The Daily News
1 Judge Judy undressed a guy. She cold-cocked this guy who took his wife's phone away from her.
2 I came in late, or I'd share more.
3 Brutal.
4 I like writing mid-afternoons.
5 I tend to avoid interruption mid-afternoons.
6 This guy on the show scammed someone.
7 The guy chirps back at her.
8 You don't do that to Judge Judy.
9 It reeled me in, even though I couldn't care less.
10 I was channel-surfing, and noticed two things coming up on Channel 6: Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy, followed by The Big Interview With Dan Rather.
11 The two stand side-by-side as journalists.
12 Larry the Cable Guy sells his own brand of instant potatoes.
13 Dan Rather, the only reporter to view the Zapruder film the day after JFK's assassination, told the world that Kennedy's head moved violently forward when they shot him. Kennedy's head moved back, indicating a shot from the front, in the area of what has historically been called the "grassy knoll." Anybody with a set of eyes can see that in the film. But I digress...
14 Moving On, Part One: The guy next door decided to mow his lawn. My peace and quiet have blown-up before my eyes. Things suddenly are out of control here in Le Luge. I'm still watching teevee. The mowing guy got louder; the teevee got weirder.
15 A commercial showed a man answering his front door. He had a monkey on his head.
16 I find myself surrounded by buzzing noises.
17 Sometimes I think I must go mad.
---Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers
---Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers
18 I think I'll go over to the radio and put KNBR on.
19 No wonder I have frazzled nerves.
20 The guy next door switched over to a leaf blower. Should I call the cops?
21 Moving Backwards, Part One: I'm back in Le Luge writing all of this amid constant teevee noise. Is it just me, or did Judge Judy have work done?
22 New case. "Was he too loaded to know better?" That was the title of the next case.
23 I'm hooked. Judge Judy shished the defendant.
24 Helene just walked in, so now I have a ticket out of all this noise.
25 Great shish. Classic JJ.
26 She gave him the look:
33 A while ago I shared King's follow-up paragraph to this enchanting grammar lesson with his simplifying the language further by showing how all sentences revolve around (a) the subject and (b) the verb. His examples, you may recall, consisted of the following combinations: Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. And my personal fave: Plums deify.
34 I'll put the burden on you to scroll around and locate that entry. Even if you are a high school sophomore secretly reading all of this nonsense, you are probably intelligent enough to search and conquer. You can find most anything I have taught online within fifteen minutes. I am making this easy for you.
35 That's about all I have to offer this fine day.
36 Again, this becomes fun, funner, and funnest. Just don't attach more or most to any of those.
37 It used to be that the word "fun" could only be enhanced comparatively by "more fun" and "most fun." While the rule is now considered obsolete, when writing something formal, you should stick with the old rule, unless you want eagle-eyed women on buses to look at you with a side-glance of disapproval.
38 Speak as though Judge Judy were judging.
39 I gottago.
40 Hope you enjoyed all of this.
41 Have a GREAT day.
42 See you again.
43 Peace.
25 Great shish. Classic JJ.
26 She gave him the look:
27 I worked the entire day on that gag.
28 I needed a coffee-snorting-through-the-eyes-and-nose gag and I landed it.
29 I may bring a strong passage from Stephen King, if you please. I may have published it before, but Zira took years off my life, so I hold you accountable for correcting me; I'm so exhausted I need a smoke.
30 I'll let Stevie take over. This is from On Writing, in the event you didn't know. Let's get going.
31 Ladies and gents, Mr. Stephen King addressing the horrid concept of learning how to grammar:
Relax. Chill. We won't spend much time here because we don't need to. One either absorbs the grammatical principle of one's native language in conversation and in reading, or
one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do)
is little more than naming parts.
And this isn't high school. Now that you're not worried that
(a) your skirt is too short or too long and the other kids will laugh at you, (b) you're not going to make the varsity swimming team, (c) you're still going to be a pimple-studded virgin when you graduate (probably when you die, for that matter), (d) the physics teacher won't grade the final on a curve, or (e) nobody really likes you anyway AND THEY NEVER DID...now that all that extraneous shit is out of the way, you can study certain academic matters with a degree of concentration you could never manage while attending the local textbook loonybin. And once you start, you'll find you know almost all of the stuff anyway---it is, as I said, mostly a matter of cleaning the rust off the drillbits and sharpening the blade of your saw.
Plus...oh, to hell with it. If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineups of the New York Yankees, or the Houston Oilers, or what label "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the difference between a gerund (a verb form used as a noun) and a participle (a verb form used as an adjective).
I thought long and hard about whether or not to include a detailed section on grammar in this little book. Part of me would actually like to; I taught successfully at high school ( where it hid under the name Business English), and I enjoyed it as a student. American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make a magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm.
In the end I decided against it, probably for the same reason William Strunk decided not to recap the basics when he wrote the first edition of The Elements of Style: if you don't know, it's too late. And those really incapable of grasping grammar---as I am incapable of playing certain guitar riffs and progressions---will have little or no use for a book like this, anyway. In that sense I am preaching to the converted. Yet allow me to go on just a little further---will you indulge me?
Vocabulary used in speech or writing organizes itself in seen parts of speech (eight, if you count interjections such as Oh! and Gosh! and Fuhgeddaboudit!). Communication composed of these parts of speech must be organized by rules of grammar upon which we all agree. When these rules break down, confusion and misunderstanding result. My favorite example from Strunk and White is this one: "As a mother of five, with another one on the way, my ironing board was always up."
Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing.
Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer's head and then leaps to the reader's.
Must you write complete sentences each time, every time?
Perish the thought. If your work consist of only fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."
The telling clause here is Unless he is certain of doing well. If you don't have a rudimentary grasp of how the parts of speech translate into coherent sentences, how can you be certain you are doing well? How will you know if you're doing ill, for that matter? The answer, of course, is that you can't, you won't. One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.
32 I'm not certain that it is safe to come out from under all of that. 31 Ladies and gents, Mr. Stephen King addressing the horrid concept of learning how to grammar:
Relax. Chill. We won't spend much time here because we don't need to. One either absorbs the grammatical principle of one's native language in conversation and in reading, or
one does not. What Sophomore English does (or tries to do)
is little more than naming parts.
And this isn't high school. Now that you're not worried that
(a) your skirt is too short or too long and the other kids will laugh at you, (b) you're not going to make the varsity swimming team, (c) you're still going to be a pimple-studded virgin when you graduate (probably when you die, for that matter), (d) the physics teacher won't grade the final on a curve, or (e) nobody really likes you anyway AND THEY NEVER DID...now that all that extraneous shit is out of the way, you can study certain academic matters with a degree of concentration you could never manage while attending the local textbook loonybin. And once you start, you'll find you know almost all of the stuff anyway---it is, as I said, mostly a matter of cleaning the rust off the drillbits and sharpening the blade of your saw.
Plus...oh, to hell with it. If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineups of the New York Yankees, or the Houston Oilers, or what label "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the difference between a gerund (a verb form used as a noun) and a participle (a verb form used as an adjective).
I thought long and hard about whether or not to include a detailed section on grammar in this little book. Part of me would actually like to; I taught successfully at high school ( where it hid under the name Business English), and I enjoyed it as a student. American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make a magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm.
In the end I decided against it, probably for the same reason William Strunk decided not to recap the basics when he wrote the first edition of The Elements of Style: if you don't know, it's too late. And those really incapable of grasping grammar---as I am incapable of playing certain guitar riffs and progressions---will have little or no use for a book like this, anyway. In that sense I am preaching to the converted. Yet allow me to go on just a little further---will you indulge me?
Vocabulary used in speech or writing organizes itself in seen parts of speech (eight, if you count interjections such as Oh! and Gosh! and Fuhgeddaboudit!). Communication composed of these parts of speech must be organized by rules of grammar upon which we all agree. When these rules break down, confusion and misunderstanding result. My favorite example from Strunk and White is this one: "As a mother of five, with another one on the way, my ironing board was always up."
Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing.
Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer's head and then leaps to the reader's.
Must you write complete sentences each time, every time?
Perish the thought. If your work consist of only fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."
The telling clause here is Unless he is certain of doing well. If you don't have a rudimentary grasp of how the parts of speech translate into coherent sentences, how can you be certain you are doing well? How will you know if you're doing ill, for that matter? The answer, of course, is that you can't, you won't. One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.
33 A while ago I shared King's follow-up paragraph to this enchanting grammar lesson with his simplifying the language further by showing how all sentences revolve around (a) the subject and (b) the verb. His examples, you may recall, consisted of the following combinations: Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. And my personal fave: Plums deify.
34 I'll put the burden on you to scroll around and locate that entry. Even if you are a high school sophomore secretly reading all of this nonsense, you are probably intelligent enough to search and conquer. You can find most anything I have taught online within fifteen minutes. I am making this easy for you.
35 That's about all I have to offer this fine day.
36 Again, this becomes fun, funner, and funnest. Just don't attach more or most to any of those.
37 It used to be that the word "fun" could only be enhanced comparatively by "more fun" and "most fun." While the rule is now considered obsolete, when writing something formal, you should stick with the old rule, unless you want eagle-eyed women on buses to look at you with a side-glance of disapproval.
38 Speak as though Judge Judy were judging.
39 I gottago.
40 Hope you enjoyed all of this.
41 Have a GREAT day.
42 See you again.
43 Peace.
~H~
fin.
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