MC Grammar

And now, a post about whether you can use 'and' at the start of a sentence.

2012-01-31T11:27:00.002+11:00

When I was at school, Our Sacred Lady of the Mean Streets and Correct Grammar, teachers told me that if I used ‘and’ at the start of a sentence, that it was the worst thing I could ever do. This was also the way they felt about using ‘because’ at the start of a sentence.

This was because these words are conjunctions.A conjunction is a word that connects two other words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. For some reason, many teachers used to think that it was a bit unclassy to start a sentence like this, maybe because it makes a sentence look incomplete.

In times like this, I like to turn to The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage book, which says

‘There is a persistent belief that it is improper to begin a sentence with 'and', but this prohibition has been cheerfully ignored by standard authors from Anglo-Saxon times onwards’

Snap, New Fowler’s Modern English. There is pretty much no reason why you can’t use ‘and’ at the start of a sentence. In fact, almost all of the best writers do this whenever they feel like it. Take J.M Coetzee for example:

‘In his youth Dostoevsky had been attracted to utopian socialism of the Fourietrist variety. But four years in a prison camp in Siberia shook his faith.’

Here, you can see that far from being weird and wrong, the conjunction ‘and’ has been a helpful sentence opener.

For any teachers reading this, hey, I know you were just trying to do the right thing. But for all you up-and-coming teachers whose dream it is to create the grammar superstars of tomorrow, just remember that not all clauses have to be complete – a sentence can be dependant on another clause in order to make sense.

To see us out, let’s appreciate this excellent writing from Daphne Du Maurier, as her heroine, an unnamed woman, wanders through the ruins of her old home.

‘And there were other trees as well, trees that I did not recognise, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.’

Creepy, conjunction-begun stuff!

Capitalisation for titles

2012-01-23T13:09:00.010+11:00

As you know, we have once before jumped into the crystal clear waters of how to use capital letters.

But my fans have told me that they are hungry for more information. They have contacted me via twitter, facebook, gmail chat and telegram, begging me to give them more information about how to use capital letters in the right way.

And certainly, capital letters are confusing, not least when you are writing the title of something, such as a memoir you have just written about your life, or a thesis on the mating patterns of salmon, or even a power ballard. Questions you might find yourself asking are 'Should my power ballard be written 'The Love Exchange Only Hands Out Monopoly Money', or 'The love exchange only hands out monopoly money', OR should only some of those words be in capitalised?

Let me explain.

When you are writing titles, some words need to be capitalised, and others don't need to be. The ones that do need to be capitalised are:

The first and last words of the title; or
All nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives

The words that should not be capitalised, unless they are the first or last word, are:

articles (a, an, the)
conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet)
short adpositions (3 and less letters long): at, by, for, in, of, off, on, out, to, up
some Latin abbreviations (most common only): c./ca./cca. (circa), et al. (et alii), etc. (et cetera), e.g. (exempli gratia), i.e. (id est), lb. (libra), vs. (versus).
medium adpositions (4 letters long): down, from, into, like, near, onto, over, than, with, upon.

For example

That Tall Man, He Runs Fast!

All these words fall into the first category of words that should be capitalised. On the other hand, a title like:

Who's That Man over there?

Would not need to be all capitals because the words in blue are prepositions, which are not to be capitalised.

Some other examples:

Believing the Lie (i.e.first word/article/last word)

Diary of a Whimpy Kid (i.e. first word/short adposition/article/adjective/last word)

It Was Just a Bit of Fun (i.e first word/verb/adjective/article/noun/adposition/last word)

These Titles Seem to Be Getting Longer and Longer (first word/noun/verb/adposition/verb/verb/adjective/coordinating conjunction/adjective)

But HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE for a minute. You might have noticed that like some sort of hypocritical monstrous dictator of some sort, MC Grammar himself does not follow these rules in his own blog posts. What the fuck? Well, this is where capitalisation for titles gets hazy, because the rules for blog titles are still hazy. For example, the very fine Julie Burchill, a very long-established journalist, only capitalises the first word of her titles, and any proper nouns that come up, whereas the very funny Cody Johnston tends to capitalise everything except coordinating conjunctions. Both are highly respectable journalists and writers, both are well-school in the fine arts of grammar. So who to follow? Well, the best bet is to follow the rules I have set up here, but just remember that the internet is a changing beast, and what rules arise for capitalisations, we simply don't know yet.

To see us out, let's sit back, relax, and listen to the very excellent Capital Letters, who never mess up their capitalisations of titles, and hope that someday you can be like them.

Focussed vs Focused

2011-11-26T21:13:00.008+11:00

As you know, we have already battled with the rules of when to use different spellings for the same words, and it has been no small task.

But the thing you have to understand that you can never really win the battle with words – you can only hold them back for long enough to crouch down in your trench and write a letter to your loved ones, telling them how much you miss the farm, and that you don't know when you'll be home.

Some words have two different spellings in the same country, and can be used interchangeably. These can hurt your head.

A prime offender of this is the word focussed. In US spelling, this word is spelt focused. In UK and Australian English, it's spelt focussed. But it's not really as straight-cut as that, because Australian English can't make it's mind up which one to use.

According to The Style Guide, which is the official guide to all the spellings in Australia, you should use focussed. But in the majority of publications, such as the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, the spelling focused is used instead. And you know when the Sydney Morning Herald is involved, shit is serious.

I know what you're thinking: You thinking 'what the fuck?! Why can't they just decide on one spelling!?' Well, you make a good point, but you're just a foot soldier on the grammar battlefield, and the question of focused and focussed is an interesting example of Australian spelling being an English ho, incorporating both UK and US spellings without so much as blushing.

The bottom line is that when you are in Australia, you have the option to use both spellings, as long as you are consistent. You can't just use focussed and focused in the same document - you need to stick with one, or you'll look like you've gone insane with choice.

Who vs whom Part 2 – grammar suffers a bulletwound in the war-torn battlefield of hurt feelings

2011-10-27T22:52:00.001+11:00

As you know, MC Grammar doesn't get upset very often. The only people that I hate are Robert Mugabe and all manufacturers of corn syrup. But lately, there has been something else that has been getting my goat – what is up with people using archaic language in an argument, just because they think that it makes them look smart and scares their opponents?

This leads us to the story of GASP Jeans, a clothes store that became part of an online viral story last month because of emails that were exchanged between a customer, Keara O'Neill, and a customer service-type person, Matthew Chidgey

From Keara O'Neill, the shopper:

I had the privilege of shopping at your brand new Chapel St store on Saturday 24th September with my three bridesmaids in tow. On the hunt for bridesmaids dresses and a hens dress for myself we walked into the store and were automatically pounced on by a male staff member, I understand that this is protocol for many retail outlets and ours is no different.

The staff member was initially funny and extremely helpful with sizes etc. I chose a bright pink dress to try on but was unable to do the zip up so asked for the size up, when I eventually got the correct size and came out of the change room I was unable to discuss the likes or dislikes of the dress with my bridesmaids as the sales assistant kept saying “you should just get it”, when I told him I would think about it, he pulled me aside and whispered “Is it the price your worried about”. By now I was extremely frustrated, and again told him I’d think about it, I walked back into the change room and closed the door behind me, only to have it pushed open with the sales assistant half standing in my change room, again whispering “I think you should just get it”, when I gave him attitude and said rudely, “I already told you I would think about it”, he then replied, “With your figure I really think you should buy it”.

I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but considering the attitude used to deliver such a statement I can only imagine that it was an immature dig in relation to my healthy size 12 frame. I got changed in a hurry and walked right out of the change rooms and out of the store, I could hear the sales assistant yelling out to me, but I just ignored him and continued to leave, assuming my bridesmaids would follow. After waiting down the road for my bridesmaids to come out of the store I was told by one of them that the sales assistant yelled out “Have fun finding something at Supre”, when one of them approached him in regards to his comments, he replied “I knew you girls were a joke the minute you walked in”. When my bridesmaids walked out of the store another two customers walked out with them, they too could not believe the immaturity of the sales assistant.

I have worked in retail for 12 years and have come across an array of customer complaints over the years, none of which come even close to what I encountered on Saturday at your store, I wish I was exaggerating but unfortunately for your company this person actually exists and is working in one of your stores. I am pretty laid back and was quite happy just leaving your store, it was my bridesmaids who felt the need to say something to him…I dread to think how many customers he has not only offended but how many customers have left your store due to the pressure placed on getting the sale, and then to be harassed when that sale hasn’t taken place.

Ring me, don’t ring, not fussed…I’m just one retailer notifying another of an extremely inappropriate sales assistant.

Keara O'Neil

And here's the response by GASP area manager Matthew Chidgey:

Dear Keara O’Neil,

Having now had the privilege of having both version of events, I am now in a position to respond to your complaint.

From the very outset, one thing that you should be mindful of is; Our product offerings are very, very carefully selected, so to ensure that we do not appeal to a broad customer base. This is something which is always at the forefront of our minds when undertaking buying duties.

The reason for this is to ensure that we only carry products which appeal to a very fashion forward consumer. This by default means that the customer whom is acclimatised to buying from “clothing for the masses” type retailers, is almost frightened by our range, sometimes we have found that this type of customer, almost finds our dresses funny, and on occasion noted comments such as 'it looks like a dead flamingo'. When we receive comments like this, we like to give ourselves and our buyers, a big pat on the back, because we know we are doing our job right, and modus operandi is being upheld.

Our range is worn by A list celebrities to the likes of Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez and Katy Perry to name only a few. Now, as one might appreciate, the style counsel for these types of celebrities are not ones to pick “run of the mill” type clothing, and they do so on the basis to ensure that the styles are cutting edge, and only worn by a select few. Similarly these items are priced such that they remain inaccessible to the undesirable.

Insofar as our employee goes; Similar to our product offerings, our employees are selected with a similar approach. Chris whom served you is a qualified stylist whom has a sixth sense for fashion, and Chris’s only problem is that he is too good at what he does, and as I am sure you are aware, people whom are talented, generally do not tolerate having their time wasted, which is the reason you were provoked to leave the store.

Whilst I concede that you work for chain retailer, unfortunately that does not make us like for like. It is probably fair to assume, a lot of what I have said in this email, either doesn’t make sense to you, or you totally disagree with it all, which is what I would expect (unless of course I have you totally wrong – which I doubt).

Let me guess, you would never, ever hire Chris in the course of your duty, would you? This is the very reason, why your comment “from one retailer to another” is so disproportionate, it’s almost as though we are in a totally different industries. Chris is a retail superstar, who possess unparalleled ability, and I am sorry you feel upset by him, but he knew you were not going to buy anything before you even left your house.

So if you would like to do us any favours, please do not waste our retail staff’s time, because as you have already seen, they will not tolerate it. I am sure there are plenty of shops that appease your taste, so I respectfully ask that you side step our store during future window shopping expeditions.

Thank you for your enquiry.

The best part of this email is the sign off, 'thank you for your inquiry' That's the sting the tail of this already very poisonous and aggressive scorpion's tale.

Let's have a look at Mr Chidgey's use of the pronoun, 'whom'.

...the customer whom is acclimatised to buying from “clothing for the masses” type retailers, is almost frightened by our range...

Chris whom served you is a qualified stylist whom has a sixth sense for fashion...

...people whom are talented, generally do not tolerate having their time wasted...

Matthew Chidgey! Why are you so fashion forward, and yet so grammar stationary! Why can't it be both! Why can't your sixth sense for fashion also come with a first sense for grammar correctness? You wordlessly promise so much with your fine, coiffed hair, your sharp, micro-fibre suit, but beyond your gilded exterior you are full of not just archaic language, but also plainly incorrect grammar.

As we have learnt before, traditionally who was used to refer to refer to the subject of a sentence or clause. For example:

I know it was you who stepped on my fish

Whom was used when referring to the object of a clause. For example:

To whom were you speaking just then?

However, the use of whom is now mostly archaic. This means that it has fallen out of use so much that it's no longer the right way to say something, and in most cases where you would have said 'whom' fifty years ago, it is now correct to say 'who'.

The only time you really need to use 'whom' when it comes after a preposition in more formal language. For example,

To whom it may concern

In all other situations, you can use 'who'.

So, unfortunately for Matthew Chidgey, he has let himself – and us – down on two fronts. He has used whom even though it is archaic, and in the places where he has used it, he's not even using it to refer to the object of a sentence. WTF, Matthew Chidgey!

Matthew Chidgey, please try to be like fisherman Julian Chidgey, who has taken life by the horns and caught this huge fish.

To lol or not to lol?

2011-10-19T14:31:00.000+11:00

David Mitchell is someone who loves grammar. Every day he fights for a better understanding of grammar, and his passions also include the honesty of politicians and the rules of queuing.

So it's safe to say that David Mitchell is a kind of well-rounded soldier for goodness. Here, David talks about the abbreviation lol, and has some very interesting points about how awesome it really is.

10 mispronunciations that could get you killed

2011-09-28T11:43:00.000+10:00

This is the cast of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

They know about heinous. This is because they deal with heinous sex crimes every day of their damn working lives. In fact, they eat a bowl of heinous first thing in the morning. When they get to their desks, the first thing they do is update their status on facebook and twitter to 'very heinous', and after work, they go to the gym for a variety of workouts, such as 'heinous pump', 'cross-heinous' and 'advanced heinousness'.

And because they deal with heinousness in every facet of their day-to-day lives, they also know how to pronounce the word heinous – you would if you had to deal with it every damn day of your life. But what about you, who isn't confronted with the same amount of heinousness every day of your life? How will you cope when something heinous comes along? And who knows how a psychopathic murderer will react when they hear you say 'heinous' wrong?

And it's for this exact reason that you need to know these 10 frequently mispronounced words – so you are safe from all forms of heinousness in the future.

Here are 10 frequently mispronounced words:

Heinous – HAY-nus, not heen-us. Hear it here.

Often – you do not pronounce the 't' in often. Hear it here.

Exacerbate – the 'c' in exacerbate is soft, so it is ig-ZAS-ur-bayt, not ig-ZAK-ur-bayt. Hear it here.

Interpret – in-ter-PRET, not in-ter-PRE-TATE. Hear it here

Miniature – This word has four syllables. Say min-I-A-ture, not min-A-ture. Hear it here.

Preventive –This word has three syllables, not four. Pre-ven-tive, not pre-ven-TA-tive. Hear it here.

Regardless – This word has three syllables. Ain't no such word as 'irregardless'.

Asterisk – Notice the second S. Say as-ter-isk, not as-ter-ik. Hear it here.

Dilate – This word has two syllables, not three. Say di-late, not di-A-late. Hear it here.

Etcetera – Say et-cet-era, not ex-cet-era. Hear it here.

Armed with this knowledge, you can go about your business, never having to be afraid that you will suddenly utter a mispronunciation without realising. The streets might not be any safer, but at least your pronunciation is.

That vs which

2011-09-21T16:18:00.000+10:00

During a very enjoyable afternoon of internet browsing, I image-googled 'that vs which', and this image came up:

Mysterious.

So, when do you use that, and when do you use which?

The easiest way to remember how to use these two words correctly is to remember that you use that for a restrictive clause, and which for everything else.

A restrictive clause is a clause that limits what is being talked about. For example:

Dogs that bark get kidnapped around here.

In these clauses, you can't just leave out the bit about barking, because the kind of dogs we are talking about is restricted to dogs that bark.

However, if you say:

Dogs, which bark, get kidnapped around here

It means that it is not just dogs that bark that get kidnapped, but pretty much any dog that gets kidnapped. The barking bit is just extra information that might give you when they are overly interested in details.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

2011-08-30T17:28:00.000+10:00

Here's the situation: the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a grammatically correct sentence that has a meaning.

The sentence uses three different meanings of 'buffalo'.

1. the city of Buffalo, New York, United States

2. the noun buffalo as in the animal; and

3. the verb 'buffalo' meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

This means that the sentence if split up like this:

Marking each 'buffalo' with its use as shown above gives:

Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) Buffalo(1) buffalo(2) buffalo(3) buffalo(3) Buffalo(1) buffalo(2)

So that the meaning of the sentence is:

Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also happen to intimidate other bison.

If this is still not making a lot of sense, think of it like this: If you replaced the verb 'buffalo' with 'intimidate', and the noun 'buffalo' with the word 'people', the sentence would read:

Buffalo people that Buffalo people intimidate also intimidate people.

It's clear that this is some crazy shit. It's an example of how homonyms can be used.

Homonyms are words that have the same spellings and pronunciations, but different meanings. Other examples of homonyms are:

Bass (e.g. I enjoy bass fishing and play the bass guitar)

Lead  (e.g. the group's lead singer had made some enemies, and carried a lead pipe for protection.)

The amazing thing about this crazy homonym sentence is that is a completely valid sentence in the form that you see it in  – it doesn't really even need punctuation, unless you are a bit of a comma-lover.

'I'm sorry, were you talking to me, or were you referring to the city of Buffalo. Or perhaps you were referring to the colloquial term 'buffalo', meaning 'to bully'? It's all so confusing! How did we even get this far as a species?'

Bear in mind – the correct spelling of a phrase, or a terrifying psychotic episode?

2011-08-19T19:59:00.000+10:00

A lot of words have more than one meaning. Sometimes, it's as though these words are taunting us like potholes in the roads of our happiness, causing us to find ourselves helplessly stuck in a hole of misunderstanding. The double meaning of bear is an excellent example of these terrible, confusing potholes, not least when it is used in the context of the term 'bear in mind'.

You, like many other sexy and intelligent people, have probably said to yourself more than once, 'hang on, it can't be 'bear' in mind because 'bear' is an animal. It must be the other word that sounds a bit like bear, which is 'bare' in mind. Yes it must be 'bare in mind', as a bear in mind would be a terrifying psychotic episode brought on by a hereditary or lifestyle influence. But before we suffer in the darkness any longer, let's separate the lies from the truth here.

The word bear has two meanings:

1. A large, furry animal that can kill you

2. To carry, e.g. ' They came bearing gifts'

And so, the phrase 'bear in mind' refers to the second meaning of bear, as in 'carry this thought in your mind'.

And so, another grammar pothole has been filled in, making your journey to grammar nirvana smooth and joyous.

Breaking news: MC Grammar reveals his real name

2011-07-31T12:26:00.000+10:00

Friends, lovers, avid followers and solicitors of sexual favours. For years I have hidden behind my street name, MC Grammar, and you have patiently accepted this and referred to me by this name, even though in your heart of hearts you must have known that that was not the name that my smart and bold mama gave me.

So now it's time to reveal to you that my real name is James Prometheus Wiki III. The reason I want to reveal this to you is because that's what friends do when they have known each other for a while, and I trust you with this information.

Now, a few years ago I discovered that I had a real talent for helping people and giving them helpful life advice. Around the same time, I was becoming very savvy at the internet. I had added a number of helpful facts onto internet and I decided that it would be great if I had my own internet website that gave people facts. I commenced going about buying a domain name, and I thought it would be fantastic if I created a website that was like consulting an encyclopedia in real life! Therefore, I tried to buy a domain site called ‘wiki-pedia’. Imagine my shock when I discovered that the domain site ‘wikipedia.com’ had already been bought. I went away to try and deal with my anger, and after some self-reflection, I decided that my helpful site would be just as useful if I called it ‘Wiki-How’. To my frustration and rage, wikihow.com had also already been purchased.

Following this, I developed incontinence for a while. It was a terrible time, but I realised after a while that it was just psychological. I decided to create a website for people who had gone through the same struggle with their bladders, but then, to my utter devastation, I discovered that the domain site ‘wikileaks.com’ had also been bought. Why was it that the world was always one step ahead of me? Why was it that every time I had a vision of how I could change the world, someone else had already seen it, and made it their own?

Then something wonderful occurred to me. I realised that it wasn't important what I called my helpful website, as long as I was helping people with their problems.

With renewed zeal, I embarked on a very happy life of explaining grammar, and let me tell you, I have never looked back.
And with all of this cleared up, let's move on to the wonderful world of non-countable nouns.

Non-countable nouns, also known as uncountable nouns or mass nouns, are things that can't be divided into separate elements. In other words, they can't be 'counted'.

For example, instead of saying a milk, you should say a glass of milk, because even if you literally owned all the milk in the world, you still couldn't have a milk. That would be like having a dirt, or a pollen.

Examples of non-countable verbs are:
advice, information, news

furniture, luggage

rice, sugar, butter, water

electricity, gas,

money, currency

And if you don't have the specific words to describe the noun you are talking about, you can always just use some, any, little and much with non-countable nouns:I've got some money.

Have you got any rice?

I haven't got much advice for you

I've got a little money.

These are also known as quantifying adjectives, because they indicate amounts. Some other ways you can refer to a non-countable verb are:

A piece of news

A bottle of water

A grain of rice

We have now made some considerable progress in the world of non-countable nouns, which I am very happy about. I realise now that my role is to help with grammar, not to launch a multi-million dollar general help site that advices people on all manner of things. But to reminisce about that youthful dream I once had, let's appreciate these fun and cool girls as they help the world with its kissing.

Definitely a post you should read

2011-07-18T14:28:00.000+10:00

I feel shame. It's the kind of shame that you know you should have, and you attend years of cognitive therapy to see how irrational your shame is, but when you're lying in your four-poster bed in the dark, you can't help but feel like you're just a really a bad person.

You see, despite all my wonderful qualities, it is pretty often that I misspell the word definitely.

Yes, even me, who loves grammar so much that my children are named 'Suffix', 'Elipsis' and 'Dash' sometimes falters when I am called upon to remember whether you spell definitely or definitley.

The short story is it's definitely. You might think that that's confusing, because it's not like you say definit-elly, but you see, the e in definitely is silent. In this case, definite is the main part of the word, while -ly is the suffix.

A suffix is a group of letters that are at the end of a word to make a new word. The most common example of a suffix is the s that is added to the end of things, like cats, to indicate that something is plural.

Other examples of suffixes include:

Suffix    Original Word   Suffixed Word

en          Eat                      Eaten

ing         Sleep                  Sleeping

al           accident             accidental

able         tax                       taxable

ly           brother                brotherly

ful           forget                  forgetful

ly           helpful                   helpfully

We have now learnt not only about prefixes but also suffixes, so to top all this off, let's listen to this rap that puts it all together:

An internet blog post about tautology

2011-06-20T15:23:00.000+10:00

This is MC Grammar's sister, Bee-Rock.

Bee-Rock is a dancer. She loves hip-hop, jazz, contemporary and ballroom, and any other style of dance you can think of. But she has a problem. Every now and again, somebody utters the phrase 'I saw you dancing that dance last week.'

This phrase is what's known as a tautology. This makes Bee-Rock very annoyed. You see, Bee-Rock has no time for tautology. Sometimes it gets so bad that the only place she feels safe is on the dancefloor. She flees back to it and dances furiously, mascara-stained tears streaming down her face. 'No der I was '"dancing" a "dance"' she screams against the din of music to no one in particular. 'How else you do a dance?'

Tautology is when you say the same thing twice in different words. For example, the tiny little man is a tautology because it's unnecessary to say both 'tiny' and 'little'. Other examples of this are:

I'm going to raze this house to the ground.

When you threaten to raze something, it's pretty much assumed that you're going to raze it all the way to the ground.

The downstairs basement

Basements are always downstairs

One of the most common tautologies is terms like a free gift. This offender tends to come up in many varieties, such as:

A gift of wine on the house

The elephant was donated as a gift

Gifts and donations are always free, so this is where the tautology part comes in.

So do the right thing and try not to use tautologies – as Bee-Rock always says, the time you waste saying unnecessary things is time your could have spent dancing.

Sudden Adjectives: The words that action movies can't do without

2011-06-09T10:46:00.000+10:00

MC Grammar loves action movies. All those explosions, high speed car chases, bombs, and even though walking away slowly from an explosion that is right behind you in real life would just be a sign that had been traumatised by violence, there's nothing quite like it when you're watching it in an action movie.

And one of the things I love the most about action movies is their names, like Dragon Eyes, Sudden Death, Street Fighter, Hard Target, Double Target, and Knockaround Guys. All these titles have something in common – they all have adjectives in them.

There's nothing I love more than an adjective-noun action move. When you see one of the these, you know that you're going to get first-class action on your wide-screen TV, and almost definitely the martial art stylings of Jean-Claude Van Damme will be in it.

The role of adjectives is to give more information about the thing you are talking about. The most common form of an adjective is the attributive adjective. There are difference kinds of adjectives. There are attributive adjectives, meaning that it tells us more about the the main noun or object in a sentence:

It was an interesting animal

An adjective can be predicative, meaning it can be the predicate in a sentence:

This wig is glossy

And adjective can be post-positive, which means that it appears after the noun, like:

There was food aplenty, but it was of the worst kind imaginable

Or an adjective can be substantive, which is when an adjective is used like a noun:

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

A good rule to follow is to avoid using too many adjectives in a sentence. For example, look at this passage from 'New Moon', by Stephanie Meyer:

I woke with a start – my eyelids popping open wide – and gasped. Dull, grey light, the familiar light of an overcast morning, took the place of the blinding sun in my dream.

Woah, Stephanie Meyer, slow down there! There's a shitload of adjectives in your story and it's making your story look weird!

Also, you run the risk of tautology when you use too many adjectives. For example:

The wide open canyon.

Obviously a wide canyon is going to be open.

I was in close proximity to the lion.

All proximity is close.

Good God – where would we be without adjectives! Imagine if some of the greatest movies didn't have adjectives to emphasise their awesomeness? We would have action movies with names like 'Death that is going to happen now', 'More Than One Target' and 'Target that I keep missing'. As this would not do justice to the man that inspires all these movies, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Let's pay homage to him now.

Hyphen use and other sex tips

2011-05-20T15:06:00.000+10:00

As you probably know, MC Grammar is as much into physical love as he is into lingual love.

And when it comes to the world of punctuation, there's no sign that imitates the act of physical love more than the hyphen, which helps bring words together as close as they can be, whilst still retaining their individuality.

Hyphens are used to combine words. They are used for:

prefixes, such as 'pre' (e.g. pre-paid)
doubled-up vowels, (e.g. de-emphasised)
clarifying meaning (e.g. to distinguish them from established words, such as post-war)

The general rule is that you should only use hyphens in the case where there may be more than one way that your sentence could be interpreted. For example, in the sentence

I was laid off

You don't need to bother using a hyphen, because there's no other way that 'laid off' could be interpreted. But you might think about using a hyphen in this sentence:

When I got laid off my face had an outbreak of acne

Here, 'laid off' could mixed up with the term 'off my face' so to make it clear what part of the sentence 'off' belongs to, and things get confusing, so it would help to use a hyphen and say 'laid-off' instead.

When I got laid-off my face had an outbreak of acne

If you're confused about where the hyphen is on your computer, it is on the bottom row here. Try it out for maximum hyphen fun!

Prefixes: the fuel belt of your words

2011-05-09T10:53:00.000+10:00

Recently, MC Grammar agreed to participate in a 10 kilometre marathon.

There's nothing I enjoy more than a marathon. The way your heart skips and pulses, the way the fresh air rushes through your lungs, the way your parachute pants flap in the wind; but I also respect the harsh deal that nature strikes with us pathetic, fallible humans and our constant need for water, so I never attempt a marathon without the use of my handy fuel belt.

As you can see, the fuel belt provides me with two water bottles at the front, so I can have a quick burst of water whenever I'm trying to break through the pain barrier.

And just like my fuel belt, a prefix is something that attached to the front of another word to add something to it.

A prefix is attached to the start of a word, and partly indicates its meaning. Common prefixes include anti- (against), co- (with), mis- (wrong, bad), and trans- (across).

Most prefixes are generally connected to the rest of the word, such as mistake, transvestite and disbelief. However, you need to use a hyphen between the prefix and the rest of the word in these situations:

the rest of the word attached begins with a capital letter, as with anti-Stalin, or

the same vowel as the prefix ends in, as with: anti-inflationary, de-escalate, micro-organism.

So as you can see, prefixes are the fuel you need to refine or change a word.

MC Grammar out!

First Blood: Words on the brink of extinction

2011-05-03T10:07:00.000+10:00

BREAKING GRAMMAR NEWS: Reading University (UK) researchers revealed that they have identified the oldest English words, which are tens of thousands of years old.

To do this, they had to what always has to be done in situations such as these: they built a super computer.

Most of the languages from Europe to Asia fall under the category of Indo-European languages, and the vocal sounds they use to express a certain concept are very similar. This means that when new words arise, you can spot them because they don't sound similar. So using their super computer, the boffins at Reading University could work out the age of a word.

'You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future,' Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading told BBC News.

'From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.'

The words they found that had been around for the longest were I, we, two and three. MC Grammar can't be sure why two and three were so popular back then – maybe things only came in sets of two and three – we will never know.

They could also predict what words will be going out of style very soon. They were squeeze, guts, stick and bad as probable first casualties.

'We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time'.

And now, to tip our grammar hats to these dying words, we can do no better than to celebrate one of them by looking back at the glorious hey day of the word bad, with a cameo by Michael Jackson.

MC Grammar's grammar mistakes

2011-04-20T16:15:00.000+10:00

Let's get something clear: you might think that MC Grammar is infallible, but let me tell you, I am just as falliable as the next person. Take, for example, MC Grammar's constant and unregulated grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes.

And make no mistake, there can be no doubt that there will be even more mistakes committed in the future by MC Grammar. Even Emily Bronte, one of the greatest writers of all time, sometimes misspelt her very own sisters' names, and they were pretty much the only people she hung out with. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that even geniuses have their off days.

So, without further ado, here's a list of the mistakes that MC Grammar has committed on this very blog. Enjoy!

In my blog profile, I put a dash, instead of an en-dash

In 'Many funky uses of the apostrophe', I wrote 'rules IF' instead of 'rules of''

In 'The Semi-Colon: What has it done for you latley?' I wrote 'People to avoid it', instead of 'people TEND to avoid it'.

Also in 'The Semi-colon', I wrote 'I can't go carry on with this charade any more'. It's pretty obvious what was going on there—I was being a verb ho.

In 'Attack of the similar words!' I wrote 'Probably twins, not clones, or a glitch in the matrix' — that was a very confusing second comma, and it scrambled the whole meaning of my sentence.

In 'Cliffhanger! Pulling the dangling participle back from the edge of misuse', I wrote 'this is were the participle comes in', using 'were' instead of 'where' That was a pretty embarrassing mistake.

In 'Commas of Mass Destruction, Part One', I wrote 'the comma in it's mutant from' not 'mutant form'.

In 'Commas of Mass Destruction Part Two', I wote 'Oxford Comma' in capitals. Why? Thems aren't proper nouns!

In 'Who's laughing now? The difference between whose and who's', I wrote 'I just asked because it thought it might get an interesting answer'

So there you are: some of the outrageous mistakes MC Grammar himself has made. But just like you, I'm not going to fall apart over these mistakes, this is what LIFE is all about—taking the good with the bad, the ill with the wack.

If I were you, I'd read this post on subjunctive verbs

2011-03-29T13:19:00.000+11:00

Have you ever noticed that sometimes people say things like 'If I were able to, I would dance all night', or 'If I were president, I'd make it illegal to chew loudly', and you're all like 'hang on friend, why are you talking in the past tense? Don't you mean "If I was able to, I would dance all night", and "If I was President, I'd make it illegal to chew loudly"?'

And then they say 'no way! I mean "if I were able to", because I'm talking in the subjunctive.'

The subjunctive is a verb form that you use when you are talking about scenarios that are not definitely going to happen.

For example, instead of saying 'If I was God', you would generally say 'If I were God', because you're probably not going to become God anytime soon.

The structure of the subjunctive is easy. For all verbs except the past tense of be, the subjunctive is the same as the bare infinitive (infinitive without "to"):

be (past)              be (present)                        Other verbs, (i.e to swim)

I were                    I be                                     I swim

you were               you be                                  you swim

he, she, it were     he, she, it be                        he, she, it swim

we were               we be                                 we swim

you were                you be                               you swim

they were              they be                                 they swim

As you can see, the subjunctive does not change according to person (I, you, he etc).

Here are some examples with a subjunctive verb:

The farmer insists that the barn be locked at night.

The doctor recommended that he join a gym.

It is essential that we leave as soon as possible

It was necessary that every student submit an essay by Friday

And now, a subjunctive treat for all my grammar brothers and sisters, an amazing home made video by two very clever cats, all about the Spanish subjunctive. It's a bit off topic for us, since I usually talk about Spanish grammar on my other blog 'Señor Gramática - Basta!, Es el momento de la gramática!' but who can resist when these two bright students sing 'And I'm like, Present, Present Subjunctive'

Who's laughing now? The difference between whose and who's

2011-03-18T17:20:00.000+11:00

A while ago MC Grammar got addicted to wiki answers. It's hard to say what it was about this particular interactive social media that I fell for: perhaps it was the satisfying aspect of asking a question, then an anonymous person taking the time to read over my question, then answer it seriously. After a few months, wiki answers was being taken over more and more by people who didn't believe in dinosaurs, so I just lost interest and took up nature photography instead. But back when I was having good times on wiki answers, sometimes I liked to mix it up a little bit and ask unusual questions. Once, during a late night session on wiki answers, I asked Whose hands are these? It didn't really mean anything, I just asked because it thought it might get an interesting answer. And an interesting answer it did receive, as the response I received back was: These are the hands of Banquo. Thank you, anonymous poster, I enjoyed this answer and its fun approach. I would like to see more of these on the internet.

And this brings us to our post for today, the difference between whose and who. The difference between these two words is a little bit like the difference between your and you're. They sound similar, but they mean very different things.

Always remember that:

Who's = 'who is'

Who's at the door?

Whose = possessive

Whose socks are these?

With the knowledge and understanding of these two words added to the stainless steel toolbox of your grammar skills, you will be able to construct the ultimate spice rack of grammar.

'Commadore Norrington, my effects please': The difference between affect and effect

2011-02-28T22:51:00.000+11:00

The difference between affect and effect has confused more than a few people. And make no mistake, sometimes even MC Grammar can end up throwing himself on his four-poster bed, howling in frustration at this very tricky area of grammar.

But lucky for us, the difference between affect and effect is a lot simpler than you might think. The thing is, effect and affect are homonyms, which means that even though they sound the same, they have different meanings. Read on, grammar children.

Affect means:

1. To have an influence or cause a change in something

Too much sunlight affected the quality of the photograph

2. To act on the emotions of, to touch, to move.

The arguments and fighting affected me badly

3. To attack or infect

Rabies affects the brain

Effect, on the other hand, means:

1. A result

The drugs took effect immediately

There was more positive information available about immigration, effecting a change attitudes towards immigrants.

2. The power to produce an outcome or achieve a result

The president's threats to kill everyone had no effect on the protesters

3. Something that produces a specific impression, or supports a general design or intention:

The fireworks were the best effects of the concert

If you ever get lost, there's a handy way of remembering the difference. In the movie 'Pirates of the Caribbean', Captain Jack Sparrow has managed to get off from being arrested. Demanding his stuff back, he says: 'Commodore Norrington, my effects please, and my hat'. When Sparrow asks for his effects he means his sword, his compass, and his belt. These are his effects, meaning the things that make him Captain Jack Sparrow. Your effects are the things that add a little something to the occasion, which is why fireworks are effects, or special animation techniques in a movie are effects.

Everything's not going to be alright

2011-02-12T11:24:00.000+11:00

From a fan:

Dear MC Grammar. What's your position on owning and keeping firearms in the home?

Dear fan,

Firstly, thanks for writing. And thanks for asking this important question. What is my position on firearms in the home? Well, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that I am very pro-firearms. I believe that every home should have two or three fully-loaded firearms, and that these should be placed within reaching distance of your bed, or wherever you sleep at night. If you have a habit of going to the bathroom during the night, and your bathroom is not close to where you sleep, such as in the case where you don't have a walk-in wardrobe, you should also keep a gun under your bathroom sink, or hanging from a shower curtain.

But the thing about this is that these firearms should only be for one specific purpose – to fight off incorrectly used words.

That's right, even in your own home, late at night when you are just relaxing with your loved ones, among your own hard-earned possessions, words that are not actually words can suddenly be breaking through your front window, traumatising your children and making love to your wife. What are you going to do when that happens? Are you going to just sit there and let the scene burn into your retinas? Or are you going to pull out your weapon and defend your loved ones like a warrior!?

Of course, by 'weapon', I mean your knowlege of grammar, and by 'firearm', I mean your astute oneness with language. And nowhere are these devices self-defense needed more than in the case of the confusion surrounding the words alright and all right.

A lot of people are confused about what the difference is between alright and all right. Luckily, this is a pretty easy problem to sort out, because alright is not a real word, in the same vein that 'alot' is not a word.

The best thing to do here is to remember this saying that Bill Walsh penned in his book, 'Lapsing into a Comma': 'alright is not all right'

Snap, Bill Walsh.

And don't forget, grammar children, always keep your weapons of grammar-knowledge loaded, and in an easy-to-reach place around the house.

Dr Whom and the attack of the archaic language

2011-01-26T17:05:00.000+11:00

Try to get your head around this: scientists believe that there was a time when neanderthals and modern humans existed at the same time. Here's a picture comparing a modern human and a neanderthal.

But the neanderthals ended up dying out for some reason. We can't be sure what happened to them (although some evidence suggests that we ate them) but what we can be sure of is that the period of co-existence must have been a pretty crazy time for neanderthals and modern humans alike. They probably spent their whole day just staring at each other, thinking 'wow, you're sort of like me, but at the same time, you're not' Maybe modern humans just ended up eating the neanderthals just to deal with the craziness of the situation.

But what you don't even realise, grammar brothers and sisters, is that we are living in just as crazy a time right now, with the co-existence of the words who and whom.

As you might know, some of us have the idea that 'whom' is the more correct version of who. This is not true. Whom and who have different functions, and back in their glorious heyday they lived side by side, two versions of the same species.

Traditionally, whom was used if you were referring to the object of a sentence, for example:

He is the one to whom I owe my life.

If you are referring to the subject of a dependant or a ('subordinate') clause then you would use 'who'

He's just a great guy who cares about safety around the home.

But stop right there. Before you log off your computer and run out into the streets, throwing out 'whom' in everything you say without a care for who can hear you, let me explain something. For a long time, the use of 'whom' has been getting used less and less, making it archaic. This means that it has fallen out of use so much that it's no longer the right way to say something, and in most cases where you would have said 'whom' fifty years ago, it is now correct to say 'who'.

You might respond to this in horror, you might say, 'but just because people don't know how to use grammar properly doesn't mean that we should just lay down and die like dogs'. But the thing is, language changes all the time. In old English, spoken 1000 years ago, the word for 'who' was 'hwa'. Imagine how pissed off people back then must have been when all those uneducated punks, with their ridiculously long trendy cloth shoes, started saying who instead? If microsoft word had existed back then, it would have immediately flagged who as a misspelling, but after people had been saying it for a few years, everyone just gave up and started saying who instead.

And the same goes for whom. In 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary printed for the first time that whom was 'no longer current in natural colloquial speech', and they were right. In most cases, who is now used. You can still use whom in the traditional way, but if you do, you will no longer be speaking what is known as 'plain' English or 'colloquial' English. You'll be speaking using archaic words out of context, and that's just as incorrect as using the wrong grammar or the wrong tense, so what's the point of that?

There is, however, one use of whom that is still alive and kicking is when it comes after a preposition in more formal language. For example:

To whom it may concern

To whom have you been speaking?

With whom will we be coming to the meeting?

Of course, in these cases, you could always say something like 'who have you been speaking with?' or 'who will we be coming to the meeting with?' and it would be just as correct. That's the beauty of language – there's more than one way of doing things.

So what did happen to our neanderthal brothers and sisters? Well, there's not a lot of scientific evidence to back me up, but I like to think that neanderthals and modern humans put aside their differences and their animal skins and just got freaky with each other, leading their DNA to be incorporated into ours. But there are other dreamers like me – enjoy this montage from the movie 'Clan of the Cave Bear', where an early modern human is adopted and lives with neanderthals.

MC Grammar, what's the deal with you?

2011-01-18T21:22:00.000+11:00

I can hear you asking this question. You want to know how I got like this, right? You want to know how I became an amazing, grammar-knowing, language-loving, word-saying type of guy. Well, let me tell you, it runs in the family.

Recently I found a whole pile of my mother's letters, dated from 1980 to 1982. She died a few years ago, so I took them home to read them and hear what she was up to in the early 80's, apart from having the perm of a god. And let me tell you, these letters revealed something fascinating about her.

My mother had seriously amazing grammar and punctuation skills, probably even better than MC Grammar.

So that's the deal about me, I got it from my momma.

'A' and 'An': the blog post we had to have.

2010-12-19T17:10:00.000+11:00

I would like to apologise to you, my multi-talented and sexy readers. The last couple of months have been lost time – they have been snatched away, never to be rescued from the jaws of the past. But believe me when I say it couldn't be helped. You see, I bought a trampoline.

Who knew how much joy you could get out of springing into the air and spreading your legs as wide as they can go, then feeling the air running through your hair as you plummet back down to earth? And when you wear balloon pants like I do, the experience quadruples in fun. I have been jumping on my trampoline, feeling the wind rush past my ears for weeks and weeks now.

And this brings us to our post today: the question of using An or A.

A is known as the indefinite article. Indefinite articles mean that we are not talking about a specific thing. For example, if you say, a cat, we can't be sure which cat is being talked about exactly. If you say the cat, it means that you are talking about a particular cat.

An is also an indefinite article, and is for when a word starts with a vowel, like 'an elephant'.

Simple enough. But like many things on the hard streets of grammar, you have to be always on your toes. The moment you get comfortable, the moment you get a little too big for your boots is the moment when they cut you down to size.

And this is exactly what happens when you come find yourself writing out something like 'an SES volunteer', or 'an LED light'. You're all 'hey! S and L are not vowels! Why are you using an?!'

It's true, S and L are not vowels. And without a doubt, if these acronyms were spelt out as 'state emergency service' and 'light-emitting diode', you would definitely say 'a state emergency service volunteer' and 'a light-emitting diode', but the thing is, in most cases, written language follows the way we speak as closely as it can. When you say 'SES' the letter S starts off with a sound like 'EH' or 'AH', so it's kind of exhausting to say 'a SES volunteer', because you spend all the oxygen you have on you at the time, just trying to say 'a', because you've got no smooth segue into saying 'SES'. You end up running out of breath and collapsing on the floor, clutching at your throat and thrashing your legs around in panic.

To avoid this this, it's easier to say 'an SES volunteer' because that way, you just spring effortlessly from your article to your noun like a kangaroo on a trampoline underneath another trampoline.

The letters that need the article 'an' in front of them when they're in acronyms are the ones that are a bit hard to say, which is F, L,M,N,R and S. So if you're ever in doubt about what to write, just say it out loud and see if you throw the old an in there. If it's good enough to say, it's good enough to write on paper.

Commas of Mass Destruction: Part 2

2010-09-16T14:38:00.002+10:00

In our last post, we got familiar with the comma. So now we are ready to revisit James Thurber and Harold Ross in the New Yorker Office in the 1930s, getting ready to bash the living shit out of each other, and all over the use of the comma.

You see, Harold Ross was a comma-lover. Some might say he was a comma-nist. James Thurber, however, wasn’t so big on them. But Ross was the editor and boss of the New Yorker, so each time Thurber’s work was put in front of him, he started comma-izing it. If Thurber wrote ‘Red white and blue’, Ross changed it to ‘Red, white, and blue’.

In his memoir, ‘The Years with Ross’, Thurber remembers that Ross thought that there was no limit to how much clearer you could make a sentence by throwing in commas everywhere. But to Thurber, they were just obstacles, getting in the way, forcing you to stop and start all the time, frustrating your progress as you read.

So who was right?

Well, first let’s look at Ross’s outlook on things. To Ross, commas were really important to show the reader were there might have been a pause, or where there was a certain amount of omitted information. For example, somebody once asked why there needed to be a comma in the sentence: ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room’, Ross' answer was ‘so the men had time to push their chairs back and stand up.’

Snap, Harold Ross. But a lot of Ross’ logic was based on the argument of the oxford comma, and so sometimes it went a bit over the top.

The oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is used before conjunctions like or, and or but. For example:

We ate oranges, apples, and pears.

The main arguments for the oxford comma are that it offers consistency with the other commas in the sentence, and that it better matches the way people speak.

The arguments against the oxford comma is that if there is a conjunction, such as an 'and' there’s no need for a comma, because the 'and' is the thing that the other apostrophes are replacing.

Jesus Christ. Now you know. Now you understand why Ross and Thurber couldn’t stand each other for another second. They were stuck in an oxford comma hate spiral. This is why, when Thurber wrote ‘red white and blue’, Ross just corrected it to ‘red, white, and blue.’ Ross always used oxford commas, and it pissed Thurber off.

As you know, MC Grammar doesn’t like it when people use grammar just for the sake of being correct. If a sentence reads correctly without the aid of the punctuation, then you don’t need it.

So do we need the oxford comma? Well, that depends on whether you think the sentence needs it or not. There are some cases where the meaning can get lost with an oxford comma. The author Teresa Nielsen Hayden gave this example of how a dedication can get confusing

To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

In this case, Hayden has shown how it can look like her parents are the author Ayn Rand and God. In this case using an oxford comma like this:

To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.

Would have been a lot better – better, but not great. The fact is, no matter how many commas you throw at this sentence, it still always reads a bit as though someone's parents are Ayn Rand and God, and an oxford comma isn’t going to fix that.

The other argument for the oxford comma is that it better matches the way people speak. An extra comma before a word like and better evens out a list rhythmically. This is true. Consider this:

This morning for breakfast I had toast, cornflakes, bacon and eggs, and coffee.

Here, we know that the bacon and eggs came together in a sort of package, but if you write:

This morning for breakfast I had toast, bacon and eggs and coffee

You start to imagine a coffee-based soup full of rashers of bacon and bits of egg. An oxford comma definitely would have made a difference here, and more than that, in speech, a person definitely would have paused just a little bit, just after saying ‘bacon and eggs’.

So what happened in the end for Ross and Thurber? Well it didn’t matter how much Thurber screamed and threatened, Ross was in charge of the New Yorker, so he always got his way.

But Thurber got back at him by writing his memoir, ‘The Years with Ross’. Now, everyone thinks of Ross as an eccentric, slightly crazy guy, even though he was technically a genius. The lesson that we can all learn from this is that you should try not to get too hung up on commas, because it can get out of hand after a while. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Columbia University, which has a student group called the Students for the Preservation of the Oxford Comma. (SPOC).

So what’s MC Grammar’s advice about the oxford comma? Don’t commit to it. Treat it like a casual acquaintance. Whenever you think you need one, throw it in, based on the fact that you would have paused if you were speaking, or because it makes the sentence clear with it. But don’t get into an argument about it, because someone might end up writing a memoir about you that makes you seem a bit anal about commas.

To finish off, let’s listen to this topical tune from Vampire Weekend, where Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend reflects on meeting the Students for the Preservation of the Oxford Comma.

Commas of Mass Destruction: Part 1

2010-09-09T10:03:00.000+10:00

In New York in the 1930s, two men had a massive fight about commas.

Their names were Harold Ross and James Thurber. Harold Ross was the editor and head of the New Yorker Magazine, and James Thurber was a humourist who worked for the magazine.

Ross loved commas. He pretty much wanted to marry a comma. But Thurber thought they were a bit more unnecessary. For example, if Thurber wrote ‘red white and blue’, Ross would change it to ‘red, white, and blue’. They could only see one way to settle their differences: with a punch-on.

So who was right? Well, to work that out, first we need to work out exactly what a comma is for.

The word ‘comma’ means ‘cut off piece’, and was first applied to writing back in ancient Greece, to tell actors reading aloud when to pause and take a breath when they were saying their lines. And this was what it was used for for a long time. (During the middle ages, it even had a little comrade punctuation mark called a ‘virgula suspensiva’, which looked a bit like a forward slash [/] which was used for the briefest of pauses, but that has now died out.)

Slowly, the comma began to be used for more than just reading out loud.

Now, the function of the comma is:

1. To divide things in lists

We bought oranges, apples and pears

In lists, the comma is not required before the and on the end, unless you believe in the oxford comma, which we’ll be confronting in part two of commas.

2. To join things in a sentence

When two sentences join to be one, a comma is like the contraception they use to ensure the information they contain stays separate

The sentence: The night was ice cold. There was frost everywhere.

could become: The night was ice cold, there was frost everywhere.

3. To fill gaps of information

For example, instead of saying

My old dog has three legs; my new dog has four legs.

You could say

My old dog has three legs; my new dog, four.

4. To show that someone is about to talk

Such as:

Suddenly he stood up and said, ‘Right then. Where are my slippers?’

5. After an exclamation or interjection:

Holy shit, what am I going to do now?

Jesus, I hate this song

OMG, where did all these lame playsuits come from?

6. To ‘bracket’ extra information.

This is a bit of a tricky one. The rule of bracketing is that you use them to put a ‘weak interruption’, in a sentence. A weak interruption is an additional piece of information. This doesn’t mean that the information isn’t important, it just means that it is ‘added’.

Her dark hair, scented like almonds, was like silk to the touch.

We ate all the ice creams, even the tofu-flavoured ones, that we could find in the fridge.

The girl, Josie, finally spoke.

In these cases, the added information could be left out, but it means that the sentence would probably be a bit less interesting and would offer less information about what’s going on.

7. To breathe.

This is the oldest, and most important function of the comma. It gives you an idea of the rhythm of what is happening and the way people are talking. When you talk, you don’t talk at the same pace, with the same pitch, the whole time. Without even thinking about it, you use pauses.

So when you’re writing stuff down, you should think about when you would pause. As you might have noticed, MC Grammar uses a lot of commas – maybe even more than is average – because MC Grammar always talks in an even, calm, emphatic and commanding manner. Each time you see a comma when you read this blog, that’s my way of letting you know that I am inhaling another strong, determined breath, and setting my steel gaze upon you, so that my eyes seem like two polished tiger-eye stones as I make yet another point about grammar. But do I apologise for this love of commas? Of course I don’t. This is because I know that each comma is well-placed and thought out.

But beware, readers, the comma has the potential for setting off a war of catastrophic proportions, in its mutant form, the Oxford Comma.

/Stay tuned for part two of Commas of Mass Destruction.

Attack of the Similar Words! Practise vs Practice

2010-08-13T12:52:00.000+10:00

An incredible thing happened to me the other day, as I was walking down the street. It was early in the morning, and I was the only one about. With the dew on the leaves, and the clouds still all fresh and pink, it could well have been the first day in creation, and I could have been the first cat who ever wore balloon pants affixed with a leather cummerbund, as I sauntered down that street.

As I turned a corner, I happened to pass by a young dude. He looked like he was in his teens, he had a shock of fluffy blond hair on the top of his head, a red shirt, and a pair of light-coloured jeans on.

I passed him and went along my merry way. I kept walking down the street and after about 20 metres, I made a short-cut through a narrow laneway. Then something very messed up happened: the same boy walked passed me again in the lane way.

For a few second there, my mind was a mess of panicking contortions. There was no way this boy could have made it around the block in the few seconds since I had passed him before. And not only were these people identical in every way, but they were also wearing exactly the same thing.

Of course, after just a few seconds, using the powers of logic that I am so well known for, I worked out that these people were probably twins, and not clones. And since they were funky teen twins (or 'tweenins' as you might consider calling them), they probably (a) had a lot of sibling rivalry, which explained why they didn’t want to walk together, and (b) on their way to school, which was why they were both walking in the same direction.

Another problem solved. But it got me thinking. Just like life, grammar is full of confusing look-alikes that not only look just the same, but almost do exactly the same thing too. So when you come across them in a sentence, you can often find yourself asking ‘WTF? What’s the actual difference between these two words?’

Take for example, the difference between ‘practise’ and ‘practice.’

You might look at these two words and at first you’d be all like ‘Oh, the reason that one of these has an s, and one of these has a c, is because one is an American spelling, and one is a British spelling’ You’d be wrong. In the UK, ‘practice’ and ‘practise’ are both used, while in the US, only ‘practice’ is used. Which kind of doesn’t help at all.

So, just say you don’t live in the wide, glorious land of the United States. Let's just say that although you’ve applied through several channels, you can’t get a work visa. What do you do next?

In the UK and its sexy colony, Australia, ‘practice’ is a noun, while ‘practise’ is a verb. For example:

Dr Wright’s a pretty good doctor. His medical practice is just down the road.

I need to practise my capoeira, so I can become a dancing warrior.

Are you a practising Catholic?

Meanwhile, at some stage in history, the US decided this was a pretty small detail, and that they were pretty busy and couldn’t really be fucked, and started using ‘practice’ for everything.

It's most likely that there are some cases where North Americans might try to stick to what’s technically correct, but when you are on your tourist's visa in the US, pursuing research into the many practices that Americans engage in, and noting it all down in your field notes, MC Grammar recommends that it’s probably best to stick to that spelling in your field report.

Back to the recent past! 'Used to' and 'use to'

2010-07-20T15:05:00.000+10:00

This is Amy.

Amy made a terrible mistake that has to do with the internet fridge.

You see, around 2003, Amy had a lot of money. She had been saving up her wages for years, because she had a feeling that a major technological breakthrough was about to burst out of the dull mould of all that had come before, such as mini-disk players, or the 1969 h316 computer, which cost $10,000 US and could only store recipes.

And then, there it was: the internet fridge. It was breathtaking. It had so many features – it had the internet, obviously, but it also had a computerised notepad, where people could write messages to each other like ‘get milk’ instead of just writing a regular note. Photos of the happy family that owned the internet fridge could also be flashed in a slide show sequence, instead of just putting regular photos up on the fridge. It had so many features. And in addition to that, it was also a fridge, where food could be stored, just like a regular fridge. That was enough for Amy. She knew that this was the technological moment that she had been waiting for. And she had also saved $15,000, which was what the internet fridge cost.

And then, twelve months later, Amy heard talk of something called an 'iPod'. Suddenly, everyone was using one, revelling in the fact that they no longer had to lumber around with CD players jammed in their pants, or that they would have buy complicated walkman-pouches so they could play their single CD over and over again, until they could get home to play it. And they revelled in how they could store all the music they owned in this tiny machine. Amy tried to keep talking up the merits of the internet fridge, but no one wanted to listen any more. In fact, they couldn’t hear her at all, because they were all listening to their iPods, which had cost a mere $500.

Poor Amy. Because of her bad decision, she found herself trapped in the recent past. She suddenly belonged to a time in the past that wasn’t too distant, but was just outdated enough to push her out of the present. This is just like our grammar spotlight today, and the dilemma of used to and use to.

These are two terms are trapped in a swampy marsh of the past, but serve different functions. What is the difference between these two terms? Is there a difference? Step into my funky tardis and let’s find out.

These terms may look the same, but they are used for describing different time periods.

As you may know, the word use is a verb, and the past tense of use is used.

The term used to is for when you’re talking about repeated actions or events that happened a long time ago, but have now stopped.

When I was single, I used to spend my weekends writing complaint letters to David Jones.

You can also use it for actions that you once did a lot, but now don’t do as much.

We used to go out all the time.

This implies you may still go out sometimes, but not as often as before.

You say use to when it follows did or didn’t. For example,

Didn’t you use to type out swear words with your label maker and stick them to pigeons?

I didn’t use to grow a moustache, but when I got dumped for the 36th time I changed my mind.

Did you use to ride the monster truck?

In these sorts of sentences, the action (typing, growing a beard, riding the monster truck) are not completely in the past, and they may not have happened all that long ago – in fact there’s a chance they have escaped into the present, and may even career into the future like a drunk on a hoverboard. For this reason, we use the present tense, use. Just to be on the safe side. MC Grammar thinks you should always be safe. I don’t want to have to meet your mother’s eye and tell her what happened to you out there when you tried to describe something that was only in the recent past, and got confused. Don’t put me in that situation.

This might all seem hard to follow, but there’s a very simple way of remembering how to go about things. If the words did or didn’t are in the sentence, then you say use. If did or didn’t aren’t there, then you say used to. This is the simplest way of working this out, and knowing exactly what time period you're talking about.

When apostrophes go bad: Do's and Don'ts

2010-06-27T17:16:00.000+10:00

Because of MC Grammar, you basically know everything now. You know how to change a light bulb, and what sort of light bulb goes into an IKEA lamp. You know how to unscrew a fluorescent light bulb and also what wattage goes into a fluorescent light bulb.

And you also know all about apostrophes. You know that an apostrophe either indicates possession, such as Jane’s hat, or indicates a shortening of the word is or has, like Jane’s happy or Jane’s already left. When there is no apostrophe, it means that the ‘s’ is only there to show that there is more than one of something. You know that saying The kings come in splendour is a very different to saying The King’s come in splendour. Because one is plural and one is singular.

But did you know that it’s not all as simple as all that? Just when you thought grammar was simple, the real world has to interfere and fuck up your shit. This brings us to the debacle of Do’s and Don’ts

What’s happening with this term? Firstly, it’s inconsistent: the do has an apostrophe before the s but the don’t doesn’t. Secondly, why does the do have an apostrophe at all? It’s NOT possessive, is it? It doesn’t ‘own’ anything in the sentence, does it? No, it doesn’t.

But believe it or not, this is how it has to be. Why? For no other reason than the fact that it looks weird without it. It looks like ‘dos’, Spanish for ‘two’. It looks like you tried to write ‘does’ and failed. It looks like a whole other word, and this reason, and this reason only, it has an apostrophe in it.

And take a look at its partner in crime, don’ts. Don’ts won’t even tow the line for consistency’s sake and become don’t’s. Why? yep, you know it – because it that looks weird too. There are too many apostrophes (two), so the final result is that Do’s and don’ts is one of the biggest outlaws of grammar, and there’s nothing that any of us can do about it, but curse and shake our fists.

So how does it get away with it? Believe it or not, because it’s more correct than all the other options, and makes more sense. Let’s remember, the whole point of grammar isn’t actually to be correct for the sake of being correct, it’s to make sense, and to communicate to the widest audience possible. In this case, ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ is correct by association, meaning that because the other options are so confusing, it’s won by default. It’s like a handsome outlaw: you know it’s a murderous felon, but who can resist those dark locks and symmetrical jaw?

A word of caution though: in most other cases, you should always stop and pause for reflection before proceeding with an apostrophe. An apostrophe is like a beautiful woman or man that you meet at a bar. Sure, you’re knocked sideways by their longish hair, dyed criminally blond and almost pitch black at the roots, and the sensual darkish colouring just below their eyes that gives a hint of Mediterranean blood via Poland or Northern Italy, but don’t just dive in – get a good look at them! Is that intriguing peroxided hair and enticing dark roots just a result of the fact that they originally set out to be a glamour model, then sunk into the seamy world of hard drugs? And are those bags under their eyes just a result of Hepatitis B?

In the same way, when it comes to apostrophes, you need to ask yourself certain self-preserving questions. A common crime in grammar is to write something like I read 100’s of books online or the two large lion’s approached quickly. These are incorrect, because neither ‘1000’ or the lions, ‘own’ anything in the sentence, nor is the s a shortening of is. A good quality-control approach is to ask yourself ‘Am I actually writing 100 IS’, or, does ‘100’ actually ‘own’ something in this sentence? If the answer is no, and ‘100’ is just plural, then you don’t need an apostrophe.

Take note, grammar lovers, not everybody agrees on the state of Do's and Don'ts. Many people who also love grammar, will insist on taking a variety of measures, such as writing Dos and Don'ts, Do's and Don't's and also Dos and Dont's. MC Grammar says: increase the grammar peace, fellow word lovers. Although these version might be accepted in some situations, if you're writing something like an important document that a lot of people are going to read, it's best to stick to the modern, most widely accepted, and easiest to understand, Do's and Don'ts.

To finish off, let's check out this video from the 50's about dating. See how the video is correctly titled Do's and Don'ts? Now THAT's how to get a date.

Indecent Preposition

2010-06-08T10:07:00.001+10:00

Alright. Again, MC Grammar hasn't exactly hit the mark with this week's post title. I am all too aware that it doesn't really work, since the movie I am cleverly pop-culture referencing is actually 'Indecent Proposal', not 'Indecent Proposition.' It would never have been called 'Indecent Proposition', because that doesn't have the same zing to it. Being MC Grammar and only achieving lukewarm wordplay is like throwing stones when you live in a glass house and wear a glass house-robe. Because of this failure, I hurl myself on my four-poster bed in frustration. But we have to try to keep a perspective, and focus on the reason we're all here: to learn about prepositions.

So what is a preposition? Well, a preposition links words to other words in a sentence, like 'with', 'under' 'without' 'on', and 'from'.

A preposition 'locates' an object For example,

The book is on the table

I am beneath the tree.

She held the book during class

I want to be on you

In each sentence, the preposition locates the object in time or space.

A prepositional verb 'introduces' nouns, and explains just what the hell they are doing. For example;

The boy climbed a tree.

There was rejoicing throughout the land

Each time, the preposition has 'introduced' the noun and linked the two nouns in the sentence together.

Put simply, a preposition explains what shit is doing in a sentence together. If a preposition was a person, it would be that person at a party who knows everyone, so when you walk in and exclaim 'Hey - I didn't know they knew each other!', preposition is all like 'oh yeah, didn't you know? They live in same apartment block', or 'oh yeah, they used to go to the same yoga class' or 'oh yeah, they've only just met, but they're really going for it, huh?'

Now, here is the tricky part. Some people think that prepositions should never go at the end of a sentence. They think that, for example, instead of saying 'who do you live with', you should say 'with whom do you live?'

The problem with trying to stick to this rule is that you end up talking like Yoda. When Winston Churchill was knocked for ending a sentence with a preposition, he answered 'This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put!' Snap, Winston.

MC Grammar reckons that the only time you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition is when it's unnecessary. For example,

I've got the money that I'll be paying you with.

Here 'with' is extra – you didn't need it. You could have just said 'I've got the money that I'll be paying you'. This is the only time that the prepositional rule should be used.

The main reason that some people still stick to this rule is because of that jerk that I hate, Latin. That's right, Latin's back, telling English what to do, calling it fat and short-sheeting its bed in the middle of winter. In Latin, prepositions tend to get attached to the object that they are 'introducing.' For example, The Latin word for 'wine' is 'Vinium' But in the saying 'In Vino Veritas' (In wine there is truth) 'Vino' shows that it's the wine that is the subject of the saying. This means that prepositions can never be found at the end of sentences in Latin, and as a result, in English we are never meant to do it either.

Not only is this stupid, but really impractical. Some more demure grammar peeps will try to not to rock the boat by suggesting that instead of saying

Who do you want to speak to?

You should say

To whom do you want to speak?

Why? If the whole point of grammar is to communicate with each other, and a person is already doing that just fine, like in the first sentence above, why complicate things? The good news is that grammar brothers and sisters have been calling bullshit on this rule for over a hundred years - in 1902, Harvard Professor Adam Sherman Hill pointed out that it was a bit crap, and then in 1918, James C. Fernald really went for the jugular in 'A Senseless Tradition', claiming that 'there was never any sense in the rule, and people go on using the prohibited idiom every day.'

Snap, James C. Fernald. You're right. It might have been OK, back in the day when 'whom' was not an out-dated form of language, but these days it's just silly, and trying to defend it is like trying to say that fat-dripping is a good thing to put on your toast instead of butter - just because they used to do it doesn't make it right or good. In fact, it explains a lot of health problems that old people have now.

When all is said and done, the rule around prepositions is one that we don't need to worry about, but it's still good to know what exactly a preposition is. You can throw it into conversation at any time, impressing people with your highly-tuned grammar skills. And in the rare cases where it's helpful to know when you've overdosed on prepositions, it could make all the difference.

Let's finish up on this humorous 'Grammar Wizard' cartoon from the Perry Bible Fellowship, that pretty much sums up the whole situation. And ask yourself; do you really want a world where this might happen?

MC Grammar loves...

2010-05-24T15:15:00.000+10:00

Online dictionaries that give you audio pronounciations, so you can avoid making embarrassing mistakes when throwing out chunky word moves at parties. Check it out!

'Alot' or 'a lot'? MC Grammar investigates.

2010-05-15T09:39:00.000+10:00

MC Grammar is pretty much the full package when it comes to education, natural intelligence and razor-sharp commonsense. When a problem presents itself to me, I just use the holy trinity of these three qualities to get me through any situation, so I always come up smiling, as well as giving off a warm glow of subtle sexuality and symmetrically good looks.

But even MC Grammar finds it hard to fight his way through the swampy marsh of the confusion surrounding alot and a lot. That’s right, even I had to stop and think about it for a minute.

I don’t know what it is about this tiny speck of grammar, but it’s confused even the greatest minds of history, leaving them to weep, crumpled on the floor in expanding pools of their own urine.

So is it ‘alot’, or ‘a lot’? It’s a lot. 'Alot' isn’t a word. However, it’s used so much that sometimes, even MICROSOFT WORD doesn’t always recognise it as a spelling mistake.

So why all the confusion? Well, these two words feature so much together that it’s hardly surprising that people have started to think that they're the same word. But just because they hang out all the time doesn’t mean that anything’s going on. You’ve got to understand, THEY ARE JUST FRIENDS – for the time being anyway. Who knows what will happen after an evening of just the right amount of fruity lexia, when everyone else has gone home early and since they’re so relaxed around each other, lot just crashes on a's couch for the night, and before they go to bed, a finally opens up about how bad her last break-up was and what she’s looking for in a new relationship, and then they realise how close they’re sitting next to each other.

But until that happens, the rest of us who are just trying to get through every day on the rough streets of grammar have to accept that they are separate words, and alot should always be ‘a lot’.

All the single clauses!

2010-04-23T13:12:00.000+10:00

If Beyonce Knowles was a piece of grammar, what would she be? I'll tell you.

But first, let's get retrospective for a moment. With MC Grammar, you have explored a lot of wonderful parts of grammar. Our minds have become so entwined that sometimes, when you're writing a letter, or trying to do a written test, or just throwing down some thoughts onto paper, you suddenly hear a voice that you imagine to be what MC Grammar would sound like; a deep, soothing voice, a bit like steel-capped boots dragging over gravel, that strokes the inside of your mind and gently whispers the correct grammatical form to you. 'Thank you, MC Grammar', you gently whisper. 'No thanks needed' you hear my voice whisper back.

But there has been a certain issue that we've been skirting around lately, and this is it: 'What are independent and dependant clauses, and why do they affect everything I do?'

Here's why.

A clause is a phrase. Sometimes it's a single sentence, but the rule is that it must contain two things: a subject and a predicate, or, the thing done or being done to the subject. Because this can be a bit confusing, here's very simple sentence to explain this.

The cat sat on the mat.

The thing being done (predicate) is 'sitting'. The thing (the subject) doing the sitting is the cat. Because the cat is the one 'doing' the verb, the cat is the subject. If it just so happened that it was the mat 'doing' the sitting on itself, then the mat would be the subject. But that would be pretty crazy.

Another example is:

Jo is writing a sentence.

What is being done? Writing. So it is the predicate. Who is 'doing' the predicate? Jo. So he/she is the subject.

'Whatever, MC Grammar!' you might scream out: 'In the same way I just know how to ride a bike, I just know how to write a sentence!' Sure, maybe, but when you don't know how a subject and a predicate go together, your whole meaning can get lost. Take for example this bomb site:

Clarise is the girl who is standing next to Lance, with the blond hair.

The problem here is that there are two subjects and one thing being done, AND there is an incomplete clause hanging onto them. The result is that you end up having no idea who has blond hair. A better way to say it would have been:

Clarise is the girl with blond hair, standing next to Lance.

Here, the subject and the predicate live together, cheerfully, in a relationship based on trust and mutual respect. Loitering by their side is the mousy but helpful, 'standing next to Lance', which can't stand on it's own, unlike 'Clarise is the girl with the blond hair', which doesn't need anybody when it's up in the club.

As you might have guessed by now, if Beyonce Knowles was a kind of grammar, she would be an independent clause. But which person best defines a dependant clause? There are many to pick from, but MC Grammar thinks Perez Hilton would be a good candidate. Relying on celebrities to be famous? Take a cue from Bouncy Knowles, Perez!

More Grammatically Correct Than Jesus

2010-02-15T11:17:00.000+11:00

Actually, MC Grammar can't be sure if he's got more grammar than Jesus did, and it would be a hard thing to compare since Jesus spoke Aramic anyway, but it was a good way to introduce this blog post on the difference between than and then.

A lot of us know how to use than and then, but can't actually explain why. It's a bit like learning how to ride a bike. Once you've got the hang of it, you never forget, but you couldn't actually stand in front of a room of people and explain why suddenly, one day, you stopped falling on your side and started soaring along with the wind in your hair, while all the other kids in the neighbourhood cheered and clapped for you.

But then there are some people who are in the dark about when to use then and than at all. They are like the kids who don't even have bikes, and who stand outside bike stores all day and gaze into the window, then they grow up and can't go to bike riding parties and have to make embarrassing excuses up as to why. This blog is especially for them

Then indicates the passing of time, or a sequence of events.
For example:

I spent the morning at home, then I left the house in the afternoon.

We saw a movie first, then we went to a bar, then I spent the afternoon ordering wines off the menu in the voice of Yoda.

Than is for comparing things. It is not related to time at all. For example:

He acted very 'holier than thou'

My haircut is better than yours.

A lot of grammar-lovers think that the common mix-up of then and than is more sinister than it looks. Some of them think that it's because a lot of people out there don't realise that they are two separate words, with two completely different meanings. This might be true, but MC Grammar knows that sometimes, when two words look really similar, and no-one has ever pointed out the difference to you, things can get tough. However, I would also suggest that one of these words gets neglected more than the other – poor old than. This word never gets its fair share of air-time, even though it's just as important as any other word in English, and in the case of words like 'slubber', it's far more important.

Cliffhanger! Pulling the dangling participle back from the edge of misuse.

2010-01-19T19:32:00.000+11:00

Things are complicated in the modern world, just as they are in the world of grammar. It's a medieval battlefield, except instead of fighting with mallets and poison arrows, the fighting is done with sales targets and active selling-point skills. And just like in business, 'developing' happens in the world of grammar. This is where the participle comes in.

A participle is a verb, developed. Participles take two forms: past participles and present participles. Present participles are all those words like 'running', 'working', 'talking', etc. Past participles are all those words like 'brought', 'cooked', and 'mashed', and other crazy irregular verbs like 'went', 'drove' and 'ate'.

Participles are those things that you just intrinsically know about, but may not have known the exact name for them. But hold on, because we need to take participles to the next level now. Because participles aren't just verbs wearing outfits appropriate for the occasion, they are more like grammar-grenades. If you put them in the wrong place, everything flies apart. Look at the example of the dangling participle. A dangling participle is a verb that has been tacked on to the beginning or end of a sentence, and doesn't 'belong' to anything.

Take for this sentence, for example.

Leaning out the car window, the air was warm and fragrant.

The problem here is that the only subject, or 'thing that the actions are being done to', is the air. We know that the thing that is leaning out of the car window is a person, but they haven't been written into the sentence. I'll write more about subjects and complete sentences next time, but for now, let's just say that in this case, the participle 'leaning', is not being 'done' by anyone, which means that technically, it's the air that is leaning out of the car window.

But before you start panicking and counting up all the times you hung participles on the edges of sentences like so many ragged christmas trees, don't panic, because there are some times when dangling participles are accepted as standard ways of expressing the way the speaker feels, even if that speaker is not mentioned in the sentence. For example:

Speaking of kumquat farming, Jenny is running her own plantation now.

Here, Jenny is the subject of the sentence, but the participle 'speaking' is not being done by her. We understand that the speaker is the person doing the 'speaking'.

But a dangling modifier is very precise, and you can't take them for granted. For example, in the sentence, 'Ranting, she stormed out of the room' it makes sense here that the ranting is being done by the woman. However, if you say 'She stormed out of the room ranting', it means the room was doing the ranting.

There can be no doubt, it's hard to fight your way through the grammar jungle. But not impossible. That's why MC Grammar is here to help. To finish up, here's a clip that reflects on how a dangling participle must feel: so very lonely.

This post title appears very interesting when it's got an ellipsis in it...

2009-11-19T16:09:00.000+11:00

A friend of MC Hammer's, Pa' Trula, recently complained that a man, a love interest for that matter, had not replied to an email she had written him. Yes, maybe it was just an innocent mistake on his part, but there was an aspect of this particular lack of replying that was very unsettling to MC Grammar.

The fact is that Pa' Trula explained that she had signed off her email with an ellipsis. And this means that a very, very serious grammar misunderstanding had occurred.

But firstly, what does an ellipsis do? Well, it has multiple uses. An Ellipsis is a three dots, one after another, like this,

...

The Ellipsis is always three dots, no more. Try to resist doing a long line of dots. The Ellipsis indicates omitted words in a sentence, like this,

The disgraced football stars described the woman who made the allegations as a 'total... dishonest person'.

It can indicate a pause in speech, such as

My thoughts wander all the time...I can't seem to concentrate. I feel...strange.

Or an unfinished thought

On the other hand, I did thoroughly enjoy some of U2's early hits...

The ellipsis can be simply to omit unnecessary or inappropriate material, such as in a news article. Or it might be used to imply something more, so that the reader fills in the gaps. For example,

Usually I wouldn't have done it but it was such a nice night and I had plenty of wet wipes...

So we can see that the ellipsis indicates more information that, for various reasons, has been omitted. It's grammatical code for 'we had sex' or 'gratuitous abusive slander once lived here' or just 'Eh? Eh?' If the Ellipsis was an expression, it would be this one.

It's highly suggestive of information that is not there.

Even the Mona Lisa has a distinct ellipses-ness about her. See?

We get the feeling that information is missing. Just like an ellipsis.

But brothers, sisters, the ellipsis doesn't stop there, and this leads us to why Pa' Trula was so upset in the first place. An arguably more modern use of the ellipsis is to invite response. When Pa' Trula finished her email with this sentence

I'll leave it up to you to suggest something to do on the weekend...

She was extending this unfinished suggestion to her gentleman friend. And he seems to have misunderstood that the sentence was for him to complete, like a lost grammatical puppy, begging to be taken back to it's appropriate grammar home, where a hot meal is waiting for it. Because, in addition to the images we have already seen, the ellipsis is also this expression,

Waiting, listening, expecting. In person, if Pa' Trula's love-interest had not responded to her statement, it would have looked like he had a sight deficiency, so outrageous and obvious would have have been that he couldn't interpret the expression on her face. And yet in an email, he has not understood the true meaning of the ellipsis, and yet another potentially beautiful thing has been ruined by a poor understanding of grammar. Don't let it happen to you!

The semi-colon: what has it done for you lately?

2009-08-13T02:24:00.000+10:00

This is a semi-colon

MC Grammar thinks that in our time, no piece of punctuation is more divisive. You might notice that I have just made an excellent pun.

Because of confusion about what this humble sign does exactly, people tend to avoid it, instead of risk using it and looking like a fool.

So what is a semi colon, and what does it do? Put simply, a semi-colon is a pause or break in a sentence. Its first use was to separate words or statements of opposed meaning in the same sentence.
For example.

They say hot dogs contain traces of arsenic; I say they contain traces of delicious.

Here, the statements are closely related but oppose each other, and the fact that they oppose each other wouldn't be as obvious if you used a full stop instead of a semi-colon.

A semi-colon is also used when you are listing items in a sentence.

For example:

He looked in the bag and made a mental note of everything that was inside; pears; plums; oranges; glasses.

As recently as fifty years ago, semi-colons were everywhere. Authors used them more than a little liberally, such as Virginia Woolf, who wrote 'To The Lighthouse.' She wrote sentences like this:

'She felt herself transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his goodness.'

You can see how Woolf is showing how the character's thoughts about the man are complex, but they still belong together, and we see this with the help of the semi -colon.

The semi-colon also imitates the way we speak. A comma shows where a person has stopped for breath, and a semi-colon does the same, with the addition of showing us where a change of mood is. When we read a book where someone is speaking and they do this,

It has come to the point where I can't go on with this charade anymore; but I will play along anyway.

we can see where the character has re-adjusted his or her thinking and mind-set. A comma can show where there has been a break, but it doesn't get across as effectively where the mind has repositioned itself.

In a way, the semi colon is like a thrust. It pulls back, pauses and then pushes forward again. It hesitates with a notion and then continues with it, realigning itself with a new, but linked idea. It does something no other form of punctuation can do, even the colon, which is like its slightly simple second cousin who shops at Chrisco , which I will talk about later. Colons I mean, not Chrisco. We won't talk about Chrisco here.

A lot of people find the semi-colon intimidating. Even with the above information, it can be hard to know when to use it. And a lot of people think that the semi-colon's days are numbered, and that soon it will be an outdated form of punctuation. American journalist James Kilpatrick even called it 'girly', just to throw in some random sexism as his contribution to the debate.

It's true that the semi-colon makes a sentence a little bit complicated. That's because it contains two thoughts, not one, and it makes the sentence longer, and on the whole, people don't like that. They want their sentences like they want their food. Quick and simple. No fiddly bits, nothing that they'll need to get a fork out for. But it can't always be pre-cooked mini-pies, sometimes it has to be cheese fondue and fiddly long cheese-prongs, and hot tea afterwards, so all the cheese doesn't harden in your stomach and kill you. And just like fondue, there's nothing quite like the semi-colon. So pull out your cheese prongs of punctuation and set up your mini gas-heater of expression, and let the punctuation do its job.

Please form an orderly queue for your good-grammar vaccination

2009-08-10T07:52:00.000+10:00

MC Grammar recently received a series of vaccinations, and now feels ready to take on the world. Rabies, Hepatitis A and B can't hurt me, neither can Malaria, Diphtheria, Typhoid or Yellow Fever. It's a good feeling. Sorry all you anti-immunisation lobbyists, I'm immunised up to my eyeballs and I love it.

Some fun times were had over the last few weeks, as I regularly rocked up to my local surgery and chatted cheerfully away to my nurse, as she cleverly lulled my muscles into relaxed state, before jabbing a total of 9 needles into me. But an interesting point was raised during the many afternoons I spent there: are you immune to, or immune from, a disease?

Before we go further, this might be a good moment to brush up on our understanding of prepositions. A preposition is a 'linking' word, such as to, from, over, or during. What they link is nouns, phrases or pronouns to the sentence. They're like the MC that introduce the main act. For example,

The book is beside the table.

That said, what's the story with being immune to, or immune from? Well brothers and sisters, it's a complicated story, because it depends what you're talking about. If you are talking about being protected from an 'undesirable circumstance' such as getting criminally prosecuted, or heavily taxed, then you are immune from. For example, you can be 'immune from arrest', or 'immune from criticism.'

However, when you're talking about something you're not susceptible or responsive to, you use immune to. For example 'I am immune to Polio.'

This is a tricky mother. The Oxford English Dictionary gives lots of examples of 'immune to' and 'immune from' that don't follow the pattern above. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary uses the 'immune to' phrasing to include anything a person might be resistant to, for example, 'he was immune to all pleas.' It's one of those things that if you think about it too hard, you can fry your brain and alienate yourself from your loved ones.

MC Grammar thinks that if you just surf the preposition wave, this one sort of sorts itself out. When you think about it, it makes sense that you're immune 'from' something that you're trying to get away from, or would rather not happen, and you're immune 'to' something that you have personally arranged will never happen. Take MC Grammar and Rabies, for example, I will never meet my end by frothing at the mouth – I've seen to that.

MC Grammar gives props to those who deserve it

2009-07-26T01:04:00.000+10:00

MC Grammar has learnt that Cleo Magazine in Australia has been giving some funky props to this blog on Twitter, helping MC Grammar bring grammar into the lives of even more brothers and sisters. Check it.

http://twitter.com/cleomag/status/1800188993

What can I say but ‘thanks!’ to Cleo for reading, and for spreading the word. Below are some of the many ways I would say thanks to Cleo if I only could say it in person

U Can’t Split This: the old-school rule of not splitting your infinitives.

2009-07-22T02:56:00.000+10:00

MC Grammar is from the school of thought that the purpose of grammar and punctuation is to communicate better with each other. It should make it easier to communicate with more people – not less. So when something can be understood without being technically grammatically correct, then I think it should become acceptable.

A good example of this is ‘Split Infinitives.’

An infinitive is the ‘stem’ of a verb. In other words, it is the universal form of the verb, when it hasn’t been changed. For example, ‘To have’, ‘to change’ ‘to eat’, etc. Verbs stop being infinitive when they are changed to fit with different tenses or to agree with plurals, for example, if 'to have' is the infinitive,‘We have lunch with Sam’ could become ‘We had lunch with Sam’ or ‘She has lunch with Sam.’ and so on.

About thirty years ago, school kids were being taught that an infinitive form of a verb could not be separated from its little ‘to’ companion. For example, saying ‘I need to quickly speak with you’ was regarded as bad grammar. The reason? In Latin, as in some other Latin-based languages today, an infinitive could never be split, not least because the ‘to’ part was built into it, in the same way as the French infinitive for ‘to speak’ is ‘Parler’, hence it couldn’t be split, obviously, unless you were some crazy person who thought it was cool to wedge a whole extra word into the centre of another.

So the key reason that you weren’t meant to split an infinitive was because some other language, one that people tended to look up to as being more distinguished, couldn’t split its own infinitives. This is why people in old novels tend to say things like ‘I need quickly to speak with you.’ Or ‘Finally I go to attend to mama today.’

Sticking to the rule of infinitives is all very well if you happen to go back in time, find yourself in Ancient Rome, can’t speak of word of Latin but feel reassured that whatever they’re saying, they’re not splitting their infinitives, but what relevance does it have for speakers of modern English? A sentence continues to make sense even where an infinitive has been split, and so as far as MC Grammar is concerned, pack this rule away next to your mini-disc player and your floppy discs.

More correct than you: How hypercorrections impress no-one.

2009-07-04T22:10:00.000+10:00

I once heard a great quote that went ‘a high brow is just someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence.’ There’s a lot of truth in there. The great institution of grammar tends to be a haven for people who know a lot about language, but not much about anything else, such as not being jerks.

This is where the scourge of ‘hypercorrections’ hits us. A hypercorrection is where a non-standard grammatical rule is applied in the belief that it is correct, even though a more familiar, standard rule would work just fine. Put simply, it’s masturbation with words.

One of the most common hypercorrections is the Me and I rule. Most people are taught at school that you don’t say ‘Me and you should eat our lunches now’, you say, you and I should eat our lunches now. That’s fine, but I don’t know about you, but as a kid at school, MC Grammar had it drummed into his head that using the word me was as bad as stripping naked and doing a poo on the Queen of Sweden, due to the idea that it could be uncouthly misused where the more refined I should have been.

As a result, a lot of people tend to think that using I is more proper than using me. This is where you get sentences like 'He gave it to you and I'. This is incorrect. The rule is that the pronoun (You, we, she, he, them) that would stand in isolation is the one that you should use. For example, you would say I went to the movies, therefore you would say You and I went to the movies. However, you would say he gave it to me, not he gave it to I, therefore you would say he gave it to you and me, not he gave it to you and I.

The best way to remember this rule is to simply remind yourself that the pronoun that would stand in isolation is the one to use. For example, when you hear someone say The letter was for you and I, you know that they should have said The letter was for you and me, because you can't say The letter was for I (Unless you are a seventeenth-century fictional pirate, obviously)

This cool video which talks about the correct pronounciation of often, might be just what you need to help you along as you let your thoughts about hypercorrection sink in. Enjoy!

Feeling Sarcastic? Try some capital letters!

2009-06-18T23:52:00.002+10:00

So, MC Grammar has become an exam invigilator. This means that I let kids into exams, then I give them their exam papers and I tell them all the important rules about the exam. Then if anything goes wrong, like a paper with a messed-up question, or a freak-out by one of the kids, MC Grammar is right on top of it, sorting it out, talking them off the roof, returning them to their table, and making a note of all incidents in the special invigilator file.

But just the other day, I noticed something alarming. I was reading my special invigilator handbook, accurately titled General, Vocational and Diploma Qualifications – Instructions for conducting examinations. It struck me as a bit strange that since this was the title of the handbook, they hadn’t followed the general rule of capitalising all the key words, and left ‘conducting’ and ‘examinations’ alone to fend for themselves against a whole crowd of fearsome capitalisations.

But it got worse. Down the bottom of the page read ‘At least one copy of these Instructions must be available in each examination room.’

Why did ‘Instructions’ get a capital letter? Yes, it’s a noun, i.e it is the name of something, and technically the names of things get capitalised, but ‘copy’, ‘examination’ and ‘room’ are all nouns too, aren't they? Where was their glory? Where was their time to shine?

There are some basic rules for capitalising words. Let’s power through the basic ones first, then jump into the big daddies afterwards.

A word needs to start with a capital letter when it is:

1. A day of the week. Take note that the seasons are not capitalised.

It was Wednesday by the time I realised that it was autumn.

2. The name of a language.

Apparently Hungarian is really hard to learn.

Complication alert! The names of subjects in school are not capitalised, unless they happen to be languages.

Today I have geography, maths and Spanish.

3. The first word of a sentence, or comes after an exclamation or question mark.

Have we seen the last of Janet Jackson’s left nipple? Probably not.

The names of festivals, holidays and holy days

Such as Christmas, Ramadan, the feast of Purim and Halloween.

4. Distinctive historical periods

London was a prosperous city during the Middle Ages.

Britain was the first country to experience the Industrial Revolution.The Greeks were in Greece during the Bronze Age

4. The first word of a direct quotation

In my frustration I cried out ‘It has come to this and I blame myself!’ A passer-by wearing a Trent from Punchy shirt comforted me.

BUT there is no capital if the quotation is not a complete sentence.

The mayor described the stealing of his trousers as 'disappointing'

OK, so that’s all fairly straight forward. The next set of rules flirt a little more with the grey area between ‘nouns that get all the glory’ and ‘nouns that nobody loves’.

Words need to start with a capital for:

5. Proper names. A proper name means a name or title that refers to a person, a place, and institution or an individual event.

My name is Tom Baker

There was a fight between Professor Lacey and Doctor Davis

The Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco Bay

The Queen is addressing the House of Commons

I’m trying out for the Winter Olympics

This can get mighty confusing. For example:

I have met the President.

Dave is the president of a massive company.

In the first sentence, ‘President’ is capitalised because it refers to a specific person. In the second, ‘president’ is just the description of Dave’s job. Here’s another example.

Saint Servatius is the patron saint of rats.

‘Saint Servatius’ is the title and name of Saint Servatius, but ‘patron saint’ is not, and so gets no capital.

The title of a book, play, poem, film magazine, etc. Basically if it’s the title of a piece of art, media or entertainment, it gets capitalised. Note that words like 'the', ‘of’, ‘and’ or ‘in’ are not capitalised unless it’s the first word.

That movie 'Bully' is messed up.

Just because I haven’t read 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' doesn’t mean I can’t guess what happens in the end.

I enjoy the classical piece, 'Air on the G String'.

Aunt May keeps telling me how losing my virginity will be like giving away a Special Flower.

According to Ben, Fallout Boy are the Next Big Thing.

Can’t you just hear the sarcasm dripping off the page! If you ever want to own someone using the power of grammar, this is all you need to know.

So suddenly, I think I have the answer to why ‘Instructions’ is such a special word, while all the sad little words around it get ignored. ‘Instructions’, unlike ‘copy’, ‘examination’ and ‘room’, not only refers to a specific thing, unlike, say ‘room’, which could refer to any which room the instructions find themselves in, but it’s also the official, or ‘proper’ title of the thing which MC Grammar finds himself holding in his hand.

And so another grammar mystery has been solved!MC Grammar’s personal favourite use of capitalisations is to indicate sarcasm. You might have noticed that sarcasm is generally limited to spoken word, because it mostly gets expressed through tone of voice. For example, if I was to write that I really enjoy the films of Kevin Costner, you can’t be sure if I’m being sarcastic or if I’m an idiot without hearing the tone of my voice. However, capital letters can be used to poke fun at an idea of somebody else’s. For example,

Many funky uses of the apostrophe

2009-06-03T00:02:00.000+10:00

Like a lover you come to know expertly over time, we have now come to know the apostrophe intimately. We have seen it from many different angles and in many different lights. We’ve looked at the rule of Its and It’s, and the rule of indicating possessives, but there are still a few uses of the apostrophe that we haven’t explored.

But first, let’s get reacquainted with some old friends. In 2002, the Australian show Popstars manufactured a pop group called Scandal’us. Here they are, touching each other in a suggestive way. A year earlier, the UK version of the same show produced a band called Hear’Say.

Band names like this say a lot about how little we understand apostrophes. The apostrophe has a group of vital functions in grammar and language. If it was a person, it would be the head of a laboratory that was researching climate change, or an award- winning journalist who had been reporting on government corruption. It would be an important person, but a very serious one. It definitely would not be happy to be thrown into a dodgy pop group’s name by their manager as some sort of pretend rebellion against society.

MC Grammar believes that it’s no coincidence that both these bands had disrespect for the apostrophe, and that they both broke up within a year of winning the Popstars competition. Sadly, at least one of these people now sleeps with Kyle Sandilands, and MC Grammar thinks that in a way, that’s also karmic retribution for mistreating the apostrophe. Don’t let that happen to you. Follow the simple rules for using apostrophes.

1. It indicates time or quantity.

In one week’s time

Or, if the amount of time or quantity is plural:

Two weeks’ notice

Four metres’ worth of rope

2. It indicates the omission if figures in dates

It was the summer of ‘69

3. It indicates the omission of letters

I come from Jo’burg.

I hadn’t thought of that.

She should’ve thrown this out.

Where is the cat-o’-nine-tails?

Bear in mind that there are lots of words that are shortenings of other words, but have become so common in their own right that it’s not necessary to use an apostrophe to indicate the part that’s been left off. For example, phone is a shortening of telephone, and fridge is a shortening of refrigerator, but this is an example where the punctuation isn’t needed because the meaning doesn’t get lost without it.

4. It features in Irish names such as O’Reilly and O’Malley.

5. It indicates the plurals of letters,

Such as: How many t’s are there in attachment?

The apostrophe can also be sometimes be used to indicated non-standard English, like in ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ when the gamekeeper speaks vernacular English, while Lady Chatterley doesn’t. For example, he says,

If yer want ter be ‘ere, yo’ll non want me messin’ abaht a’ th’ time

But this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Just do what your heart tells you.

Holy shit! It’s singular and plural possessor apostrophes!

2009-05-26T01:47:00.000+10:00

This is MC Grammar’s friend: J-Tube.

J-Tube is an English teacher.

J-Tube knows the difference between single and plural possessor apostrophes, but the kids in his English class do not. For example, one of them might look at a sentence like The wigs' problems and have no idea why the apostrophe is behind the s instead of in front of it. Each night, J-Tube flings himself on his bed and howls in frustration. He dreams about apostrophes that are crying out to be better understood and treated with dignity and respect, not just thrown in anywhere like so many mothballs on last year’s skinny jeans.

Last time we looked at It’s and Its. It was fun. We had some laughs. But it was only the innocent laughter of a group of fresh-faced school kids who don’t fully realise that they’re not just learning about the interesting early years of the ancient Roman Republic, they’re in for the whole fucking thing, all the way from the first expulsion of the ancient Etruscans to the final invasion of the Gauls that lead to the Dark Ages. And that is some serious timeline shit.

Anyway, now that we’ve dipped our toes in the apostrophe waters, it’s time to strip right off and plunge deeper into the grammar pool.

First up, let’s make ourselves a bowl of singular and plural possessor apostrophe cereal, eat it down and benefit from its high levels of riboflavin.

Let’s get there step by step.

Apostrophes indicate a possessive in a singular noun.

The boy’s hat.

When the possessor is a plural that does not end in an s (i.e Men, Children, Sheep) the apostrophe goes in front of the s.

The women’s movement

BUT

When the possessor does end in an end (i.e boys, wigs, tables), the apostrophe goes after the s

The babies’ bibs

So this is all fairly straight forward, but there is one final thing that you might have already noticed. What happens if you want to write something about, say, all the parents of all your friends? You can’t say ‘My friend’s parents’ because that just looks like you are referring to a single set of parents, so you have to say

My friends’ parents

An easy way to work this out is, ask yourself if something makes sense if the apostrophe is in front of the s. If you can see that it looks like you’re only referring to a singular thing, when you want to refer to many things, and you’re not lucky enough to have scored a plural word that DOESN'T end in s, then help yourself to an apostrophe AFTER the s.

This all might seem more information than you ever wanted to know – you might feel that you were happy in wading in your ignorance, and now that you’ve found out that you’ve been doing it wrong all along, you know that not only will you continue to do it wrong, but you’ll feel ashamed about it too.

Let me take this opportunity to remind you that MC Grammar loves you, and doesn’t want you to feel ashamed, just because you didn’t have a teacher like J-Tube around to fight for you and your grammar-hungry soul. And the truth of the matter is that we now have just six uses of the apostrophe left, and all of them are less used or less confusing than the ones we’ve already looked at. As far as I'm concerned, the score is almost settled against bad grammar. Justice has been served out here, and let me assure you, it tastes of your favourite ice-cream.

Knocking on the door of apostrophe-land: 'It's' and 'Its'

2009-05-13T17:53:00.000+10:00

MC Grammar likes to keep up to date with technology. You might think that this means that naturally MC Grammar has a Facebook and Twitter account, which he can access directly from his iphone. You’d be close, but wrong. In fact. MC Grammar has decided to speed right on ahead to the next stage of keeping up-to-date and in contact with friends: by simply having a microchip inserted directly into his neck so that his every move can be followed by anyone who wants to keep tabs on him.

But the microchip has had an interesting side-effect: MC Grammar can now read minds. At first it just started as an intercepting the mass currents of status updates, but eventually refined itself so that I can hear just one, concise psychic thought at a time, and from any direction I want. It’s pretty wack.

With all that in mind, I know what you’re thinking right now. I can hear it loud and clear. You’re thinking ‘apostrophes don’t matter. People know what I’m saying anyway.’

As I said in the start of this blog, yeah, your friends on Facebook might know what you're saying, but what about everyone else? If you get lost in the apostrophe wilderness, it can mean instant humiliation among anyone you're trying to impress or persuade on paper. Strange as it may sound, that tiny little tadpole shaped sign does matter.

For example, imagine a newspaper's placard saying 'FAN'S RAGE AT STADIUM CONDITIONS'. This sounds pretty interesting until you realise they meant to say FANS', as in many fans, instead of just one fan who has completely gone mental.

The apostrophe has a lot of uses. The two main ones are:

1. To show that one or more letters have been missed out

Such as:

will not – won’t

do not – don’t

they are – they’re

it is – it’s

2. To show possession

Jane’s daffodils

Edward’s racial prejudice

Slough’s twin city in France

There will be more on apostrophes later on right now we need to deal with a law-breaker.

That’s right, there’s one word that breaks the mutherfucking rules for no obvious reason except to fuck you up, because it’s tough out there on the grammar streets. However bizarre this rule seems, there’s something to remember: there is a reason for this grammatical trickery.

The exception to the rules is the use of It’s and Its.

Use it’s only when you mean It is. For everything else, including when you are referring to something it owns, always use its.

As Lynne Truss says, ‘the rule is: the word it’s (with apostrophe) stands for it is or it has If the word does not stand for it is or it has then what you require is its.

So let’s just imagine you see a baby and you don’t know its gender and don’t care to find out. The way you would write about it is:

Its face reminded me of a wookie

Or, if you were a food critic and you were writing a review, you would say:

This was jellied eel at its best.

However, if you were just saying something ‘It is your turn’, you would just say:

It’s your turn.

The best way to remember this is by using the same system as if you were deciding on whether to use ‘your’ or ‘you’re’. If you’re saying It is, use it’s. If it’s anything else, use its.

Let’s turn to an aural aid. This week we need look no further than one of MC Hammer’s favourites, The Weather Girls, with their track, It’s Raining Men. This song wipes the floor with the newer Geri Halliwell version. Notice how the person who posted this video got it wrong and titled it 'Its Raining Men.' Remember, what they mean is It IS Raining Men, and that’s why it should read It's Raining Men. If it was anything else there would be no apostrophe. Freakishly easy, isn’t it?

Rainbow Grammar Family! Clearing up the confusion of UK versus US spellings.

2009-04-24T00:35:00.001+10:00

This is how people say hello to each other in different parts of the world:

America: What’s up?

England: Alright?

France: What is it like you going? (Rough English translation)

Australia: How the fuck are you, you fucking cunt-arse dickhead? (Rough Lara Bing-in-a-tourism-ad translation)

We all know that people from difference places but have different ways of saying things. But things can get confusing at times. MC Grammar has a correspondent from the southern states of the US who can’t help but notice that there are words out there that swap back and forth like MC Grammar’s corn rows. She asked me, ‘what’s the deal with the word travelling? Sometimes it’s spelt traveling, and sometimes it’s spelt travelling? What’s the story with that?

Sister, the story is that traveling is the US spelling, and travelling is the UK and Australian spelling.

So now you’re saying ‘oh, I get it, in the US, words with a single l are spelt with a double ll in the UK.’ Not always. For example,

US Spelling UK     Australian Spelling

Enrollment                  Enrolment

Fulfill                           Fulfil

Skillful                        Skilful

There are lots of words like this, and people get confused all the time, which is fine – but sometimes they think that everyone but them is spelling incorrectly. Why you gotta hate? Don’t you know a rainbow needs all the colours to make it beautiful? That reminds me, Colour is the UK/Australian spelling, and Color is the US spelling. See what I’m saying here? Here’s a few more to remember.

US                              UK/Australia

Theater                              Theatre
Anemia                              Anaemia
Agism                                Ageism
Favorite                             Favourite
Check                               Cheque
Defense                             Defence
License                              Licence
Program                            Programme
Pajamas                             Pyjamas
Tire                                   Tyre

There’s also a difference between verbs that end in –ise. In the US, most of these words end in –ize instead. Words like agonise, terrorise, hypothesise, accessorise, and so on become agonize, terrorize, hypothesize, and accessorise.

I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘yeah, well it’s obvious what happened here; the yanks have gone and mangled our beautiful language and BROKEN THE RULES OF GRAMMAR. If the English do it one way, THAT must be the right way.

Sucker, you’d be wrong. The form –ize has been in use in English since the 16th century. The first white colonists of the US brought it over with them from England, and it they retained it while back in England it changed over time. This can be said for a lot of things in American English. For example, you might have noticed that they tend to say and write ‘I am’, ‘I will’ and ‘I can not’ a lot more than ‘I’m’, ‘I’ll’ and ‘I can’t’, which is more the norm in the UK and Australia. Again, this is because they’ve retained an older, or 16th Century usage of English. If grammar was a piece of clothing, they’d all be wearing Elizabethan ruffles, while the UK and Oz would probably be in Adidas track pants.

To finish up, here's a picture of some global harmony that should inspire you to take all these different spellings and use them for good, not evil. Use grammar to make friends, not enemies!

'To' and 'Too'

2009-04-14T23:39:00.000+10:00

This is MC Grammar's sister, Mashaylah.

As you can see, Mashaylah is a pretty awesome. As you can see, Mashaylah has her priorities in order – she’s got lust for life, excellent coordination skills, and a bitchin wardrobe. If you saw Mashaylah on the street, you’d find yourself nodding your head and saying ‘scene’ before you even realised you were saying it, or what it meant.

But there's one thing Mashaylah doesn't have - an astute understanding of how to and too work.

Some people might judge Mashaylah for this, but not me. The truth is, more than just the impeccably dressed have this problem. It's a common situation, and it's time to clear it up.

Let's go to the Grammar dancefloor!

Here's the basic rundown:

Too – an excess amount, or meaning 'also.'

To – everything that isn't the above.

Example: There are too many examples to mention.

So too has two meanings. It means either also and besides, like I want one too, and it also means an excess amount of something, like too much or too many bananas.

To is a preposition, this just means it's a function word. It's like the person that everyone always dumps on at work, thinking they do shit-all around the place and imitating their laughter when they're not around, and then, when they finally leave you suddenly realise all the indoor-plants are dying and there's no recycled paper cut into neat squares for note-taking, because while they were being under-appreaciated by you and your workmates, they were the glue that held everything together, and you never even noticed.

A function word combines with a noun or a pronoun, and tells you where, or when, how or why. Some examples are

The job was suited to her abilities.

We went to the city.

Their faces were pressed to the windows.

They toasted to evil.

She referred to the dictionary.

In some cases it can also be used as an adverb. An adverb is a word that limits or 'describes' another word, like she paints well ('well' is the adverb), or he's funky fresh (funky is the adverb)

An example of to being used as an adverb is the patient came to, as in the patient woke up or regained conciousness.

MC Grammar thinks that the best way to remember anything is to remember it through song. Whenever you get confused, just remember The Temptations song 'Ain't Too Proud To Beg'. It's all there in the title, taking your hand and dancing you through a grammatically correct life.

Your and You're

2009-04-09T06:03:00.000+10:00

For those of you who don't have time to read this whole post, here's the quick guide to your and you're:

You're – You are

Your – Something you own

Your and you're has to be the most divisive aspect of grammar around. Confusion about these two is so widespread that MC Grammar sometimes hurls himself onto his large, four-poster bed and cries from a sense of helplessness. But we can sit around all day and find people to blame for this grammatical mishap, or we can settle this score on the dancefloor. Come with me!

As I've said before, MC Grammar loves you, and doesn't want you to feel bad if you've just looked at the quick guide above, and your face is becoming paler as every grammar mistake you've ever made with your and you're is now dancing in front of your eyes like so many mischieveous leprechauns. There's no need to feel bad, just grab the horns of now and ride fearlessly into a grammatically correct future!

The best way to work out whether you're after your or you're in a sentence, is to ask yourself if you're saying you are, or if you are referring to something the other person owns. For example. 'Hey! You're right!' means 'you are right.' If you say 'your right', you're referring to their right-hand side.

Think of it like this - you cannot say any of these things:

Your great

Hope your ok

Your lying

Your welcome

Your looking trim

Because 'Your' is like 'Mine', 'hers', 'his' and 'theirs'. It's something that belongs to you.

But you can say:

What's your phone number?

Your mum!

Your car is missing

Your jumper is nice

Your cat just said 'Aubergine'

If you ever get completley confused, the best thing to do is, each time you're about to use your, ask yourself if you're saying you are in a shortened version. If you're not, hold back cowboy! Control yourself and your base animal urges! You'll be needing a you're there instead.

This video is also very entertaining and helpful. I think it's mostly directed at the thousands of abusive comments he gets for sharing his videos with the world, hence the slightly bitter undertone. MC Grammar has too much love to share this bitter undertone, but likes the cut of his jib anyway.

Why Even Bother?

2009-04-05T23:03:00.000+10:00

I know this is what you're wondering. You're thinking, 'ho hum, another toff tries to find yet another way for me to feel shit about myself. Well you can you can go to hell in a hand-basket MC Grammar, because grammar's just what smarmy people use to put everyone else down! I hate you!'

It's true – correcting people over their grammar is the height of rudeness. No-one ever appreciates it, in fact a lot of people also consider it pointless. What does it really matter if an apostrophe is out of place, or if 'your' and 'you're' get mixed up. Who cares? You still get your point across, right?

It depends on who you're trying to get your point across to. Yeah, your mates on facebook are going to be down with your avant garde ways, but how hard does it become trying to write a cover letter for a job when you're not sure of where an apostrophe goes in 'its' or 'it's'? Most employers just throw away an application at the sight of one of those indescrepancies, so grammar can end up being the difference between getting ahead and staying where you are.

But that's all pretty superficial business. More importantly, the purpose of grammar is to help make a sentence clearer – otherwise it's just a way of showing off.

As Lynne Truss, who wrote 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' said, grammar and punctuation are the traffic signs of language. They prevent meaning from getting confused. For example: A used car show-yard sign reads, 'Used cars for sale: Why go elsewhere to be cheated? Come here first!' This looks wrong because of a mangled subject/verb agreement. More on that later. I promise it will be awesome. But more than that, the bottom line is that a lot of the time, you're not actually saying what you think you're saying, and that's like wearing a hessian sack and thinking you're in Prada.

Probably the number one example of this is the case of 'your'. I'm going to settle this score in the next post, but for now I'll say that when someone writes something like 'hope your well', the nearest thing they're actually asking is 'hope you have turned into a well.'

It's important to remember to MC Grammar loves you. MC Grammar has noticed your outrageous physical attractiveness, and also finds you funny and witty. MC Grammar doesn't mean to offend you or be a toff –and don't forget, MC Grammar makes grammar mistakes all the times. If this blog really annoys you, but helps you just a smidgen to write a letter or impress someone you're trying to sleep with, then my massive pants are filled with funky joy.