GrammatiCats: Zeugma

Zeu-what?

Zeugma.  (Pronounced ZOOGma - the 'eu' is like it is in 'leukemia', and like everybody thinks it is in 'Dr. Seuss'.)

Yeah, I didn't know this one either - but it's totally a thing!  Are you ready for this?  I mean, fair warning:

Pinkie Rating: 5

what's this?

For real, you guys.  This one isn't long, but it goes deep.

So what's zeugma?  It's like this:

GrammatiCats: Y'all

Well, look.  I was sitting around trying to think of a good grammar topic to do for "Y" today. 

And I said to my cat, I said: "Kitty, what if we did 'your' and 'you're'?"

And she was like,

And I had to admit that it didn't sound like a terribly substantial topic. 

But then I thought, "Wait a minute - we DO know a Y-word that the world needs to understand!  Quickly, kitten - to the Hickmobile!"

Thus, we have arrived at "y'all."  Come!  Let me teach you the pronoun of my people.

Beer Score: 2

GrammatiCats: XXIV (and Other Roman Numerals)

Yeah, it's a little sneaky, but look: how many grammar words do YOU know that start with "X"?  No jury will convict me!

Actually, though, I'm super jazzed about this post.  I'm a huge Latin / Roman history dweeb, and it came as a surprise to me when I first met someone who couldn't read Roman numerals.

"But didn't you just, you know, want to snort them up your nose and wear them on your face when you were taught them in school?" I asked, perplexed.

Well, apparently not.

But!  Since we do still need them for keeping track of popes, Superbowls and Land Before Time sequels, here for your edification is a no-fear guide to Roman numerals.

GrammatiCats: Was and Were

"Pff, what?  WAS and WERE?  Who doesn't know how to use those?  I 'was' going to read this post, and you 'were' going to write something worth my time.  Handled!"

I know, right?

But then where the dickens do we get "If I were you", and how come Beyoncé's singing about "If I Were A Boy"?  Did Loudon Wainwright screw up in writing "I Wish I Was a Lesbian"?  Should it be "I Wish I WERE a Lesbian," or does it even matter?

These are the burning questions on which our tiny grammatical planetoid turns.  Join us now for a very special episode of "Days of Our Conditional Verb Tenses."

Pinkie Rating: 4

what's this?

GrammatiCats: Voice

Hello again from Internet land!

Sorry these last few posts (and comments, visits, et al) have been on the late side - my life's inbox has been full to overflowing with you-know-what.

Anyway, voice!

Not the "finding your unique writing style" kind of voice - that's well outside my purview.  (For that, you need to come to DFWcon and hear Jenny Martin's class: she will take you to the wall!)

But you know how people are always ragging on the "passive voice" and talking about why you shouldn't use it?

Well, I'm here to tell you that - just like alcohol, television, and saturated fats - the passive voice can be part of a healthy literary lifestyle.  And the only way you can make good decisions about when and how much to use it is by having the facts and knowing the alternatives.


... that sounds more like a medical pamphlet than I'd intended, but you get the idea.  Onward, to voice!

Pinkie Rating: 3

what's this?

GrammatiCats: Umlauts

Um-what?

Umlauts!

Otherwise known as "those little dots that Mötley Crüe put in its name for extra metal cred" and "The official  diacritical mark of the Weimar Republic."

"That's great for them," you might say, "but what does that have to do with me?"

Well, have you ever wondered about how or why your word processor autocorrects your writing to say "Noël" or "naïve", or why the New Yorker keeps talking about "preëminence" and "coöperation"?

If so, get your pinkies out, people - we are going to put the ü in über.

Pinkie Rating: 5

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GrammatiCats: Tmesis

I know, right: you had to click over here just to figure out whether I really did misspell "thesis" that egregiously.

But no!  Check it out, you guys: tmesis is totally a real thing.  Here's one right here:

Did you see it? 

GrammatiCats: Subject and Object Pronouns

All right, you punks - pull up your pants, get off my lawn, and listen up good.  Let me tell you a story.

See, back in the good old days - you know, back when children respected their parents - the linguistic light of the Western world was Latin.  And the cool thing about Latin was that you could arrange the words in your sentence almost any way you wanted, because the ending of each word told you its function. 

For example --

Puer puellam amat.
Puellam amat puer.
Puer amat puellam.

--all mean "The boy loves the girl."  No matter how you arrange the words, the "-am" ending in "puellam" says that the girl is the one who is loved, while "puer" (with no ending) says that the boy is the one who loves.  (If the girl loved the boy, it'd be "Puella puerum amat.")

The same is true for verbs:

Clamo, clamatis, omnes clamamus pro glace lactis.
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

Notice how the Latin verb, clamare, changes its ending each time so that you know who's doing the screaming.  You could dump this whole sentence out on the floor, and no matter how you put the words back together, you will ALWAYS know who is doing what to whom.

Two thousand years later, what does the new "international language" called English have to say for itself?

Yeah.  Exactly.  Our words have to hold hands like kindergartners crossing the street, because Lord knows what would happen if we mixed them up.

Before I get you a drink, hit me.
I drink before you get me a hit.
You hit me before I get a drink.

See what I mean?  One jostling of the word order and it's anarchy.

But look just there: we have I and me.  They both mean the same thing, so why are we hardwired to never, ever say Get I a drink or Me hit you?

Could we still retain a glimmer of our noble Latin roots?

Is there anything about this that you don't already know?

Well, I'm throwing down a four-pinkie challenge - let's see how good you are!

Pinkie Rating: 4

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GrammatiCats: Reign and Rein

Just a short one today (tonight?  I'm so hideously far behind!)

I'm not the type to get all bent out of shape when someone comments on a news article and their post has a spelling error.  (For one thing, news article comments are the motel pools of the Internet: swim at your own risk, and whatever you do, don't get any in your mouth.)

However, a depressing number of actual news articles keep messing this up, so I figured it was worth sending the cats out to tackle it.

Because I say things like that now.

Because in my own mind, I'm like Professor X, and my X-Men have names like Adverberus and Modifire and the Predicator.  And I send them out to fight crime, and we all live together in a big secret mansion lair, and I'm never, ever lonely.

What were we talking about?

Right.  Reign and rein.

Pinkie Rating: 3

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GrammatiCats: Quotation Marks

I wasn't actually going to do a post about quotation marks.  Because who doesn't know how to use quotes, right?

As it turns out, me.  I was writing the Linking Adverbs post when I realized that I didn't know whether to use single or double quotes when I was referencing a word (such as "however"), and although I sincerely didn't want to have a comma inside the quotes, I wasn't sure whether that was a universal grammatical dictate, or simply an MLA-mandated habit from my school years.

So now we have this post.  By all means, help me to remediate myself!

N.B.:  All of the following advice concerns American usage.  Quotation practices are considerably different in other English-speaking parts of the world.

Pinkie Rating: 3

what's this?

First of all, I'm going into this with the assumption that you guys are already pretty good with the ol' double quotes.

1.  Dialogue and Other Direct Quotations