on it’s versus its: it’s is a contraction of the two words “it” and “is”; if what you are trying to do is say, “it is,” and you want to do it without using that pesky middle i, use it’s its is possessive; try to think about how neurotic you would be
An Invalid
You can imagine how stupid I felt when I called someone an “invalid” in high school. As if they weren’t valid. And don’t even get me started on “epitome”. ehp-ih-tohm. Fark this farking language! Drives me nutty sometimes, it does.
A Literal DSL Connection
To find out how you can litererally connect with GTE DSL Service, click on the following information for a complete overview of DSL components, pricing and the steps to getting GTE DSL. I will not pay attention to the spelling error. I won’t. I’m not looking at it. What the hell do they mean by