[lace-chat] Old money (was editing)
Jacquie wrote: using decimal currency, any time money was mentioned it had been changed to its decimal equivalent.> Most of us can cope with reference to both LSD and decimal money depending on when the scenario/object is from - we only changed in 1971. I notice several sellers on ebay don't seem to know anything about the old money because I've seen several listings where something with the price on it as three old pence is described as "A 3D pattern/book/toy ...". Why they should think the object is three-dimensional is a mystery. Jean in Poole, Dorset, UK To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace-chat] Secret Pal Thank You
Hi to my Secret Pal in NZ! I was so pleased to receive the goodies this morning after a not-too-good start to the day! The rose scented bath stuff, and the silver sugar star were looked at with envy by my 4 - year old grand-daughter - she is into pink and purple in a very big way and is training to be a Princess, so we both loved them! The nail decals were also well-received - I do love things like that, and will enjoy putting them on my nails. The magnetic pad and the gift-tags are so pretty - almost too good to use! - so I do thank you so much for them, and the beads - I love spangling, so will greatly enjoy either buying new bobbins to use them with (?) or changing the beads on bobbins I have - I'll leave you to ponder which option will appeal most! Once again, many thanks indeed - I will look forward to next month and, ultimately, finding out who you are!If things had gone to plan just after my husband and I were married, we would be living in New Zealand now, and possibly lace-making neighbours - what a wonderful thought! Thanks once again, and may your pins never bend. Carol To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace-chat] Re: Editing (was: favourite authors)
On Feb 12, 2006, at 21:46, Martha Krieg wrote:
Ah, but when you put your text into Word, the spell-checker squiggles
under the "colour" words,
I don't know what my writing program is now -- Word, Word Perfect or
something else entirely -- nor where its spell-checker lives. But I do
know that I had to switch it off on the old puter, because I write both
in English and in Polish and, when I wrote in Polish, the whole text
was underlined, which drove me nuts :) And, anyway, it's a useless
tool, since it'll accept what might amount to an incorrect spelling,
depending on a situation (your/you're; their/they're; its/it's etc). I
know where most of my spelling "weak spots" are in English (double
consonants, c/s and s/z), keep a dictionary handy, and check.
And, a propos spelling, Ruth wrote:
I remember asking one of my daughter's teachers at a conference why,
with Traci's terrible spelling, her paper was scored as high as it
was. I was told that these days the emphasis is put on making the
student feel good about him/herself rather than correcting and
possibly embarrassing them.
When my stepdaughter, whose spelling is also atrocious (I think it goes
through the female line among the Duvalls; her grandma was as bad, and
so is her aunt, but not my husband) was in school (30+ yrs ago), she
used to get straight As for her English essays and for her creative
writing class too. When I asked her how that was possible, she said it
was the content and style that counted, not the niggling details like
spelling :)
back to Martha's message:
and unless you have the grammar-checker turned on, it ignores the
hypercorrection "he was nice to my mother and I" --- an overreaction
to "My mother and me went to the store together." The teachers
drilled so much on "My mother and *I* went to the store" that people
started using it everywhere.
I know "where it's coming from", but it still bugs me :) English has so
few cases and in so few words, you'd think they'd be easy to keep track
of...
There's another fairly common "grammatical bug" in present-day English
that pops up and bites once in a while. "As the smallest child in the
family of 5, her brothers often made her the victim of their practical
jokes"
I think of it as a "doesn't follow", but suspect it stems from another
over-reaction -- the excessive dislike of passive form in English.
Can't have passive ("as a [...], she was the victim [...]"); active's
better, always. Add to it the the post-Hemingway obsession with "short
and crisp" instead of "long and meandering" (a whole clause as a
subject? Perish the thought) and you can eliminate a whole lot of
punctuation marks, too...
I hated grammar throughout all the 11 yrs of school; couldn't tell a
subject from an object if my life depended on it (not sure I could even
*name* them ), and couldn't diagram a sentence any more than I could
diagram a car's motor. To this day, my theoretical knowledge of Polish
grammar is close to zero, and what I do know about it is "in
retrospect" -- I apply to it what I learnt about *English* grammar, at
the U. But formal grammar lessons in school were, thankfully, few and
far between (and counted, maybe, for 5% of the grade); as long as your
speech and writing were grammatically correct, you were OK. If your
grammar was poor, the teacher would explain why, and how to improve it
(read and write more).
I didn't really need to learn grammar until I hit the U, and then it
was the *English* grammar. I needed that, because we were being trained
as teachers, primarily, so would be expected to be able to *explain*
the corrections we made to our students' papers...
--
Tamara P Duvallhttp://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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[lace-chat] Re: Editing (was: favourite authors)
T, you always leave me rolling on the floor with your descriptions of language issues! I didn't see a problem with the "victim" example - youngest/smallest children are often vulnerable. However, I do frequently run into a problem where two current grammatical shibboleths occur at the same time: 1) The passive voice must be avoided at all times. 2) I must not overuse the first-person pronoun "I," lest I appear to be centered on myself. Now, when I'm trying to write a bulleted narrative describing all the steps that I took to resolve a problem, each of which is several sentences in length, it's a real challenge. Should I write (as artificially short examples): * I examined the data to ensure that the table was empty before I initialized it with the good data. (bad - uses "I") or The table was examined to ensure it was empty before being initialized with the good data. (bad - has a passive) It's not overwhelming in a single sentence, but when you get a long series of them, either choice begins to stick out like a sore thumb. And alternating between them sounds really stupid, almost as bad as switching to non-parallel verb forms in the same sentence... When the individual items are really short, the conundrum can be resolved by saying, "I performed the following steps" 1. examined the data. That isolates the "I" in one spot, and allows all the verbs to be active. But it truly doesn't work if each item is a paragraph or two long! -- -- Martha Krieg [EMAIL PROTECTED] in Michigan To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace-chat] Writing (was: Editing )
On Feb 13, 2006, at 23:05, Martha Krieg wrote:
T, you always leave me rolling on the floor with your descriptions of
language issues!
Always happy to be of service :)
I didn't see a problem with the "victim" example
No? Let me quote it again:
"As the smallest child in the family of 5, her brothers often made her
the victim of their practical jokes"
- youngest/smallest children are often vulnerable.
I do not question the truth of that. And I do understand what the
sentence is *supposed* to mean. All the same, it's a badly constructed
sentence, which doesn't "hang together".
"As the smallest child in the family of 5" is a clause -- an almost
sentence -- but it's also the subject, which could be substituted by a
single word: "she". Now, put it together with the rest of the sentence,
and you get:
"She, her brothers often made her a victim[...]" Does it make sense?
No. There's no "agreement" between the beginning and the end, because
the subject changes; it's "she" at the beginning, and it's "they" (the
brothers) at the end.
You can also "test" a complex sentence (or a complex phrase) by
reversing the order:
"Her brothers often made her a victim [...], as a smallest child etc".
It still rubs the wrong way...
I should be either:
"As a smallest child in the family of 5, she was often the victim of
her brothers' practical jokes"
or else:
"Her brothers often made her the victim of their practical jokes,
because she was the smallest child in the family of 5".
In the first sentence, "she" remains the subject throughout, even if
she's in passive form grammatically as well as being a passive object
of her brothers' agression. You could eliminate the entire introductory
(less important) clause and lose only an "explanatory frill".
The second sentence is a compound one and has two -- equally important
-- subjects, joined together by "because". "They" are the subject of
the first part, "she" is the subject of the second part.
Which of the two sentences you used in a story would depend, entirely,
on where you wanted your spotlight to focus. But the original one seems
to focus on her at first then shift the focus to the brothers and does
it sloppily. IMO, of course, which isn't end-all, being as I'm a
foreigner and a dumb Polack to boot :)
The substitution and the reversal as tools for understanding grammar
was something I didn't learn until I was at the U, but, for me, it
worked much better than any amount of parsing and diagramming. OTOH, I
happened to hit the U when a lot of the old ideas were being tossed out
and the "new idols" were "spoken", "context vs paradigm", etc.
However, I do frequently run into a problem where two current
grammatical shibboleths occur at the same time:
1) The passive voice must be avoided at all times.
2) I must not overuse the first-person pronoun "I," lest I appear to
be centered on myself.
A very sad (not to mention artificial) dichotomy. Passive voice may be
(indeed is) less interesting than active voice. But active voice goes
right back to a "yawn" (if not to a "pompous ass"), when stripped of
personality (again, that's my personal opinion). Use both --
judiciously -- and your text's that much richer.
Now, when I'm trying to write a bulleted narrative describing all the
steps that I took to resolve a problem, each of which is several
sentences in length, it's a real challenge. Should I write (as
artificially short examples):
* I examined the data to ensure that the table was empty before I
initialized it with the good data. (bad - uses "I") or The table
was examined to ensure it was empty before being initialized with the
good data. (bad - has a passive)
I've had to write a "pompous ass" (bad - uses "I") paper only once in
my life -- my Master's thesis -- and hated it. Would have hated it even
more, if I hadn't already been on my "grace period extension" and had
had more time to ponder the idiocy of it... :) It's *supposed* to make
the paper sound... What's the word, what's the word... Means "taking no
sides"... *Objective*! But, in fact, it only makes it stiff and
dis-associated. It also -- IMO -- dis-allows disagreement and curtails
discussion, however subtly. You can argue with an "I" (a personal point
of view) easily, but it's much harder to argue with a ponderous,
God-like statement...
As soon as I was out of the U, I never again wrote that way; I'd much
rather be (or try to be) objective in fact than in form. And, if my
irrepressible-self pops out at every corner, announcing it's *me*
writing, not some Martian robot? Tough.
I've always preferred reading fiction to reading "learned papers" and
always assumed that most others do too, which is why I write the way I
write ("I" 5 times in every sentence) and have no intention of
changing... :)
--
Tamara P Duvallhttp://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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