Sentence fragments

Not actually sentences.

Nope.

Usage you can use: O[h]

Anyone familiar with hymns has an advantage in knowing "O" from "Oh". The hymn-literate person may have an intuitive descriptive understanding of this.

"O" introduces a direct address (for fancy types, the vocative case):

I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!

O dearest Jesus, what law hast Thou broken?

O Kitchen! my kitchen!

"Oh" is an interjection.

Oh, I'm not particular as to size.

Oh, that I had a thousand voices to praise my God with thousand tongues!

--but oh! We were all such earnest students!



The O- section of the first line index of LSB is a helpful diagnostic resource. Then for fun, compare it with TLH's. ;)

Oh, who cares?

Usage you can't use: Great Grains Cranberry Almond Crunch

Recently someone gave me a box of fancy cereal. This made me very happy because I love cereal*.

But the box I did not love. I did not love it because all I could think was, Someone got paid to write this box. 

Someone got paid to write, "Less processed nutrition you can see." (But I want less processed nutrition I CAN'T see! Or MORE processed nutrition I can see! Or best of all would be MORE processed nutrition I CAN'T see!) Someone got paid to write, "Natural Flavor With Other Natural Flavor."

I blame everybody who never told me I could be a food box writer when I grew up.

*I eat cereal. Would you like to hear about my weight, my health, my sense of personal vitality, my powerful toenails, my glistening eyeballs, the penetrating insights my personal somatic functions have given me about how everyone should eat? Huh, weird.

Usage you can use: Voilà

Most everyone uses "voilà" [vwa la] at some point in her life. This is likely because voilà [vwa la] is a French word. We Americans like borrowing things from the French. They are just so fashionable.

Voilà [vwa la] has all the expected subtleties in its native form, but we barking Anglophones tend to use it to mean, "Ta da!" This is a fine usage, given that voilà [vwa la] could be translated to mean, "lookit!" or, "here it is!" So carry on, friends. Carry on.

But do not ever spell it "walla" or I will laugh at you.

Fallen

Disclaimer 1: I don't want to come off all First Girl Ever To Learn [Greek] here, so let me say upfront that the basic fact I present below came to my attention via the very much English Concordia Commentary on Ecclesiastes, which I was reading for a thoroughly  non-erudite reason with which I will not bore you.


Disclaimer 2: I hesitate to address this as one who has graciously been spared the heartbreak of losing a baby without having seen his face. But experience is neither equalizer nor guarantor of consensus, and every woman who has carried a child or hoped to knows the dread of this shadow.





I ponder endlessly the sadness of my friends who have endured a miscarriage, particularly the sentiment expressed by my dear Reb. Mary:  "'Miscarry. Mis-carry. Like, “Whoops! I dropped the baby! Next time I’m carrying a baby I really should try to be more careful!'" Ah, friend. :'(

Ecclesiastes 6, Job 3, and Psalm 58 speak of a miscarried or stillborn child, but not in the way we speak of him. For where we call him "miscarried," which so many mothers I know cannot but understand to place the blame particularly with themselves, the Hebrews use the simple word nephel, "fallen."

No special term for it, and no fault beyond that which we all bear. Fallen like every last one of us.

Usage you can use: Fiancé(e)

Fiancé is masculine. A man who is engaged.

Fiancée is feminine. A woman who is engaged.

E. It matters.

Usage you can use: joint possession

Don't say it:

Timbo and I's anniversary was so amazing!

Don't ruin your anniversary like this. Timbo will still love you, but he'll be embarrassed.

To fix it, you can say:

Timbo and my anniversary was so amazing!

What? Not Timbo's and my anniversary was so amazing!? No, because you and Timbo share the anniversary, so you only use one possessive (my). (If you're talking about unshared possessions, it goes like this: Timbo's and my Corgis got in an amazing fight again!)

But you're right, the fix sounds weird. So why not redirect the whole thing into something like,

Our anniversary was so amazing! or, Timbo and I had an amazing anniversary! ?

Right again, because every time an American says something is amazing the Daughters of the Air have another day added to their amortization. Let's try once more:

Our anniversary was so [any adjective but amazing]!

There you go.

If that still isn't sitting well with you, you can always try one of these:

Hot enough for ya!

How bout them Hawks!

Are you still nursing that baby!

Usage you can use: RSVP

RSVP, as one may learn in Paddington Takes the Air, stands for the French expression "répondez, s'il vous plaît", meaning "please reply." This means that it is redundant to say "Please RSVP."

Incorrect: Cocktails at my house Friday at 8. Please RSVP.

(In fact cocktails are always served at my house on Friday at 3, and I already said please.)

Correct. CSPP conference on Monday the 11th. RSVP.

(In fact there is a conference and if you're coming we'd like to reserve you a spot, so let us know. While we're on the topic, let me mention again that this is mostly a glorified playdate for any mom and kids who otherwise plan to be bored that day. I will not be counting children and making personal judgments on the basis of my accounting on that day. Or any day, as I have attempted many times to explain.)

Usage you can use: -igamy

Bigamy is having a second wife at the same time as a first wife.

ex. After hanging around with a lot of really nice people in Utah, he became a bigamist.

Digamy is having a second wife after having lost a first wife (through death or divorce).

ex. After a lot of court dates, awkward dates, and finally good dates, he became a digamist.

I've heard the term "serial monogamy" used to indicate digamy+, but I think I like digamy better. As a usage, obviously. Then again, trigamy appears less clear so maybe it won't work.

The eloquent in the room

Well, I know we were all excited to be a part of the events of yesterday afternoon, but here at CSPP we have trouble focusing when people are torturing pronouns. Does Our Beloved Synod really objectify subjects like the masses? Are we among the ignorami who can't figure out how to use intensives and reflexives? Strunk have mercy!

It would be uncharitable to cite specific examples. But the problem was not endemic. There was one tense syntactic moment which ended in a flawless pronominal usage beautiful as a perfect dismount from the uneven bars. And who stuck this grammatical landing? None other than the Reverend President-for-two-more-months Gerald Kieschnick. Unfortunately this thrilling moment is not included in the available archived video and I wasn't transcribing--it was during the practice balloting for VPs in succession--but the man nailed it.

There have been a lot of cringe-making moments at the 2010 convention, but this wasn't one of them. Thanks, Father Jerry, for speaking well. It means so much to us.

Usage you can and must use: Begging the Question

This is really, really important.

"Begging the question" is a technical term in the field of rhetoric. It means making an argument which assumes an unproven point. Let's watch a five-year-old beg the question flawlessly:

"Mom, if you make me go to bed now, you won't get to watch the movie with me!"

True, son, true. But here's the thing: I don't want to watch the movie with you! I want to watch it with Dad! Without you, my dear boy! So your argument has failed on your sweet assumption that I want you around right now. Off you go, XOXO.

Another? We'd better. How about an entirely fictional friend of an entirely fictional homeschooling family (you can tell it's fictional because I'm not a homeschooler):

"But they won't have friends!"

Yes! YES! That's the point! We don't want them to have any friends, at least not the kind they'd find at school. You're a charming person and we appreciate your concern, but you have assumed something about what we want for our children, and it's not an accurate something. PS, have you noticed that our house is swarming with friends for them?

Tracking? Great.

Now, what if a five-year-old boy announced to you that his favorite movie was Saw III? No, wait--The Saint? You would surely want to know what appalling mockery of a parent allowed a five-year-old to watch such an atrocity. But that doesn't mean any question (ie proposition) was begged. A question (ie inquiry) was prompted. Begging the question does NOT mean, "makes one wonder" or "leads one to ask."

Again, a homeschooling parent has great anxiety about homeschooling. Those aware of this anxiety would like to know why these crazy people are homeschooling if they're so unhappy with it. But again, no question (proposition) begged here. Only a question (inquiry) naturally formed in the mind of the hearer in response to the available evidence. (BTW, the polite thing to do here is either to ask or to put the whole thing out of your mind, not pretend to sympathize and then badmouth the anxious homeschooler to your other friend later on.)

Fact: misusing this usage damages the credibility of the [mis]user. The increasing misuse of this usage is, as the homeschoolers know, more evidence that schools do not teach what students need to learn, ie, how to think. As such, it separates the thinkers from the bloggers. So handle with care. "Beg the question" is not an expression or a cliché. When in doubt, look for an actual tired idiom. Or really impress everyone by just saying, "It made me wonder [why anyone cared so much about begging the question]".

Usage you can use: /pɔr, poʊr/

Pour means to dump something out.

I tried to pour out the milk I found on the counter, but it fell out of the mug in a quivering chunk.

Pore means to study closely or scrutinize.

The new mother pored over her parenting books as if they contained useful information.

Get it right! Or I will judge you!

Word of the day: hangry

I'm sure you know this, but just in case.

Hangry: when you're angry because you're hungry.

Ex 1. The baby woke up just as we left the Post Office and was hangry all the way home.

Ex 2. Having found nothing but brown rice and chocolate bunnies in the pantry, I spent the morning hangry.

Hey kid, are you going to eat that?

Usage you can use: Banshees

Banshee: a female spirit of Irish legend which visits a family to announce the impending death of one of its members by screaming. Alternatively, the banshee shows up after the fact as a mourner.

Where's MY sequel, Disney?

Which is to say that "banshee" is not appropriately used as a proxy for some vague extremity. The following usages are ill-informed:

--Pushing out that baby hurt like a banshee.
--The dripping two-year-old ran down the hall naked as a banshee.
--The basement was darker than six feet up a banshee's bum.
--etc.

Someone desiring rhetorical employment for the term "banshee" is probably looking for the cliche "screaming like a banshee." But that's a cliche, so why use it? The banshee has lost nearly all rhetorical force between becoming a cliche in her own right and consequently being forced into other nonsensical tropes. Can she be revived in correctly applied metaphor? I believe so. In the right context, one of the following might be of use (please note, some uses are ironic):

--informative as a banshee (alternatively: sympathetic as a banshee)
--subtle as a banshee
--upbeat as a banshee
--Law-oriented as a banshee
--etc.

I'm not Irish, people, but let's get this right.

Word search

Shouldn’t there be a single word to express the phrase “pregnant woman”? I realize that pregnant is an adjective, but once we’ve established that a person is pregnant, isn’t woman kind of redundant?

Prepositional objection

What is with the weirdly garbled prepositional and phrasal verbs in children's books? Don Freeman (Corduroy dude) is the worst offender I've noticed, but I'd say it's pretty common throughout kid lit. It sounds unnatural and serves no linguistic purpose. Its overuse renders it aesthetically impotent, and it teaches kids to write in a similarly affected voice. Drives me nuts.

Over she tabbed to Publish Post! Up, up, up she rose from her chair! Toward the freezer she lumbered, slowly, slowly. Out she took the ice cream and into her 25 week old wombling she shoveled it!

Usage you can use: offensive language

Vulgarity: offensive language of a scatological nature or pertaining to the body in non-sexual context. If a farmer uses it, he is likely to be doing so literally.

Obscenity: offensive language of a sexual nature.

Profanity: offensive language of a religious nature. Considered blasphemy by religious adherents. Words sometimes considered profane may be used literally by religious adherents in religious context.

Some words considered offensive may be applied to fit more than one category, but context normally indicates into which category a particular usage fits.

Please note, if a mother describes frankly what she had to get out of the carpet after some clever child escaped his diaper, she has not used profanity or obscenity. (Mothers are basically farmers.)

Superfluous rant

I can’t help hating the ubiquity of the word ubiquitous, even though I can’t seem to help using it, ubiquitously.

Usage you can use: relative pronouns

The relative pronouns are who, whom, and whose; that and which; and where.

--Use who and whose in reference to persons.

He's the clown who preached for 35 minutes.
The person to whom I complain about long sermons is my 6-yr-old.
DPs are the guys whose sermons are always too long.

NOT: The pastor that preached forever also talked about himself the whole time.

--Use that and which in reference to objects or animals.

The Athanasian is the creed that no mother of a 1-yr-old ever confesses in its entirety.
The gun on the lintel is for untethered dogs which enter my yard.

--Use where in reference to places.

That's the rest stop where we had to get the world's nastiest diaper out of the car.

Improper proclamation

I get upset when I hear a pastor proclaim that Jesus died for you and I. So I appreciated this. Go ahead, email that link to your pastor (if he’s one of those). You can say that a crazy lady made you do it. Hypercorrection is no excuse for actual correctness.

This was good too, exemplifying the dilemma I face if someone kindly asks me whether I’d like to “go lay down and get some sleep.” While there’s nothing I’d like better than some sleep, I simply won’t be able to rest after hearing an innocent transitive verb abused so wantonly. People, this is not hard. I can sympathize with difficulties in the past tense, but even our dog has mastered the present tense, so I’m confident that (most) humans can too. (Tell her to “go lay down” and she’ll just look at you quizzically while I wince. Tell her to “go lie down,” and she does.)

Ok. I’m done. You may now resume your weekend activities, assuming that you don’t intend to engage in any grammatically risky behavior. Better safe than sorry, folks: don’t party unless you designate a grammarian.

Only if you ask the right way.