All the single clauses!

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

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.

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...

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?

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

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

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