Camera stories / Happy Birthday / bad grammar / LOST IN LA MANCHA

Tue Feb 25 06:46:26 UTC 2003

Elkins wrote:

<< Besides, camera stories are a total conversation killer. I forget
sometimes that other people don't always find that sort of thing 
funny. >>

Hey, *I* thought your and Eileen's and Torsten's camera stories *are* 
funny! Don't stop.

Mary Ann wrote:

<< It's birthday time again! Today's greetings go out to Michelle. >>

Happy birthday, Michelle! Let me throw some confetti at you -- 
it's time travelling confettit, so even throw it's already Tuesday 
in UK when I throw it, it will go back and arrive on Monday.

Barb wrote:

<< I believe that the web is probably a more likely culprit for this 
bad grammar and punctuation than the schools in any one country. >>

There were plenty of public displays of bad grammar and bad spelling, 
and many signs in many shops that used apostrophe-S to indicate a 
plural, and (*my* pet peeve) quotatation marks around words that 
probably should not be there, such as the card in a museum vitrine 
explaing EXHIBIT "TEMPORARILY REMOVED FOR STUDY" -- whevever I 
see that, I say "Do they mean that the exhibit has been stolen and 
they want to hush it up?" -- long before there was an Internet or an 
ARPAnet, let alone a Web.

I know that I got bored to death with years and years of teachers 
writing on the blackboard (it was green and used chalk):
TO TOO TWO
or
THERE THEIR THEY'RE
but apparently some people aren't able to remember those spellings no 
matter how often teachers nag about it. I didn't mention ITS IT'S 
because I always have to stop and think that one out myself. 

It's late at night and my brain isn't quite working, so I don't quite 
know how to say that being bad at spelling has more to do with not 
reading much or having memory problems or some other learning 
disorder* than with being stupid, because the spelling of English 
words is pretty arbitrary, so the people who are good spellers must 
have memorized the spellings. I don't mean CONSCIOUSLY memorized, but 
I remember to this day something I read in a Neuro-Linguistic 
Programming book in the early 1980s, where the NLP dude said that all 
good spellers have the same mental strategy, which is to see the word 
in their head, and a feeling along the mid-line of the body indicates 
that it's wrong or right, and bad spellers have all kinds of 
strategies except that one ...  

*I've spent a lot of time in my life correcting the spelling in 
memoes, essays, etc written by men who are intelligent and well-read 
but suffer from dyslexia. Some of them spelled a bit better after a 
year or two of nagging, I mean running commentary as I corrected 
their spelling ... Tim learned the difference between "then" and 
"than"!

I know there are some people who are just as bugged that I can NEVER 
remember their silly rule about "that" and "which" as I am by people 
saying "flaunt" when they mean "flout", but I think people wouldn't 
hate grammar so much if the grammar police let up on some of their 
stupid arbitrary picky rules, especially the one about saying 
"everybody take his book" when you MEAN "everybody take their books", 
and perversely pretending that "they" is not the third person 
singular pronoun, when Lee has examples of that usage back to the 
1500s (which I don't happen to remember). 

Anna Adam's Apple wrote:

<< they show Fred Durst saying, "I'm glad we are all in agreeance . . 
." AGREEANCE? >>

Fred Durst of Limpbizkit? I heard the soundbite on this morning's 
news. It's not his job to be intelligent or educated or able to read 
or even able to play music, just to entertain his particular audience 
(which I have been told consists of young teen-age boys).

LOST IN LA MANCHA -- I saw it this evening (on the way home from work 
*snerk*) and enjoyed it. What I wanted to mention here is I was 
overwhelmed by how much the parts of Spain where Gilliam was filming 
look like my Southern California. The yellow plains around Madrid 
look like what I pass on the San Diego Freeway whenever I go to the 
science fiction club meeting or to visit friends in that part of 
town, and the barren, eroded landscape where they were caught in the 
flash flood is beside I-10 once you get out of town (which I admit 
does take three hours if you obey the stupid speed limit). Someone 
wave at Grey Wolf for me.