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Grammar? Like, whatever.

I don’t know if your reaction to the phrase “grammar lessons” will result in a “YESSSS!!!”  or a “Yippee!” but I love grammar!  I love words, I love spelling, I love semicolons, and I love discussing and learning about grammar and punctuation.  My home page is m-w.com and I learn a new word every day.  When I read books, I always look up the words I don’t know.  I get an even bigger kick out of finding typos in published works.  Oh, the embarrassment!  Fire that proofreader, stat!

Grammar lessons might be a dry subject to some, but don’t let those high school memories of diagramming sentences and memorizing lame rules blind you from the fun of split infinitives, transitive verbs, and participle phrases.  I am by no means an expert, but grammar and punctuation are important to me.  They should be important to everyone.  I scrutinize every e-mail, bulletin, myspace comment, and newsletter for mistakes.  I either laugh or cringe when I see signs like the ones above.  Yes, I make mistakes; we all do.  No doubt there are mistakes in this very blog.  But…I find myself constantly observing the structure and punctuation of sentences.  I can think of four reasons for this.

First, I read.  When you read, you notice things like diction, grammar, syntax, spelling, semantics, and sentence structure.  They all contribute to the clarity and meaning of what you’re reading; they are important. 

Second, I own two very important books that have improved my written communication.  The first is the Associated Press Stylebook, a much-appreciated birthday gift from a co-worker last year.  It’s part dictionary, part encyclopedia, part textbook—an eclectic source of information for anyone who cares about good writing.  This book taught me that e-mail is hyphenated and is most helpful with capitalization and punctuation.

The other book is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a beat-up copy from Mr. Shields’s high school English class.  This book has been in print for over forty years and has given more than ten million writers a helping hand.  It’s a great little tool, teaching such basic writing rules as “use the active voice” and “omit needless words.”  Some other important tips from this book that might be helpful to all you myspacers and bloggers are the following:

Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.  Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.  Thus write Charles’s friend, Stearns’s house, Burns’s poem.

Use orthodox spelling.  Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.

Avoid the use of qualifiers.  Rather, very, pretty, little—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.  The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

Nauseous vs. Nauseated.  The first means “sickening to contemplate;” the second means “sick at the stomach.”  Do not, therefore, say, “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

Third, I listen to Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.  These podcasts are about five minutes long and are available for free on iTunes.  Grammar Girl taught me that it’s okay to end sentences with prepositions, as long as the preposition is needed in order for the sentence to make sense.  Grammar Girl is awesome.  Check out her podcasts and website.

Finally, I have a co-worker who keeps me on my toes when it comes to grammar and punctuation.  Every time I send him an e-mail, I triple-check it to make sure it’s error-free, or else he’ll rub my mistake in my face for the rest of the day.  99% of our “arguments” have been over a comma or an apostrophe.  Seriously.  He got a perfect score on an online prepositional phrase test; I missed three.  I am, of course, talking about Riley Hall.

Riley, don’t forget that it’s is a contraction, not a possessive, okay?

At a college-age leadership meeting a while ago, our pastor had been talking about a recent visit to Oklahoma to see family.  He was talking about the food and mentioned fried okra. 

Blank stares.  (This was pre-Lucille’s.)

“Do you guys even know what okra is?”  He asked us.

“Yeah, it’s whale!”  Someone said.

So funny...it still makes me laugh.

The Aesthetic Voyager

I have officially become captivated by the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless.  After hearing about Sean Penn’s new film, Into the Wild, I decided to read the book before seeing the movie.  I devoured it.  The story was haunting and kept me up at night.  It was all I could talk about last week.  I told my boss about it, my professor, all my friends…I bought a copy of the book for a friend and am loaning my copy to another, I saw the film on Saturday, and am now blogging about it.

Chris grew up in an affluent suburb of Washington DC.  He graduated from Emory University with honors in 1990.  After graduation, he gave his entire savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting hunger.  He burned the cash in his wallet, left his few possessions behind and wandered across North America for over two years to his ultimate destination—the wilds of Alaska.  His family had no idea where he was for over two years.  Chris had made a new life for himself and had a new name, too:  Alexander Supertramp.

Four months after he arrived in Alaska, his decomposed body was found by moose hunters.  Chris had been dead for two and a half weeks before his body was discovered.  He had been alone in the wild for 112 days, no simple feat.  Chris’s cause of death was starvation after he had ingested wild potato seeds, which are toxic and cause starvation, due to the alkaloid called swainsonine that prevents the body from turning food into energy.  Chris’s remains weighed just sixty-seven pounds.  Read this description from the book about starvation:

Starvation is not a pleasant way to expire.  In advanced stages of famine, as the body begins to consume itself, the victim suffers muscle pain, heart disturbances, loss of hair, dizziness, shortness of breath, extreme sensitivity to cold, physical and mental exhaustion.  The skin becomes discolored.  In the absence of key nutrients, a severe chemical imbalance develops in the brain, inducing convulsions and hallucinations.  Some people who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replacedby a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity.  It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.

(The end of the film captures this brief starvation-induced euphoria well.)

The more I got into the story, the more I wanted to find out everything about Chris.  I just didn’t get him.  “He wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast. McCandless was something else—although precisely what is hard to say,” Jon Krakauer, the author of the book,wrote.  I wanted to figure him out.  Chris fascinated me.  He seemed like a person I would have really enjoyed talking to, so interesting and intense and talented.  But where did all the lofty ideals and insane goals and rigorous moral standards and intense social awareness come from?  Chris was inspired by Jack London, Leo Tolstoy, and Henry David Thoreau, but after reading Into the Wild one realizes that from the moment Chris was born, he marched to a different beat.  Even as a young child, Chris resisted instruction of any kind and always pushed himself to the limit physically and, in a way, spiritually. He’s described in the book as having an “extravagantly independent nature.”  He evaded the “threat” of human intimacy and friendship and was never very interested in girls, reflecting lifelong virgin Thoreau’s single-minded passion for the wilderness.  He was a smart kid longing for truth, beauty,and adventure; a kid with an agitated soul. Of course, it can also be said that Chris was arrogant, selfish, ill-prepared, and reckless; his desire to live in the Alaska bush cost him his life and has left his family devastatingly heartbroken. 

There are pretty much two sides to Chris’s story—some believe he was a total nutcase who mistook passion for insight, and others admire him for his noble ideals and courage.  I have to ask myself why I am so completely enthralled by his story.  I don’t want to romanticize his unnecessary death or hero-worship him or ignore the pain he caused his family.  But I think that in most of us, deep down, there is a similar desire for a great adventure, for complete freedom from society and expectations, and I think the story of Chris McCandless speaks to that part in all of us. 

Currently Reading Into the Wild By Jon Krakauer see related

What's in a name?

Some of my oddly-named stuff: 

Yoda.  The nickname for my Toyota.  (Get it?  Yoda?  ToyOTA?)  You know I'm a Star Wars girl, right?  This should be a well-established fact by now.  At least I got rid of the Yoda head that dangled from my rear-view mirror back in high school.  Okay, moving on...

YummyPianoRock.  My e-mail.  In college, the word "yummy" was my adjective of choice, even when referring to non-food items.  And "piano rock" refers to one of my favorite bands, Something Corporate.  This is still my personal e-mail address and I love it!  (It beats my very first name, BchBum1440, and my second one, RoseDwson, referring to Rose Dawson from Titanic.) 

Betty.  My bed.  Another word play.

Riley.  The name of a purple Beanie Buddy stuffed animal that my friend Dee Dee gave me as a birthday present my junior year of high school.  If you forgot, Beanie Buddies are larger stuffed animal versions of Beanie Babies.  Now that I work with a real Riley, it's a bit strange to have a purple hippo stuffed animal with the same name.  I actually brought Riley into the office to meet the real Riley.  Riley was happy to meet a hippo named Riley because "the only other Rileys I have ever met have been dogs or little girls."

Franny and Holden.  The names of my two iPod minis, referring to the fabulous J.D. Salinger characters from the books Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye.  I love these names, I love my iPods, and I love J.D. Salinger.  Holden might even be a future child's name.  (Wouldn't it be cool to have three boys named Huck, Hayden, and Holden?)

xanga.com/SparkyTruman.  Why Sparky Truman as a hideously-named blog domain?  Well, short and lame story.  Last Christmas I got an iDog.  It's an iPod port that is the shape of a dog and wags its tail and shakes its head.  It's from Brookstone and it's actually really cute.  I was reading a book by Truman Capote at the time, so I wanted to name the dog Truman.  But my dad thought Sparky was a better name.  Alas, I compromised.  I don't know exactly how or why this blog ended up with the unfortunate name though...it's definitely a regret.