Junior Moment

You're familiar with "senior moments," those times when you forget something so simple, so commonplace, that you fear you've temporarily embodied the brain of a person much, much older than yourself.

Well, yesterday, just the opposite happened in my fifth/sixth grade art class. This is the same class that I'm studying ancient Egypt with. (And yes, I realize I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Fire me.)

We were making Egyptian wigs as our art project. Thanks to Kelly, we had four skeins of black yarn to make generously coiffed hairpieces. (No, we didn't use anywhere near even one skein's worth.)

I went around to each student measuring the circumference of his or her head. Then I asked, "Do you want to make the wig for a man, woman, or child?" Every girl answered, "Woman," and every boy answered, "Man."

One boy said, "Yeh, 'cuz mans are cool!"

I smiled at him and asked, "Mans?"

"Yes! Mans are cool, don't you think?"

"Do you mean 'men'?"

He still looked at me funny. Then that "lightbulb" effect happened.

"Men! I mean 'men'! What in the world made me say 'mans'? Good thing you're my grammar teacher."

I chuckled and thought, "Junior moment."

Woe is Not Me

Seldom do I get paranoid about a leaving a comment on a blog.

There is one I read, however, once in a great while because it's all about grammar, written by a grammar guru. Occasionally I will leave a comment, but I get the kind of nervous one feels when she's one chess move away from checkmate. I mean, this grammar king has some serious linguistic syntaxes firing away in his brain. The rest of us are babbling pawns.

Not even in my 400-level college grammar class did I hear about "datives" (unless I mistook them for daters--people who date) and I barely recall accusative constructions. Then again, I was planning my wedding.

This blogger, proud author of Anti-Small Talk, has been "refusing to celebrate mediocrity for over four years!" (Woe is he for letting grammar run amok before then.)

In his most recent post, the blogger analyzes the correctness of Ophelia's cry "Woe is me!" by stating that an alternative construction could have been "Woe is to me," since woe is something that must be given to someone. (Think of it as giving grief.) The blogger concludes that only a preposition is dropped, thereby rendering the sentence grammatically correct .

Diagramming the sentence would prove that woe is the subject, is is a being verb, and therefore me would have to be a predicative nominative, which it can't be because you can't interchange the two. You can't say the reverse: Me is woe. Me is a pronoun, which means it stands for a noun. Woe is a noun, but it's not me. I am not woe. I am Zo. (Woe's on first.) I can be woeful, but I can't be woe, nor can woe be me. Grammatically, the wording would only be correct if you could say "woe is I" because "I" must follow a being verb. That's not what Shakespeare's woe-man character meant. She said what she meant and meant what she said.

Got it? Woe is you for reading this.

Conclusion: the construction of "woe is me" must be a dative, not an accusative.

And I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm just having fun throwing a smart guy's words around.

I Know What I'm Getting for Christmas

At care group last night, my friend Mitzy said she saw a T-shirt that reminded her of me.

It says: I'M THE GRAMMARIAN YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU ABOUT.

Inklings

C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite writers. In a biography I was reading lately, it mentions a group of fellow writers and thinkers in England who met regularly at the pub to discuss their writing.
They called themselves the Inklings.

I suggested the name to my little class of homeschooled high school writers who come to my home every Thursday. They latched onto it with alacrity. The two main differences between us and Lewis's cronies? We don't smoke cigars and we don't care about British royalty. (At least I don't.)

I just love the clever triple meaning "inklings."

1) youngins with a shared penchant for pens
2) followers of Mother Ink (me)
3) ponderings, thoughts, feelings, hunches

I love my Inklings, Maggie and Becca. They are eager to be better writers. They welcome constructive criticism (and don't cry at the sight of ink spilled like blood on the page). They are insightful, opinionated, funny, and diligent. A teacher's dream class, I'd say. I love that I can give them six or ten things to work on in one week. This week, for example:

-Avoid cliches.
-Eliminate run-on sentences. Separate complete but similar thoughts with punctuation; that's why it was invented.
-Omit "very" before adjectives (lazy; use strong adj instead).
-Organize your writing before you start. Good writing follows good thinking.
-Don't use "this" as an pronoun. (This is bad.) Make "this" an adjective: This habit is better than that.
- Be concise.
-Vary sentence structure. Don't always start with a prep phrase, a subject, or a gerund.
- Use special punctuation sparingly. Most sentences need only a period. Exclamation points are overused and therefore lack emphasis. It's okay to say, "Fire!" but not, "The building was on fire!"
-Avoid "there are." Take a look at the words following "there are" and see if you can start the sentence with one of them.
-Use active voice (the boy wiped his butt) instead of the passive voice (the butt was wiped by the boy). We all like boys to wipe their own butts, especially when they start school, but I've already mentioned that in an earlier post, and am therefore committing the cardinal sin of writing which is wordiness that we all want to avoid like the plague at all costs because it makes the reader pant with breathless anticipation for an end mark such as a period, question mark, or exclamation point!!!!!!!!!!!