cosmolinguist | [169/365] Friday Five (Reply)

1. Can you diagram a sentence?
I sure can. Well, I could five years ago. packbat asked a very good question -- "why do sentence diagrams put the verb at the top?" -- and in my attempt at figuring out this thing that I probably got taught but do not remember, I looked at some wikipedia pages because I couldn't even remember the name of the kind I'd learned in my syntax class. Eventually words like x-bar theory and lexical-functional grammar started to ring a bell. I learned how to make diagrams that look like this:

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?
I used to be fine but now I can't remember how many R's embarrass has.

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?
Honestly so many British spellings still look wrong to me after almost 20 years. Especially the extra vowels: my initial reaction to things like "foetus" is still what is that, that's not a word I know. It's bad when they team up too: colourise has both the -our and the -ise endings and that's just not fair.

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?
Stalactite has a C in it because it comes out of the ceiling. Stalagmite is, uh, the other one.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?
I didn't study it until college! When I was an English major there was a class called Grammar & Language which everyone talked about like it was the worst thing ever, so I planned to avoid but then I had to take it one semester because my schedule clashed with my other options. The "Language" part ended up being the history of the language, and between that and "grammar," this was my first exposure to linguistics. I adored it. I was sufficiently convinced to take Old English (this professor's specialty) the next year. I then realized -- at the end of my junior year in a school that didn't offer it -- is what I should have been studying in the first place. And which I spent 15 years feeling bad about until I went on to do just that!

Before that, I thought I enjoyed grammar but what I actually enjoyed was reading parts of our English textbooks that we never studied in class, and just reading a lot anyway, and getting from this a pretty good idea of how "correct" English should be, which I was relieved to be good at since I didn't feel good at much else, and which I was delighted to weaponize over others who were less good at it. It was only in adulthood that I realized how racist, ableist, and otherwise bigoted this idea of a single correct English which all else should aspire to is, and how much harm it does. I learned how arbitrary standards are in language; they are, like all else about it, just made up by people and they could just as easily be different than they are. I used to call myself a grammar nazi proudly, but it turns out that power-dynamic control-freak shit isn't grammar, and we've had real nazis all along.