POTUS? President of the United States.
POS? Parts of speech.
Yes, I know you learned the parts of speech in school, but we are going to review and then have a “challenge.”
It depends whom you ask as to how many parts of speech there are in the English language. I say eight. It is usually about eight. I guess it depends how you group some of them.
The parts of speech are the categories into which words are put, depending on the role they play in a sentence (or a phrase). Many words fall into more than one category, depending on how they are used in a particular sentence. Here are the eight parts of speech:
- Noun – Person, place, thing, or idea (you probably remember that one!): school, dog, boy, computer, happiness; proper nouns: Golden Gate Bridge, California , Susan
- Verb – Action or state of being: to run, to study, to eat, to be, to look, to think.
- Pronoun – (not to be confused with a proper noun, which begins with a capital letter and is a noun) A word that takes the place of a noun: he, them, us, everyone, this, those, himself, what, which.
*All you need to have a complete sentence is a noun (or pronoun) and a verb: I read. Actually, you don’t even need the noun or pronoun in the case of a command: Sit. In this case the subject is implied and is you (You sit.)*
- Adjective – Describes a noun or another adjective: red, pretty, terrible, this, many. I group the articles (a, an, and the) with the adjectives, since they do modify nouns.
- blue dress (describes a noun)
- bright blue dress (describes another adjective)
- Adverb – Describes a verb, another adverb, or an adjective. Tells how, where, when, to what extent: slowly, then, now, too, very
- talk slowly (describes a verb)
- very slowly (describes another adverb)
- very blue (describes an adjective)
- Preposition – Always appears as part of prepositional phrase. The phrase tells what kind, where, or when: in, out, below, with, by, for, along, to, at.
- in the house
- out the door
- down the slide
- along the river
- at school
- by the same author
- after the party
- with stripes
- Conjunction – Joins two words, phrases, clauses, or sentences: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so (FANBOYS)
- tiny, yet strong
- Jack and Jill
- chicken or fish?
- I can’t go, so you can have my ticket.
- Interjection – Usually an exclamatory word, but can be followed by a comma or an exclamation point: gosh, well, oh, darn, yikes, wow
- Wow! Look at the size of that cat!
- Oh, I have seen that cat before.
As I said earlier, many words can function as two or more different parts of speech,depending on how they are used:
play
- I saw a play last night. (noun)
- I play tennis every weekend. (verb)
- I set up a play date for Jimmy. (adjective)
well
- Timmy’s in the well! (noun)
- I did well on the test. (adverb)
- Well, how did you figure that out? (interjection)
So, that is our POS review. Here is the challenge: I used to teach the parts of speech to my 7th graders — not that they hadn’t learned it before — and to make it more fun, I had to give them something interesting to do.
Can you make a sentence that uses each part of speech only once? Your sentence would be eight words. Well, if you really think, you can see why this might not be possible. You can do it in 10 or 11 words because something has to repeat. Or does it? HINT: If you break a grammar rule — one that is sort of okay to break these days, you can do it. When you have figured it out, and written your eight-word sentence, scroll down for the answer.
Oh, so sneaky Nancy secretly waited for him.
- Oh – interjection
- so – conjunction
- sneaky – adjective
- Nancy – noun
- secretly – adverb
- waited – verb
- for – preposition
- him – pronoun
Problem: The major problem is the conjunction, which connects things, meaning you might have to put in two nouns. The rule that I broke is starting the sentence with the conjunction (so) instead of having it connect two things. It is sort of breaking a rule, but in informal writing, it’s fine to do.
But look:
Well, wait for her and very tall Joe.
Here, I avoided the issue by writing a command. That way I could avoid using the noun or pronoun as the subject and could use them as the prepositional objects and not have to repeat a noun or pronoun. So that is another way to do it.
Such challenges keeps the brain in good working order! If you have any other solutions or just sentences you have created, just send a comment!
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Grammar Diva News:
I will be the guest speaker at the March 8 meeting of the Napa Valley Writers, a chapter of California Writers Club. Looking forward to it!
Hella is an American slang term that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has since spread to become native slang to all of Northern California. And since I believe Cartman uses the term on South Park, I guess it goes even farther geographically. I just read something about hella being added to the dictionary, but actually hella is an old word – coined in 2002, fifteen long years ago! It has been in certain dictionaries, I would assume, for a lot longer than this past year. If you aren’t familiar with the word, it seems to mean about the same as helluva, such as in,”I had a helluva good time!” It does often describe the word good: This pizza is hella good!
Every year thousands of new words are added to various dictionaries. Here are some of this year’s words. Don’t worry, slang still exists, and words are marked as slang if they are indeed slang.
Oxford English Dictionary
Gender-fluid: androgynous; a person who does not identify with a single fixed gender.
Clicktivism: Signaling support for a political or social cause through social media, online petitions, etc., rather than by more substantive involvement.
Moobs: Yup, man boobs.
YOLO (“You only live once”): The view that one should make the most of the present moment without worrying about the future.
Non-apology: A statement that looks or sounds like an apology, but does not acknowledge responsibility or express regret; an insincere or unconvincing apology.
Yoda: A person who embodies the characteristics of Yoda — an elder, sage, or guru.
Squee: A high-pitched squealing or squeaking sound produced by an animal, musical instrument, etc.
Merriam-Webster Online
Accentophile: A person who enjoys foreign accents.
Belignorant: Belligerent and ignorant.
Breakfunch: A small meal eaten between breakfast and lunch. (Then what is brunch?)
Confungry: Confused and angry.(Shouldn’t this be confangry? This sounds more like confused and hungry!)
Definotly: Definitely not. (I hope this didn’t come about because people cannot spell definitely!)
Equalist: A person who believes that all people are created equal regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or general beliefs. (Deal me in.)
Fabulize: To make fabulous.
Gayborhood: A neighborhood where the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people live and/or work.
Jokative: Causing laughter.
Mantrum: A man tantrum.
Misophonia: Anger created by the sound of someone eating.
Shooista: A person very passionate about shoes.
Silent Generation: The generation born from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s. (Think about this one!)
Sillerious: Silly and serious.
Word of the Year
The American Dialect Society just named “dumpster fire” Word of the Year. Why? Because the phrase best represents the public conversations of 2016.
This society of linguists, grammarians, and word scholars has awarded this prize each year since 1990, when bushlips (insincere political rhetoric,) won Word of the Year. This year more than 300 members of the Linguistic Society of America voted at a standing-room-only reception during the society’s annual conference. (There’s a visual: standing room only at a reception of the Linguistic Society). Dumpster fire triumphed over normalize and post-truth. There is even a “emojical” representation of the word: (How do you like the word I just made up for this occasion: emojical? I hope it makes the 2017 dictionary!)
Merriam-Webster also has a word of the year: surreal. Dictionary.com chose xenophobia, and Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth.
Last year, there was a clear front-runner: they, used as a singular third-person pronoun.
And like this year, the words often have political meaning. For example, past winners include binders (full of women).
Dumpster fire without the emoji actually originated in 2009, when sports radio host Mike Wise used the phrase to mean an “abomination of a loss.”
And yes, there is an emoji of the year, and is it!
Now we know Words with Friends won’t take emojis (yet), but how many of these new words will they take?
In 2017 I promise to
- Lose weight
- Go to the gym three times a week
- Be more patient with my children (my spouse, my friends, myself, my whatever . . . )
- Eat healthier
- Find love
- Find a new job
Sound familiar?
Where Did New Year’s Resolutions Come From?
Although New Year’s resolutions are most common in the Western Hemisphere, they are found all over the word. We all know what they are: a promise to ourselves to do some type of self-improvement.
The ancient Babylonians were apparently the first people to make New Year’s resolutions, about 4,000 years ago. However, for them the year began not in January, but in mid-March when the crops were planted. During a 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. They made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any farm equipment they had borrowed.
The Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus, for whom the month of January is named. The early Roman calendar consisted of 10 months and 304 days, with each new year beginning at the vernal equinox. It was created by Romulus, the founder of Rome, in the eighth century B.C. Over the centuries, the calendar fell out of sync with the sun, and in 46 B.C. the emperor Julius Caesar consulted with the most prominent astronomers and mathematicians of his time. He introduced the Julian calendar, which closely resembles the calendar that most countries around the world use today.
Caesar instituted January 1 as the first day of the year, partly to honor Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, whose two faces allowed him to look both back into the past and forward into the future. Romans celebrated the new year by offering sacrifices to Janus, exchanging gifts with one another, decorating their homes with laurel branches, and attending raucous parties.
In the Medieval era, the knights took the “peacock vow” at the end of the Christmas season each year to re-affirm their commitment to chivalry.
This tradition has other religious parallels. In Judaism. on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the culmination of the Jewish New Year, Jews reflect upon their wrongdoings over the past year and seek forgiveness. And the practice of New Year’s resolutions came, in part, from the Lenten sacrifices of Christians. The concept, regardless of creed, is the annual reflection upon self-improvement.
Despite the tradition’s religious roots, New Year’s resolutions today are a secular practice. Instead of making promises to the gods, most people make resolutions to themselves and focus purely on self-improvement.
So Who Makes Resolutions? Who Keeps Them?
At the end of the Great Depression, about 25% of American adults made New Year’s resolutions. At the beginning of the 21st century, about 40% did. And those who make common resolutions such as weight loss, increased exercising, or quitting smoking are at least ten times more likely to succeed compared with those who do not make resolutions.
Here are the most common reasons for people failing at their New Years’ Resolutions:
- Unrealistic goals (35%)
- Not keeping track of progress (33% )
- Forgetting all about it (23%)
- Making too many resolutions (10%)
A 2007 study by Richard Wiseman from the University of Bristol involving 3,000 people showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail despite the fact that over half of the study’s participants were confident of success at the beginning.
- Men achieved their goals more often when they engaged in specific goal setting.
- Women succeeded more when they made their goals public and got support from their friends.
Things to Do on New Year’s Eve
In Spain and several other Spanish-speaking countries, people bolt down a dozen grapes right before midnight, symbolizing their hopes for the months ahead. In many parts of the world, traditional New Year’s dishes feature legumes, which are thought to resemble coins and herald future financial success. Because pigs represent progress and prosperity in some cultures, pork appears on the New Year’s Eve table in Cuba, Austria, Hungary, and Portugal. Ring-shaped cakes and pastries, a sign that the year has come full circle, are part of the feast in the Netherlands, Mexico, and Greece. In Sweden and Norway, rice pudding with an almond hidden inside is served on New Year’s Eve: whoever finds the nut can expect 12 months of good fortune.
Other customs that are common worldwide include watching fireworks and singing songs, including “Auld Lang Syne” in many English-speaking countries.
In the United States, the most iconic New Year’s tradition is the dropping of the giant ball in New York City’s Times Square at midnight, an event that began in 1907. The ball has gone from a 700-pound iron-and-wood orb to a brightly patterned sphere 12 feet in diameter, weighing nearly 12,000 pounds. Some towns and cities across America have developed their own versions of the Times Square ritual including public drops of pickles (Dillsburg, Pennsylvania) and possums (Tallapoosa, Georgia)
How Have Resolutions Changed?
Americans’ Resolutions for 1947 – Gallup Poll
- Improve my disposition, be more understanding, control my temper
- Improve my character, live a better life
- Stop smoking, smoke less
- Save more money
- Stop drinking, drink less
- Be more religious, go to church oftener
- Be more efficient, do a better job
- Take better care of my health
- Take greater part in home life
- Lose (or gain) weight
Americans’ Resolutions for 2014 – University of Scranton
- Lose weight
- Getting organized
- Spend less, save more
- Enjoy life to the fullest
- Stay fit and healthy
- Learn something exciting
- Quit smoking
- Help others in their dreams
- Fall in love
- Spend more time with family
P.S. Weight loss has obviously become important to us. As a nation, we’re the heaviest we’ve ever been. And along with the extra pounds come physical conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as social stigmas like bullying and weight discrimination. But Abigail Saguy, a sociology and gender studies professor at University of California, Los Angeles, points out that bodies — especially women’s bodies — have always been imbued with some kind of social meaning, and she suspects that people are more interested in enjoying the elevated status of a socially acceptable body than improved health outcomes.
Where Did the Holidays Go?
It all started when we began to see Thanksgiving decorations several months ago. Well, actually perhaps it began around Labor Day when pumpkins started showing up in stores. And now, several months later, it is just about over. Most people are breathing a sigh of relief. A few love the season and hate to see it go.
I would think most of the people who love it and hate to see it go are those with kids — small kids — and intact marriages, and families who get along — for the most part, anyway. The holiday season is a whole lot easier for those people. And add to it a love of decorating, a love of baking, a love of entertaining, and just a love of being busy and spending time with people you love — and you can see why there are those who really love the holidays.
People who are glad the holiday season is over, I would think, fall into two groups:
- Those who consider it too much.
- Those who have too little.
Those who consider it too much: Even if you love to shop and wrap and bake and entertain and decorate and look at pretty lights, it gets tiring, and many people love it, and love when it is over as well. Maybe there are family issues, or too many people to visit, people who are now alienated from parts of families, people who are far away — or too far away to see at all. Then, there is the money spent, the stress of it all. Ah! January 1!
Those who have too little: I am not talking about having too little money, although that could certainly put a damper on the holidays. I am talking about those with no family, or estranged family. There are more people in those circumstances than I had thought, I somewhat being among them. Perhaps they have no siblings, no living parents, no children, children who are estranged or occupied with spouses’ families, newly divorced or widowed, and the list goes on. It is a very difficult time of year for lots of people. That is where good friends come in. They become our family. But for many, it is a relief when January 1 comes, and we don’t have to worry about the holidays for another 9 or 10 months.
Regardless of the kind of holidays you had this year, I hope 2017 is a happy and successful year for you all!
Happy New Year from The Grammar Diva!
Thank you all for reading and commenting on my blog posts and for your support during the past year!
Hope. The usual cheer that is part of the holiday season may be diminished for many of us this year. Our hope for the future may have dimmed. Our families may be divided, much as the country is. For many, the holiday season is never very cheerful, as loneliness moves in. I usually write a holiday post, often with quotes about some aspect of the season. This year I have chosen quotes about hope, and I have “stolen” the title of the post from President Obama’s book and famous speech. I “hope” you find some of the quotes reassuring; some may actually make you sad as you think of what might have been and what might be instead. And some of you may be hopeful the way things are. Whichever the case, I hope you draw meaning from the post and joy or solace from the season.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. Barack Obama
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up. Anne Lamott
While there’s life, there’s hope. Cicero
There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them. Clare Booth Luce
Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune
Without the words,
and never stops at all. Emily Dickinson
History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy. George W. Bush
Hope, like the gleaming taper’s light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray. Oliver Goldsmith
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey. Quida
Hope is necessary in every condition. Samuel Johnson
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future. Stephen Ambrose
Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair. Thomas Hobbes
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. Helen Keller
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. Desmond Tutu
A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning. Brad Henry
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us. Samuel Smiles
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Albert Einstein
Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one. John Lennon
My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth. Abraham Lincoln
You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own. Michelle Obama
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. Robert Kennedy
We talk a lot about hope, helping, and teamwork. Our whole message is that we are more powerful together. Victoria Osteen
I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe. Dalai Lama
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. Nelson Mandela
The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world. James Madison
We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon. Franklin D. Roosevelt
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope. George Eliot
Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be. Vladimir Putin (I couldn’t resist!)
Never lose hope. Unknown, Polish Slogan
Thank you to these websites for the quotes: https://www.brainyquote.com www.quotationspage.com/
HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE GRAMMAR DIVA TO YOU AND YOURS!
Part 1: Black Friday
Unless you live under a large rock, you know that Black Friday refers to the day after Thanksgiving, which marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season: big crowds, small prices (maybe). Where did the term “Black Friday ” come from? What does it mean?
Because we don’t often read about the meaning of the phrase, people have invented their own explanations for how the phrase became attached to the day after Thanksgiving. One incorrect explanation is that it all started with a tradition of slave owners or slave traders using that day to sell slaves. Black Friday has nothing to do with the selling of slaves: in fact, the term didn’t originate until nearly a century after slavery was abolished.
Another explanation of “Black Friday” originates from 1951, referring to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, giving them a four-day weekend. (that day was not yet commonly offered as a paid day off by employers).
(more…)
