More Outstanding Grammar Blogs

We think you will enjoy The Red Pen and GrammarBlog.

http://mightyredpen.wordpress.com/
http://spandg.blogspot.com/

Be sure to note the changing taglines on GrammarBlog. They're quite entertaining.

Who That Girl

It's perhaps unsportsmanlike to pick on the grammar of a pregnant convict who's being interviewed by Diane Sawyer, but we're not feeling very Girl Scoutish at the moment:

I have a responsibility and it's something that I did wrong, and if I could personally apologize to every single person that has lost a loved one from drunk driving, I would," Nicole Richie said.

It should be every single person WHO has lost a loved one. Generally, that is a pronoun best reserved for things and unnamed animals. There are some cases where people can be "that," but we don't care for it.

All Give and No Took

Ordinarily, we don't make fun of blog posts, especially ones written by minors. This, however, comes from a post on SportingNews.com to a member blog that's been viewed nearly 300,000 times. That's not a small number of readers. The writing is comically bad, though it can be enjoyed by a novelist trying to capture the diction of a sincere but illiterate teen.

There's no way to bold-face all the errors, so we're focusing on the word "tooken," which brought us here:

To my point of this whole blog entry is, your life can be gone in a flash. Your dreams, your love, your likes, and your life can all be tooken away in one little wrong move. I was lucky a couple times to not have my life tooken away by a motorist when one ran a red light and I was on my scooter going across the street when I was eleven and was litterally knocked down by the wind of the criminal.

The wind of the criminal, eh? Our dog emits that every so often, and we are forced to light a candle. We'll do the same for this young writer.

Throw Me a Bone

On a lark, we decided to see how many citations for "throwed" we could find with Google. The answer? 415,000. Many of these seem to be rap-music lyrics, which occupy their own category of probably excusable idiocy.

But this?

Stu did something he never had to do before: He recorded a mechanic's lien and gave a stop notice to the construction lender. Stu started getting legal bills monthly and paying out big money. He sued. Nick countersued. It was a race to the courthouse! Winning this lawsuit had become the most important thing in Stu's life. He'd been throwed off a job! No matter what the cost, he had to prove it was not his fault, and he had to prove it in court.

It comes from a Web site for lawyers who serve the construction industry. The correct form is "thrown," and we'd be mighty skeptical of any lawyer who didn't have this commonplace irregular verb in his or her vocabulary.

The Grammar Lottery

Or, have poor grammar, win $12,000.

We found this funny story today. It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

£6000 FOR OFFICE SNUB
Boss quit over huffy assistant
By John Ferguson

A FORMER council manager has won more than £6000 compensation after quitting his job because an office assistant would not talk to him.

David Moxey, 52, said he became depressed and had to resign because Maureen McMahon would only communicate by email - even though she sat just a few yards away.

The ex-lottery money manager for Aberdeen City Council was awarded the cash for unfair dismissal, despite having found a new job at a yacht club in Malaysia before he resigned.

An industrial tribunal in Aberdeen heard the pair fell out after Ms McMahon corrected punctuation and grammar in a report he had written.

Mr Moxey complained it was "like having an essay corrected by an English teacher".

That led to Ms McMahon refusing to speak to him.

The pair were both employed in November 2004 but fell out the following spring.

Mr Moxey said he was unhappy the council failed to address the issue. He started to look for another job at the beginning of last year. Soon after, he was signed off work for six weeks with anxiety and treated for depression.

The tribunal yesterday agreed he had been constructively and unfairly dismissed on the grounds that he was given no option but to resign.

However, they found he was 10 per cent to blame as he could have initiated disciplinary action himself.

Tribunal chairman Nicol Hosie said: "We were entirely satisfied the one and only reason for him leaving was the ongoing difficulties which he was having with Ms McMahon and the council's failure to address them."

More Lindsay Lohan

G. Whipple sends this our way:

"That behavior won't cut it anymore and neither will spa-style clinics,"said Barry Gerald Sands, a Century City defense attorney who's also a certified drug and alcohol counselor.

"Whatever you have done in the past, do a 360-degree turn and go the other way," Sands said Wednesday. "She has to change her alleged friends, people sharing or selling her drugs. She has to lead a clean and sober life."

We believe the 360-degree turn is exactly what led her to be arrested again for DUI. But a woman who can "turn herself into the Beverly Hills Police Department" might be able to manage turning all the way around and still moving in the other direction.

But seriously, this is the problem with cliches. They're so familiar, we don't even know what the words mean, and we fail to notice when they make absolutely no sense. It's time to nip them in the thorn.

SPOGG Endorses Junie B. Jones

It's funny that our newsletter just mentioned the Junie B. Jones book series; the New York Times today has a long story on the debate over the grammar in the books.

An excerpt follows, but we will point out a few serious factual errors in the piece:

1) Junie B. did not want to name her brother Gladys Gutzman. She wanted to name herself "Pinkie Gladys Gutzman," because pinkie is the most beautifulest color, and Gladys Gutzman hands out snacks in the cafeteria and who wouldn't want to be associated with that? She did, however, think her baby brother was a monkey.

2) Junie B.'s antics do receive punishment. When she cut her hair, for example, she was forced to cover her "sprigs" with two hats and a shower cap, and later was humiliated at school for said headgear.

For the record, SPOGG is a huge fan of Junie B. Jones. Parents who refuse to read it because of the grammar are missing serious hilarity, as well as the opportunity to point out the errors and talk about language with their kids. Kids would much rather you correct a book character's grammar than their own, so it's actually a terrific teaching opportunity.

What's more, it's brilliant writing. The author, Barbara Park, captures the language and thinking of young children beautifully -- very much like Mark Twain captured a certain sort of youth in Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Anyone who doesn't like this sort of thing can always clip the "Gallant" pages out of Highlights for their kids. He's a bag-load of correct and clean fun. Yawn.

Is Junie B. Jones Talking Trash?
By ANNA JANE GROSSMAN
AT her all-day princess-theme party for her graduation from preschool, Lyra Alvis had her face painted, went first down the water slide and was even allowed to eat the flower on the cake. “It was the best day of my life,” said Lyra, 5, who lives in
Nashville.

At least until bedtime. That is when her father, Lance Alvis, did something he’d never done before: Midway through a book that was a gift from a friend, he insisted she pick out something different to read.

“But I love this book,” Lyra said.

The paperback in question was about Junie B. Jones, the hero of a popular Random House early reading series that has divided parents since it was introduced 15 years ago. With more than 43 million copies in print and a stage show touring the country, the series has its share of die-hard fans and is required summer reading at many elementary schools.

But more than a few parents have taken issue with Junie B., as she is called. Their disagreement is a pint-size version of the lingering education battle between advocates of phonics, who believe children should be taught proper spelling and grammar from the outset, and those who favor whole language, a literacy method that accepts misspellings and other errors as long as children are engaged in reading and writing.

The spunky kindergartener (first grader in more recent volumes) is prone to troublemaking, often calls people names and isn’t averse to talking back to her teachers. And though she is the narrator of the stories, she struggles with grammar. Her adverbs lack the suffix “ly”; subject and object pronouns give her problems, as do possessives; she usually isn’t able to conjugate irregular past tense verbs; and words like funnest and beautifuller are the mainstays of her vocabulary.

Children, however, are not usually strict grammarians. And it’s rare to find a child that isn’t quickly seduced by these silly, often slapstick stories. Even adults who are rankled by Junie B.’s impulsive, oft-unpunished shenanigans (playing with scissors or head-butting other children, for instance), can occasionally laugh at her odd
little-girlisms. They include her passion for fixing toilets with her “grampa,”
her desire to name her little brother “Mrs. Gutzman” after her favorite cafeteria lady, or her belief that green cucumber-like vegetables are named “Sue Keeny.”
Parenthood, though, is full of choices. Breast-feeding: Yea or nay? Muesli or Cap’n Crunch? Public or private school?

And now: To Junie B. or not to Junie B.?

The series has been banned in Lewis and Susan Bartell’s home in Old Westbury, N.Y.“My dad doesn’t like the grammar,” said the Bartells’s youngest, Mollie, 9. “And I guess that’s important, because maybe when you grow up and you’re at work and you say, ‘I runned,’ people will get annoyed at you.”

She added: “I’m also not allowed to watch R-rated movies, but nobody is
these days.”

The series, which had its 27th installment in February, has, like the Harry Potter series, been on the New York Times children’s book series best-seller list since the list was started three years ago.

“Of our series books, it’s the most popular one we have that’s about a little girl,” said Elizabeth Bird, a librarian at the Donnell Library Center’s Central Children’s Room in Midtown Manhattan.

“But it splits people down the middle. There are parents who will defend her till their death and those that call her loathsome. It’s unusual to find that sort of divide for early chapter books. They’re just not the sort of books that usually get much attention.”

Among librarians and teachers, Junie B. has become as familiar a name as Ramona, Pippi or Eloise, but unlike her predecessors she hasn’t been around quite long enough to straddle multiple generations. Many parents in their 20s, 30s and 40s are only now discovering the series as their children enter kindergarten and grammar school.

With every new kindergarten class comes attempts to ban the books. In 2004 Barbara Park was selected as one of the American Library Association’s 10 Most Frequently Challenged Authors, alongside Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and John Steinbeck.

More...

Humor from India

Smita H., who works at one of India's finest business schools, received this e-mail from an applicant:

Sir, pls tell me the details regardin the importance of WORK EXPERIANCE in admissions. On web, its written work exp of 2 years. If i hav work exp with good
profile espec related to management and co-ordination in a team for 1 year n good GMAT score, can i get admission there?Specially rep dis ques pls. Pls give all the details of admission through which i can enter. CAT, GMAT, GD, PI.................... wat are the steps. wat r d cut offs of GMAT and cat? pls give all the details s, i m nt gettin it cearly frm web. pls reply soon s u recive dis mail, so i can proceed for admission.

It might be true that texting abbreviations aren't ruining the ability of native English speakers to spell normally when circumstances require it. In this case at least, the English-as-a-second-language student has sabotaged his ability to get into business school.

We Knew She Was a Good Actress...

But this ticker from Fox News shows Lindsay Lohan is something special. Look at the transformation she managed:

Lindsey Lohan turned herself into the Beverly Hills Police Department.

(Thanks to to Krista K. for the find.)

Nice Job, Mr. President

SPOGG would like to applaud the way George W. Bush said "try to" instead of "try and" in this Bushism from Slate.com:

"I'm going to try to see if I can remember as much to make it sound like I'm smart on the subject."—answering a question concerning a possible flu pandemic, Cleveland, July 10, 2007

We have no further comment.