NaBloPoHalfMo: Playing with spelling

Spelling is a wild kingdom, but I like to play there.

A couple weeks ago, my friend Diana complained about something Oregon State University had sent 'round that contained a letter or report from a teacher talking about how a student's interest had been "peaked." In case you are one of the thousands who apparently don't know, if your interest has "peaked," it means it has reached its upper limit. The word this teacher really wanted is "piqued," meaning the student's interest had been awakened.

I recently saw someone on Facebook use "peek" instead of "pique." Yeah. If your interest is peeking, please stay away from my windows.

Peak, peek, and pique are homophones, words that have the same sound but different meanings. Other examples of homophones with which people torture the spelling-and-grammar-minded among us are: too, to, and two; their, they're, and there; and your, you're, and (less frequently) yore.

I'm the first to admit that homophones are a pain in the ass. But oy! Be more careful, folks.

Another interesting category of words is homonyms—words that have the same spelling but different meanings. These can be really puzzling. Take "spell" for example. How do you suppose that one word ended up meaning all of the following:

• a magical incantation,
• a deep influence (as in, "under a spell"),
• colloquially, a brief period of time (as in, "let's sit a spell"),
• to write or name the letters of a word, and
• to convey or bring about (as in, "that spells trouble").

At least with homonyms misspellings are less of an issue.

Speaking of misspelling, do note that second 's' in there. Misspell is a frequently misspelled word. Ah, the irony.

A new service for unschooling bloggers

If you would like me to copyedit your blog posts, you can send them to me here. I will endeavor to get them back to you within a few hours (unless you're in Europe or an early riser on the East Coast). I will limit my edits to spelling and grammar, leaving your writing style intact, and you will of course have the final say on what gets published.

My motivation for doing this is simple: Good writers are not necessarily good editors. I'd like to minimize editorial issues that distract readers from the important themes being discussed on unschooling blogs.

This is a free service.

Premise: using the wrong word will get you booted off the premises

Here's another pet peeve: using "premise" singular to mean a building or property. YUCK! Retail types do this all the time. "I want the shipment to be on premise by Tuesday." YUCK!

"Premise" singular is an idea, an argument, the foundation for a theory. If you're talking about the building or property, it MUST be plural "premises."

Speaking of pet peeves

10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling

I thought it was just me

Okay, so I know it's mostly people interested in good grammar and spelling who are reading this article on MSN about the stress of bad grammar and spelling, but I find myself more hopeful about the future of English after seeing these results from the Live Vote linked to the article:


Of course, there's no guarantee any of those people who are out there fighting the good fight are getting it right. :-)

Grammar from the Interwebs

The horror!

i no some of you dont like uesing the SDD wind shear maps but in tell the wind shear maps gets fixs this will have to do

My favorite part is "in tell" for "until."

Here's an edited version (just in case you couldn't decipher that):

I know some of you don't like using the SDD wind-shear maps, but, until they are fixed, this will have to do.

Colorful metaphors

Your use of language has altered since our arrival. It is currently laced with, shall we say, more colorful metaphors, "double dumb-ass on you" and so forth. — Spock, Star Trek IV

A slip of the tongue was probably the trigger for a conversation I overheard the other night on our way to the baseball game. I tuned in when MJ was explaining to 9yo Emma that she is allowed to use "bad" words. Someone asked by whom she was allowed, and she replied, "My mom." My grandma asked her not to use them in front of her. My mom asked for clarification about when she is allowed to use them. MJ admitted (with that word describing her tone of voice) that she isn't supposed to use them in front of grandparents.

The truth is, she is "allowed" to use whatever language she wants, whenever she wants. I have asked her to moderate her language around small kids and people who are sensitive to language (including grandparents), but she is free to disregard this request. In most cases, probably for her own reasons rather than mine, she watches what she says at family gatherings. But sometimes she slips and sometimes she lets fly.

I swear with some regularity, but I tend to use profanity to create impact in my speech. And indiscriminately while driving. Frank swears freely.

It's about personal expression. We (including our kids) are free to speak as we will. People who are offended are free—no, welcome—to ask us to stop, just as I asked a drunk guy at the game to stop dropping F bombs around Emma (he did).

And in the case of our daughters, it's about learning. We all experiment with language. Our speech rhythms and habits change over the course of our lifetimes. The societal rule that says kids don't get to experiment with profanity until they turn 18 or 21 or whatever is just silly. And unrealistic.

Did you wait until you were 18?

Finally, it's about comfort. I want my kids to be themselves around me. If a "colorful metaphor" will help them do that, I have no problem with that.

NaBloPoMo "Y"

Y is for You and Me




Who went?
You and I.
You went.
I went.
You and I went.

Who joined her there?
You and I.
You joined her there.
I joined her there.
You and I joined her there.

With whom did she go?
You and me.
She went with you.
She went with me.
She went with you and me.

For whom did she try?
You and me.
She tried for you.
She tried for me.
She tried for you and me.

That sucking sound you heard...

...was Ronnie getting pulled back into the quicksand that is judgmental parenting.

My niece: "Me and Sam went—"
Ronnie: "Who went?"
My niece: "Me and Sam."
Ronnie: "Sam and I?"

I even heard myself saying something about how I "had to" correct her on that one.

Oy vey.

And to complete the horror, I have no recollection of how she eventually finished the sentence. So, on top of being just plain rude, I obviously wasn't listening very well.

It's really easy to slide into this crap. It's much harder to make up for it when you come to your senses.

But I'm going to try. Here's a start: I'm sorry, Chelsea.

Thursday 13

This is my 13th TT. I would have liked to do something special like Mary did for her 13th, but I am theme-less today. So here is... A Random Thirteen 1. Why live music is better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhhLeqjjf20 2. This is the cat I would have if I weren't allergic: I fell in love with Abbies when I met a little charmer named Tiger. He loved me nearly as much as I loved him and sat on my shoulder to cuddle and sniff my ear. I sneezed and wheezed for an hour afterward, but it was worth it! 3. As you might have been able to discern from my TT of two weeks ago, I love movies with ensemble casts best of all. "Two minutes, Turkish!" 4. I find it tragic that the subjunctive is fading from our language, especially when expressing a wish or a hypothesis. However, I once heard (a possible grammar-geek urban myth) about a killer's use of the subjunctive in a note left at the crime scene helping to convict him, since so few people use it these days. 5. Speaking of urban myths, did you know that "Ring Around the Rosie" is probably not about the Black Death? 6. MJ took this: 7. The oldest romance novel I've read (if you don't count Austen, Brontë, et al.) is The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart, originally published in 1961. It's a damned good book. 8. This is terribly unoriginal—I'm certainly not the first to claim her—but this is my secret girlfriend: Why? She's stunning, of course, she works for the welfare of children, and she did some of her own stunts in Lara Croft. That bungee ballet scene? Beautiful! I'm just glad they skipped the silly falsies in the sequel. 9. Oh my gawd, I just realized I left The Rock off of my list of favorite action movies. For shame! Great quote: "Well, gosh, kind of a lot's happened since then." 10. These are the 935 lies that drove us to war in Iraq — The Center for Public Integrity 11. After Juno, I have had to reconsider my opinion that Jennifer Garner is a horrible actor. She still sucked in Rose Hill, though. Of course, that movie was a pretty terrible adaptation of a pretty charming book, so her suckiness was...appropriate? 12. We have been watching this family transform their house. So nice to have somebody else doing the work for a change! 13. This is the prettiest TT I've ever seen.

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Ten pet peeves

It's been a while since I ranted. Can't go too long without a good rant! Of course, I'm feeling too good to do it right. Five minutes ago, I set my mood (at right) to "Mixed." And then our STUN Movie Night came together so I know we get more good times tonight, and now I'm all chipper (even if I do have to clean house now).

So maybe I'll skip the rant and just list some pet peeves. This is by no means a comprehensive list.

1. When mothers threaten their children, especially in malls and other public places. Most recently overheard threat: "Stop doing that or you won't get your cookie." gack

2. When the scissors have not been returned to their drawer in the kitchen. We probably own eight pairs of scissors, yet I can never lay hands on one.

3. When people don't show up for meetings at work.

4. When people on message boards get pissed off over the advice they receive instead of simply ignoring what they don't like (or better yet, thinking about what was said).

5. When people hog the left lane. I know I might have mentioned that one before (like a dozen times), but it bears repeating.

6. When people say "so-and-so and I" when they should say "so-and-so and me." The trick: If you would use "me" if there were no so-and-so, then you should use "me." For example, "She went to the store with so-and-so and me" and "Send the e-mail to so-and-so and me" are both correct.

7. Same as above but substitute "myself" for the "I".

8. When I make grammar and spelling mistakes, especially mistakes that get published. (Did you know I have been known to flush with shame over and hurry to edit two-year-old blog posts?)

9. When Wendy's (and it always seems to be Wendy's) gives us the wrong food. "They f*** you at the drive-through!"

10. When I set out to make a list of ten items and can only come up with nine.

What unschooling looked like in the middle of the night

I usually try to avoid making a big deal of the schoolish moments that happen in our house, because it tends to make non-unschoolers (schoolers?) think that unschooling *only* works when schoolish moments happen. But this was too cool, so I have to talk about it.

Last night, Chloe confessed that she isn't sure she's acquiring skills marketable enough to land a job when she's old enough. We talked about her options some, then I made an offhand comment about her abilities as a proofreader. One thing led to another and we were soon huddled around the computer playing with words. I typed out a series of flawed sentences, then Chloe corrected them. It was so fun! We played with changing punctuation to completely change the meaning of a sentence, and we found some badly written paragraphs on the Internet that she and I fixed in different ways. This went on until three in the morning!

Here are a couple of examples that made her laugh. The first I borrowed from a recent discussion of punctuation on Grammar Geeks.

Woman without her man is a savage.
Woman: without her, man is a savage.

Real men don't eat spinach, but I like it.
Real men don't eat, Spinach, but I like it.

I discovered to my delight that Chloe knows how to punctuate speech perfectly, and she—normally the queen of lowercase—knows perfectly well that the pronoun "I" is always capitalized. What can I say? Such things are near and dear to my heart.

She told me one of her pet peeves from reading fan fiction. I will share it here in the hopes that somebody somewhere will see the error of his ways. She says fan-fiction authors often write spoken questions like this:

"Are you crazy" he asked?

That is very bad indeed, and I can only thank my lucky stars that I have never come across such wretched punctuating. Here is the corrected question:

"Are you crazy?" he asked.

With Chloe reassured of her skills, we talked about how this is one of the perils of unschooling: sometimes unschooled kids have little idea of how much they have learned. Kids in school get regular validation (or correction), and they are constantly compared to their schoolmates, so they have some feel for where in the spectrum their knowledge falls. Unschooled kids know that they are experts or budding experts in the areas they are passionate about (manga, music, karate, Swahili, whatever), but they don't always realize how much general knowledge they've acquired. So, Chloe had no idea she is an expert at grammar and punctuation, and she will tell you that she is bad at math, just after she's added a column of numbers in her head or worked a fraction problem effortlessly. We'll work on it.

A small rant about spelling and grammar checkers

I hate to break it to you, dear readers, but you can't trust your spell-checker. I've spent today writing in Microsoft Office Word and being disgusted with the number of things it tells me are wrong that are actually correct. Here are a few examples:

Word thinks "noninventory" is misspelled. Actually, Word thinks just about any word starting with "non" that doesn't have a hyphen in there is misspelled. This is simply not the case. The Chicago Manual of Style and the American Heritage Dictionary agree: "non" words are nonhyphenated unless:

• The hyphen is arguably needed for legibility (non-native)
• The "non" comes before an already modified compound
  (non-English-speaking)
• The non is part of a Latin phrase (non sequitur)

Watch out for this sort of spell-checker confusion whenever you're using a prefix. Chicago says compounds made from all of these prefixes should be closed (no hyphen, no space) in most cases: ante, anti, bi, bio, co, counter, extra, infra, inter, intra, macro, meta, micro, mid, mini, multi, neo, non, over, post, pre, pro, proto, pseudo, re, semi, socio, sub, super, supra, trans, ultra, un, and under.

Word has as much it's and its confusion as the next guy. Word told me that "it's" in the following sentence should be "its".

The file is not ready for review, but it's close.

This is simply not the case. That "it's" would only be "its" if I were talking about the close (of business, of the letter).

"It's" is a contraction standing for "it is." The verb that is tucked in there means "it's" tends to come before adjectives ("it's hot") or gerunds ("it's going to be another hot day tomorrow"). It's active or descriptive.

"Its" is about possession and always comes before nouns (although the nouns might be modified by an adjective first, as in "I was distracted by its faulty reasoning"). It's its own thing.

Word can't handle a little creative writing. Finally, Word is forever getting lost in my sentences and telling me my subjects and verbs do not agree, when clearly they do. Of course, this one might be just the tiniest bit my fault for writing such long sentences. :-)

Anyway, the point is, don't turn off the spell-checker or grammar-checker in your head. If you think the checker in your software is mistaken about something, you just might be right! Get a second opinion!

P.S. I should clarify something. It is not that Word actually thinks "non-inventory" is preferable to "noninventory." There are simply too many possible "non" words for all of them to be in Word's dictionary. So, it doesn't recognize "noninventory" at all, but when you type "non-inventory" instead, it recognizes "non-" as a prefix that is in the dictionary, and it determines that "inventory" is spelled correctly. I don't know why it doesn't recognize "non" as a prefix without the hyphen; that was evidently too much refinement for the developers to cope with.

I should also point out (or maybe I just want to) that if you previously had blind faith in your word processor's spell-checker, you're not alone! I've had professional writers and editors tell me I was misspelling a word because Word didn't recognize it. That's one for the pet peeves file.

8 things about me

My unschooling buddy Schuyler has meme-tagged me.

~~~Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.~~~

1. I want to go live in England with Schuyler! I have a little fantasy of living in a flat in Epping, a little town that is at one end of one of the Tube lines. I could live the village life but have amazing, exciting London a 30-minute Tube ride away. Loverly!

2. I also want to live in Sunny Valley, Oregon. I fell in love with Sunny Valley when we traveled down to southern Oregon several years ago for the wedding of one of Frank's many cousins. It's a gorgeous spot just up the road from Grants Pass. You climb a big hill and there it is, in all its green glory. One of Oregon's historic covered bridges is located there, but it's the woods I really love. Too bad they charge Seattle prices for homes there!

3. A recent development: I feel guilty for wearing comfortable clothes. Just don't ask me to explain it!

4. I wear comfortable clothes all the time. If Levi Strauss ever goes out of business, I'll be devastated.

5. I proofread everything: books, billboards, Web sites, cereal boxes. Words are my passion and all, but even I get a little tired of the editor in my head. It would be nice to just *read a book* without thinking, "The author should have used the subjunctive there!" or "It's its not it's!"

6. Our experience on the Zombie Princess might have put me off sailing forever.

7. On my bulletin board at work, I have pictures of Boris Karloff, Beethoven, a nun playing paddleball, a mermaid, an American Indian, and a stick-figure writer whose arms are tied to his torso. I also have a quote from Shakespeare in Love that reads, "The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster... Strangely enough, it all turns out well."

8. I want to marry Frank again. We talked about doing it this summer—it's our 17th anniversary August 24th, and 17 years is our age difference—but the summer filled up with other events. Sometime soon, though.

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As a rule, I don't pass chain letters on, so I won't tag anybody. But feel free to put your 8 in the comments or on your own blog!

Grammar makes a comeback

From the Washington Post:

Grammar for Teachers
"The Loudoun County school system offers an annual summer staff development session called Grammar for English Teachers, tailored to teach the basics to teachers who didn't learn them in college. 'It usually fills up pretty quickly,' said Carrie Perry, supervisor of English language arts in Loudoun... The newest English teachers are products of a grammarless era, unprepared to distinguish an appositive from an infinitive.

"'What you have is a generation of teachers from the early to mid-'70s who don't know grammar, who never learned it,' said Benjamin, an author of the national council's publication. 'We have armies of teachers, elementary teachers and English teachers, who don't have the language to talk about language. It's kind of their dirty little secret.'"

Grammar for Students
"In surveys, not quite two-thirds of students said they had studied grammar by the time they took the 2005 SAT.

"Those concerns, and a growing consensus among scholars that many high school graduates 'can't write well enough to get a passing grade from a professor on a paper,' drove the addition of a third section to the SAT, upending decades of balance between reading and math, said Ed Hardin, a content specialist at the College Board.

"The new section introduced a long-form essay and -- less publicized -- a series of multiple-choice responses that test how well students can assemble and disassemble sentences."

The full article is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/22/AR2006102201135.html