Celebrate Your Celestial Body

Yesterday, a student asked me how I felt about Valentine’s Day.

I realized I’m kind of ambivalent about it. One the one hand, how lovely to dedicate an entire day to celebrating love! On the other hand, shouldn’t every day be Valentine’s Day? Shouldn’t I be showered with jewels and chocolates and flowers and cards and expensive dinners and romance every day of the year?

Do holidays like Valentine’s Day allow us to take our loved ones for granted during the remaining 364 days?

It’s really Earth Day that got me thinking about this. We celebrate Earth Day on April 22, but for the rest of the year, we seem to take our planet for granted.

I say this because we capitalize the word Earth in Earth Day, but we don’t consistently capitalize it otherwise.

Now, I realize that earth should not be capitalized when we use it to refer to dry land or dirt; I’m talking about when we’re referring to our planet.

It's not fair; we capitalize the other planets. Saturn already has those cool rings, Mars houses weird green creatures with three eyes, Uranus is the butt of lots of jokes, AND they get capital letters.

We only capitalize words like earth, moon, and sun when they appear in a context with other capitalized celestial bodies.

Example: The sun heats the earth, and the moon provides the earth with swiss cheese.

Example: I don’t care if Jupiter is big and Venus is sexy; I prefer to live on Earth.

It’s as though we esteem the other planets more than our own.

Shouldn’t we capitalize the word earth even when it’s not in the same sentence as the other planets? Shouldn’t we celebrate our planet? Every day should be Earth Day!

I’m so upset, I am thinking about driving my Escalade straight over to my local congressman’s office. But first I need to calm down; I think I’ll take a long, hot shower.

Don't Get Sad; Get Even

When I was in eighth grade, this guy named Chris dumped me out of nowhere after two weeks of what I thought had been total bliss.

I was devastated. I would come home from school, lock myself in my room, listen to my U2 Joshua Tree cassette tape over and over again, and ask myself why Chris still hadn’t found what he was looking for in me. Was it my bangs? Were they not big enough? Was it my jeans? Were they not acid-washed enough?

I was so depressed even my teachers noticed.

If I could turn back time, I would have handled things a bit differently. Instead of suffering, I would have made Chris suffer.

In fact, I would have started a club called the All-Ex-Self-Esteem club. My club would have focused on preserving post break-up self-esteem by engaging in activities against all exes.

The boys in the club would have been responsible for smearing Nair into our ex-boyfriends’ football helmets. The girls in the club would have befriended club members’ ex-girlfriends and put laxatives into their Diet Cokes. There would have been egging and TPing and rumor spreading. It would have been grand!

In addition to helping us poor dumpees maintain our fragile junior high self-esteem, the All-Ex-Self-Esteem club would have helped us grammatically—it would have helped us remember when to use hyphens.

When used as prefixes, the words all, ex and self use hyphens:

all-encompassing, all-knowing, all-inclusive

ex-boyfriend, ex-wife, ex-patriot, ex-Patriot's fan

self-loathing, self-satisfied, self-aware

A club that builds self-esteem and grammar skills! It's not too late. Who’s in? I’ll provide the Nair.

(Do they even still make Nair?)

One Hand-Clapping

One day, Buddha was asked ten questions by some monks. He refused to answer these ten questions, and, consequently, they have become known as the unanswerable questions. Buddha claimed that knowing the answers to such questions only hinders our advancement toward liberation. (Good one, Buddha. That’s also how I respond to my students’ questions when I don’t know the answers.)

The monks’ questions were fancy metaphysical ones like whether or not the world is eternal, whether or not the soul is identical with the body, whether or not a perfectly enlightened being exists after death, and whether or not a hyphen is required in between Buddha and belly.

Okay, fine, the monks didn’t ask Buddha about the hyphen, but they might as well have; the hyphen is as elusive as the mysteries of the universe.

I attempted to reach Buddha in hopes that he might answer the following question: Is there a rule that explains when to express words as two words, one compound word, or a hyphenated word?

I texted him, left him three voicemails and tweeted him, and he never got back to me—so I consulted some grammar gurus instead.

“To understand the hyphen,” the grammar gurus said, “one must first contemplate the sound of one hand clapping.”

In other words, nobody really knows. The consensus is this: when in doubt about whether or not two words should be hyphenated, consult the dictionary.

As you can imagine, that response did not quench my thirst for the knowledge I was seeking.

So I delved deeper into the grammatical sea of knowledge, and I found an explanation that was a bit more satisfying. I found it in the good old Texas Law Review Manual of Style. It advised that we should join two words with a hyphen “if doing so will significantly aid the reader in recognizing the compound adjective.”

So, basically, we should add a hyphen if it’s needed to clarify our meaning.

For example, if I want to express to my reader that my friend Karen loves porn, I would write the following:

Karen is a dirty-movie enthusiast.

Without the hyphen, the reader might think that Karen loves movies but hates showers:

Karen is a dirty movie enthusiast.

If I want to express that Don Juan is a prominent lover, I would use the hyphen:

Don Juan is a big-time lover.

Without the hyphen, it would appear that he is a large person who loves time:

Don Juan is a big time lover.

We have only scratched the surface of the hyphen’s infinite mysteries. More will be revealed in next week’s post.

Until then, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Is it different from the sound of one hand-clapping?

References:

“Compound Words: When To Hyphenate.” Get It Write. 27 April 2003. Web. 1 February 2012.

“The Ten Unanswered Questions.” Web. 1 February 2012. http://www.mi-lam.org/pdf/TenQuestions.pdf.

Ask and You Shall Recieve ... Eventually

I am more than just an English instructor. I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint, and I am also the IDEA Center coordinator on my campus. I know it sounds like a creative gig, like I am paid to sit in lotus position and beget one brilliant idea after the other, but IDEA is an acronym for Individual Development Educational Assistance. Basically, I run the center which offers the students more personalized help. I mostly help students with writing skills, study skills, boyfriend issues, and time management.

But, lately, the fact that I am the campus time management go-to person seems to make as much sense as hiring Ashton Kutcher to be a marriage consultant or Mel Gibson to run anger management courses.

Since school started this quarter, for some reason, I have been terribly unorganized. That, my friends, is why your much-appreciated requests for particular grammar lessons have up until now gone unaddressed. But I would like you to know that they haven’t been forgotten. I’ve been storing them in my cheeks like a chipmunk.

So starting with my next blog post, I am going to cover the following:

Hyphens for Mykuljay at Perception Is Reality Corner

When to capitalize north, south, east and west and when to capitalize planets for Stephen T. McCarthy at Stephen T. McCarthy's STUFFS

Supersede/Supercede for my friend Jennifer

Presume/Assume for my friends Emily and Travis

While you've got me focused, any other requests?

Stop Reading. Pass It On.

I believe that reading books is the best way to improve our grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary. My theory is based on the fact that when I returned home from living in Australia I was walking around for a week saying, “Bloody hell!” In other words, I believe we tend to automatically recreate what we’re exposed to. So it makes sense that if we repeatedly expose ourselves to good writing, we will subconsciously absorb such things as proper spelling and comma placement.

So I implore you to please stop reading books. And if you catch your friends reading a book or the guy next to you on the train reading his Kindle, please rip the reading material out of their hands and throw it away. Encourage them to spend more time on Facebook, or better yet, have them watch Jersey Shore marathons.

That way, late this year, when the Missed Periods and Other Grammar Scares book is scheduled to come out, the nation will be in a grammar crisis and I will sell billions and billions of copies!

What I am trying to tell you is that I got a publishing deal!

I am new to this whole publishing thing, but what I do know is that the publisher said they were aiming for a fall release, that I have a million revisions to do, and that I am super excited.

Thank you all for reading this blog and giving me the confidence in my grammar vision to turn it into a book.

Now stop reading this, and start reading Snooki’s Twitter feed.

Crazy Sexy Men

If I had to come up with one word that defined 2011 for me, the word would be protest. There were all the Middle East protests, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and, I think we can agree most importantly, the Sexiest Man Alive protest.

As many of you may remember, back in November of 2011, People magazine awarded the Sexiest Man Alive title to Bradley Cooper. I distinctly recall the moment I learned that the coveted title had been bequeathed to Mr. Cooper. I was in line at the supermarket purchasing some guacamole ingredients. I make really good guacamole. The secret is a dash of cumin. Anyhow, I’m in line and I see this:

I’ll admit that I didn’t immediately succumb to Bradley Copper’s charms, but as I have mentioned in previous posts, as soon as I saw some footage of him speaking French in an interview, I swooned and converted. So I agreed wholeheartedly with People’s decision.

However, not everyone agreed. A group of people gathered outside of the People magazine headquarters to protest the fact that Ryan Gosling hadn’t won the title.

I can totally see their point. He’s hot. I saw Crazy Stupid Love. I saw those abs. And he’s a great dresser.

I think both Bradley and Ryan are perfectly acceptable Sexiest Man Alive contenders.

The Bradley/Ryan controversy reminds me a lot of the addicting/addictive controversy. You see, like Bradley and Ryan, the words addicting and addictive are both acceptable words to use when you are trying to express that something is dangerously habit forming:

Watching Bradley speak French is addicting.

Admiring Ryan’s abs is addictive.

However, the English language sticklers insist that addictive is the only acceptable choice.

I wouldn’t consider myself a stickler. If the word is in the dictionary, that’s all I need, and addicting is in the dictionary.

And speaking of the dictionary, in your opinion, under the word sexy, whose picture will you find?

Happy New Pair!

In my last post, I held a Hanukkah hide-the-grammar-errors sock contest. It's like hide the matzoh, but it tastes better. (I'm kidding; matzoh is delicious with butter slathered all over it like my grandma used to make.)

To your left, is the beautiful pair of socks that will be awarded to the lucky winner. If any men had entered, I would have gone for a more androgynous pair, but since men can't find grammar errors, luxe girl it is.

P.S. Just kidding, men.
P.P.S. I really wanted to capitalize luxe girl.

Three women entered the contest, so I wrote each of their names on a piece of paper:


Then, I crumpled up the pieces of paper:

Then, I ran into my room and got my furry purple hat (faux fur, of course) that I've had for years but have never worn. New Year's resolution: wear purple furry hat.

Then, I put the crumpled pieces of paper into the hat:

Then, I shuffled the crumpled of pieces around and selected one:

The suspense is killing me!

And, drum roll please: the winner is...

Congratulations, Jessica!

(Jessica, I can't find any contact info. for you on your profile. If you see this, email me your address at missedperiods@gmail.com and the socks will be yours.)

Happy New Year to everyone!