Latent Grammar Geekism

"[Lionell Trilling] returned [my] paper with a wounding reprimand: "Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence." Ever since then, I’ve made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence." — Cynthia Ozick

Last night someone asked me if I loved grammar in school. Her question surprised me, because it was my least favorite subject. I’d rather work on a algebra problem than diagram a sentence. To this day if someone talks about clauses and modifiers, I fall into a stupor.

Still, she had a reason for the question, and after a bit of reflection, I realized that I have come to appreciate good grammar, and although I don’t like to describe it, I strive to improve it. I don’t think about prepositional phrases, but when writing a phrase I do want to use the correct preposition.

To this end, I am reading more about grammar, looking up the rules and asking questions when I am stumped. Mrs. Holton, my 7^th grade English teacher, would be proud.

Favorite Words

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900

In my last blog post, I wrote about the words, cellar door. This leads me to a discussion of my favorite word—borborygmi, the medical term for stomach growling that is audible without the use of a stethoscope. Borborygmi slips off my tongue, like ice cream.

According to Wikipedia, the word borborygmic has been used in literature. In Ada, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.” Eliza Fenwick wrote in Long Way Down, “The room was very quiet, except for its borborygmic old radiator.”

I don’t know why I am so fascinated by it, but apparently I am not alone—someone told me that her friend named his boat The Borborygmi. She also told me that her friend had a heart attack and died on his boat. After she told me that, it didn’t seem appropriate to mention that technically, he should have named his boat The Borborygmus, since borborygmi is plural.

The Music of Words

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.”  ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967

When I was around eight years old, my mother told me that the most beautiful words in the English language are cellar door. Actually, what she said was, “They say that the most beautiful words in the English language are cellar door.” I thought this was weird on so many levels, not least of which was wondering who the they were who thought these were lovely words.

That is, until I conducted a perfunctory Internet search for the term cellar door before consigning my mother’s statement to the annals of insane mother remarks. It turns out, that my mother wasn’t making this up. In 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that cellar door had a beautiful sound – one of the most beautiful in the English language. As if to give credence to this, Cellar Door is the name of the literary magazine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

I think attic entrance has a certain ring to it…

Despeartely Seaking a Profreeder

“Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.”  ~Author Unknown

Sometmes I typ so fast tht I mispel. The problem with this is when my misspellings are exposed publicly, and even worse, to my writers group. Last week I sent two announcements out to the Sierra Writers email list with spelling errors in both. Although they were clearly transposed letters, I was horrified. I cringed to the point of squeezing out all the blood in my brain; then I moved on.

I need a proofreader and a full-time massage therapist.

Grammar Geek

"A man will turn over half a library to make one book." ~ Samuel Johnson

My grammar geek meter skyrocketed this week. I had a rousing discussion with a colleague about whether website should be one word or two, and if it should be written as Web site. This conversation was followed by a dialogue about whether health care should be one word or two, and/or hyphenated. Yes, these were serious conversations—so serious that I decided to get a 30-day free online subscription of the Chicago Manual of Style, since I felt my 15^th edition might be outdated. Mrs. Holton, my 8^th grade English teacher, would not believe this behavior was coming from me, as I did not think grammar was worthy of my pre-teen attention.

Encouragement

"When you first start writing, you never fail. You think it's wonderful.  You think it's easy to write and you enjoy it very much, but you're thinking of yourself, not the reader.  He doesn't enjoy it very much.  Later, when you have learned to write for the reader, it's no longer easy to write." - Ernest Hemmingway

Last week, my writing club, Sierra Writers, awarded prizes to the winners of the Young Writers Contest. It was fabulous to see the talent and enthusiasm pouring out of these teens. It brought back a memory from when I was a freshman in high school, and I took first prize in the school-wide creative writing contest. The $5 represented so much to me—as a freshman competing against upperclassmen, a writer, and as a teen with no self-esteem. Now my only question is, how much money did the 2^nd place winner get?