Just Sayin'

For an English major, I'm remarkably chill about grammar. I've blogged about this before. I don't really care about spelling and who and whom and things like that, but one thing I really don't care about is subject verb agreement. Lemme explain what I mean: as a chill English major, I feel it is my sworn duty to address the gender neutral pronoun issue in the English language. In case you're unfamiliar with the gender neutral pronoun debacle, it comes down to this: the burrito eater must realize that they will become a burrito . Did you see anything wrong with that sentence? If no, congratulations: you have successfully internalized the descriptive trend towards gender neutral pronouns in English.  If you're a prescriptivist, this makes your brain EXPLODE. Someone with a more prescriptive attitude towards grammar would probably tell you that this sentence is incorrect because "eater" is singular whereas "they" is plural. Technically, the...

I've had it up to here with English! (In this case, here is somewhere between extremely irritated and an anger that burns with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns). I mean, I really love the English language and all that crap (I mean, I am an English major), but, at the same time, I sort of think that it's punishment for the sin's of man. Like, now that I'm getting into upper level English classes, my teachers are actually stressing proper grammar and I'm just like "ugh, I hate everything." Like, but actually, I'm so casual about grammar. I use commas incorrectly all the time because I literally don't care at all. I'm just like, "eh, let me stick a comma here...and there...and maybe here and here and here. Comma rules? There are no comma rules. Let the commas run free!". I mean, in general, the meaning of a sentence is 100% clear weather or not you use a comma correctly. Granted, there are a few exceptions to this rule...

So, I don't know if you've noticed this, but Arial is the default font for like everything . This is a problem for me, because I hate Arial. I mean, I really hate it. Like, I like black licorice more than I like Arial and black licorice makes me gag. I mean, that's probably why I like Blogger so much; it doesn't use Arial. I can't stand Arial; It's so round and obtrusive. The problem is that there are so many things written in so many different fonts (and a lot of things written in Arial, frustratingly) on the Internet. So every time you think you've escaped every thing that uses Arial it pops up out of nowhere and attacks you - like that giant alligator in that movie about that giant alligator who lived in a lake and ate cows. Now, I know that all of this mean literally nothing to most of the people who are going to read this blog (especially the part about the alligator). But, as someone who writes a lot, I can tell you that a good font means a lot. T...

So, the other day I was on Facebook, you know, like your typical college student with three billion pages to read a night, and I found one of those list challenge where you go through a list of things and mark all the things on the list you've done. Anyway, I found one that was called '50 Books to Read Before You Die'. Anyway, I read a lot, so I thought it I would try it, but out of 50, I'd only read 19, and, while most of the books on the list are famous and well known and note-worthy, I don't think my life would be significantly different if I hadn't read Frankenstein. Which, by the way, was like the dullest book I've ever read. I don't really like this whole idea of list of "necessary" books. It's hard to create a list of books that everyone should read before they die because, obviously, not everyone likes the same sort of thing. That's not to say that I don't think dark or boring books can be valuable. For example, Heart of ...

So, as any good English major should, I get really upset when people under value the letter W. For some reason, people are constantly under-pronouncing the letter W in words. It's a very important letter for the English language. Think about it, without the letter W, we wouldn't have words like 'word' or 'who' or 'what' or 'Wednesday' (and you all know how I feel about Wednesday). Also, speaking phonetically, the W sound is produced by an voiced bilabial glide, and doesn't that just sound cool? Like, I have this one friend who just refuses to pronounce the W in the words 'drawer' and 'dwarf'. And I'm all like, I'm not sure if you know this, but W is actually the best letter. It upsets me so much! English, as a language, is super frustrating because most words have letters that aren't supposed to be pronounced. But I cannot think of a single instance of a word that contains a W in which the W is not supposed to be...

So, since it seems that I'm on a the-English-language-is-weird kick this week, I'm going to talk about something that really bothers me: the discrepancies between English and American spelling. As you probably already know from my Spelling Shenanigans blog, I sort of suck at spelling. My feeling is that, because it's been scientifically proven that as long as a word begins and ends with the correct letter and has the right letters in between, a native speaker can read it without a problem. So why do we care so much about spelling. I mean, when I'm typing, I obviously use spell check, but if I'm writing something by hand, I just sort of make some circles and loops in the middle of the word and hope that they can pass for an L or an I or whatever is supposed to be there and hope for the best. And, it's not just me; English spellings were standardized until fairly recently, in the history of the language that is. Like, even Shakespeare's spelling was pretty ...

So, this semester, I'm taking a grammar class. Which, for me, as an English major, is actually quite interesting. Now before you start having punctuation nightmares, let me reassure you that I'm not going to start lecturing on the proper use of the semi-colon. For me, as an English major, this is actually quite an interesting class. For example, the other day we were talking about grading adjectives. In a nut shell, If you don't know, grading adjectives is when you assign some sort of value or degree to which a characteristic applies to an adjective. For example, you have the adjective 'big', but you also have 'biggest' and 'bigger'. When you change 'big'  to 'bigger', you are grading the adjective. Anyway, our professor was talking about the fact that not all adjectives could be graded, and the example he used was 'dead'. His point was that, once someone is dead, they're dead; they can't die again, they can't be...

So, I'm like a month into my fall semester and it's going pretty well so far. Of course, I have a lot of homework but, fortunately, I get to do a lot of different sorts of things, sometimes I read, occasionally I read, and, when I don't have anything else to do, I read. So, clearly, I've been experiencing some of that famous college diversity. Occasionally, I read novels, sometimes I read novels, and the rest of the time I get to read about parts of speech and bilateral symmetry in ancient Meso-American cities. So that's always fun. All. I. Do. Is. Read. I know that you're thinking that since I'm an English major, I should like reading. I do like reading, of course, but, since the first day of classes, my life has been: wake up, go to class, go to work, come home, read , eat, read some more, go to bed, and repeat. Besides that, when ever I have free time, I read for pleasure because I have this problem where I go to the library and check out all the book...

The Oxford Comma Prevents Misunderstandings There are a few things that really annoy me: people who take up two spaces when they park, scientists who say that Pluto isn't a planet, and people who deliberately ignore the Oxford comma. In case you don't know, the Oxford comma is a magical creature that comes from Denmark, where all the magical creatures like unicorns, narwhals, and breakfast pastry, come from. It also happens to be used as a serializing comma. The Oxford comma is the comma that comes before the 'and' when you have a list of three or more things. I have a deep abiding affection for the Oxford comma because it circumvents a lot of unnecessary ambiguity. It's like my favorite piece of punctuation. I'm an English major, so I'm allowed to have a favorite piece of punctuation without being weird. My second favorite piece of punctuation is the upside down question mark, which is used in Spanish and some other languages at the beginning of a...

So, the other day I started rereading The Great Gatsby . It's a great book and all and I am enjoying it as much as I did the first time, but I noticed something that I didn't notice the first time. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes really complicated sentences. Point out the obvious much? I mean, Fitzgerald doesn't just write a sentence; he writes a little adjective filled, adverb flavored pie with a thin, flaky verb crust on top. He writes a sentence like he's riding a stampeding wildebeest in the Lion King: very carefully. Because writing a sentence can be a dangerous thing. I mean, you don't know how dangerous a semi-colon can be until you misuse one and suddenly it's punching you in the stomach while a pair of quotation marks hold you down. However, reading a sentence can be just as hazardous. As an English major, I'm used to complicated sentences, but that doesn't change the fact that every time you read a sentence, you are diving into that sentence...

Recently, I've noticed a problem in my life. It's actually not a very problematic problem; I'm buried in books. Now, before you tell me about how wonderful e-readers are and how I don't have to have the clutter of physical books, let me tell you this. I have a nook and I like it a lot, but nothing compares to that book smell and the texture of the paper and all that other nostalgic, sentimental stuff that is causing me to lose all floor space in my room. Seriously, I have three book shelves in my room, one with three shelves and two with five shelves, and I still have big piles of books lying on my floor. Not to say that my room is a mess. I have everything very organized. I have one pile for library books, one pile for textbooks I'll probably never look at again but I didn't want to sell, and about a bazillion piles for books that I bought in the past couple of weeks and can't find a place for. Yes, my friends, I'm buried alive in books. I think my ...

So, the other day I was at the annual AAUW used book sale in my town and let me tell you something, people will commit murder for a one dollar copy of A Game of Thrones . Of course, I've been to this particualr used book sale before, and I've been to other used book sales in the past, but I don't think I've ever gone to the first day of the sale before. Don't get me wrong; I'm an English major, I love to read; I love books, but this isn't just a few boxes of books at the local library. This book sale is held at the Ag Arena, which is this great big building where they have cow shows and stuff. I mean, people start lining up outside at six o'clock in the morning with big, cardboard boxes and shopping carts! Anyway, I ended up getting some really great books, like normal, but I practically got trampled trying to find a copy of The Lord of the Rings . I think the big problem was that there were just too many people. I swear there must have been like six o...

So, I've been in college for about four semesters now (if you count the Summer Session) and I've taken about six English classes so I think that I'm qualified to assert that no one talks in English class! Now, when I say English class I'm talking about the awkward five to ten minutes when everyone is just sitting in the classroom waiting for the professor to get there. And, in English classes, in that time, from anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, no one says a word. The weird thing is that, I've taken a decent number of non-English classes, and, in those classes, no one can shut up. Take bio for instance, everyone's always making plans for the weekend or talking about last weekend or complaining about their teachers/tests/girlfriends/the price of weed. Even after the professor gets there, they're still talking. In math, I've heard tales of drunken mistakes, recaps of Family Guy episodes, and homework answers being swapped, all while the lecture is...

So, I've been having a lot of essay tests over the past week and I've come to realize something. I am an atrocious speller. I guess it's always been that way, I just never noticed it before because I type most of the time. For example, as I write this blog, when I misspell a word, I get a helpful little red line and I control click and voila, it's as if I was walking around with a dictionary in my head. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen when you're scribbling away in your blue book with ten minutes to spare and you're making stuff up because the essay has to be 700 words and you have about 5. Yeah. That's a problem. Fortunately for me, in the modern world no one cares about spelling. All that's really important is that you get the first letter right, the last letter right and most of the letters in between. You should also stick some vowels in there somewhere. Usually, when I don't know how to spell a word I write the first two or three let...

In history class we're working on a group project on Greek and Egyptian mythology and we're not allowed to use websites as sources, so we have to use books. At first, I was like "no big deal - I read books all the time". Wrong: I read novels all the time. Books are different, books are scary. I had a time in the library yesterday with my group. I mean, I don't know how people did things without the internet! Doing research with books is hard - and that's with the internet telling me what I'm supposed to be looking for. First, we had to find the books, which is a lot harder than it sounds because the PSU library in HUGE. I had to go into the stacks - with all narrow little rows of books and the lights on timers and the tick-tick-tick until you run out of time and the ceilings so low you stoop a little bit to go through the doors. I realized something yesterday, I have NO comprehension of the dewy decimal system. I was looking for a book in the 50s, but i...

As an English major, I spend a lot of time thinking about words - nerdy, I know. But after nearly two decades of listening to speech patterns, I have come to the conclusion that English a really, really, reallllly weird language. Maybe it's just that I'm American or Pennsylvanian or whatever, but English speakers, as a rule, have a propensity for not pronouncing vowels, ts at the ends of words, hs at the start of words, and letters between the first and last syllable. I mean, are we French? Do we just stick random qs and zs into into words for decoration? I've been taking Spanish classes for the past four years and one thing I've observed is that, in Spanish, you actually pronounce all the letters in the word (except for hs, but we won't get into that). And I think it is for this reason that people go around referring to themselves as human "beans"; I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty sure that I'm a human being . I'm not judg...

Today in English my English teacher told the class that if we could find a way to connect our ideas, our essays would "write themselves". Now, maybe I'm missing the point, but the image that immediately came to mind was a piece of rolled up paper with eyeballs, holding a pen in his little, papery arms, writing on another piece of paper (also with eyeballs, but you can't see them because that piece of paper is lying on his back, in case you care). As if the one paper was giving the other paper a tattoo or something. So, how am I supposed to write my essay? Open Microsoft Word and yell "write" until something happens. I'm thinking that would be a pretty short paper. But actually, I've never liked that expression - I mean, even if a paper is supposedly "easy", most people can figure out a way to screw it up. And, as a person whose been subjected to many a peer review session, I can tell you that they normally do. Maybe essays are like the ...

I like commas; in fact, I think commas are the most useful linguistic tool available to writers; I mean, think about it, a comma shows that your ideas are related, they flow, they are interconnected and consistent; semi-colons are kind of like that too, they really break down your sentences; I mean, sometimes, its difficult for readers to see how your seemingly unrelated - and, in my case, usually, totally unrelated ideas - relate, well, that's what semi-colons are for; but, let's be real here, commas are friends, not food -that's from Finding Nemo - , which, by the way, was an excellent movie, though, I didn't appreciate their portrayal of whales, which are shaped like commas; you see, everything fits together into one big idea, like circle; that's why I like commas. Just sayin'.