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May 26, 2009

Grammar for Idiots, Part III

In English, it is often difficult to decide how to indicate that a noun is plural. Sometimes you have to add an S to the word, sometimes you have to drop a Y and add an "-ies," sometimes you have to change the word completely, and sometimes you just have to leave it alone. And that's not even all the options. So, yeah, the whole thing is pretty easy to mess up--if you're an idiot. See, the one thing we always know is that we only ever have to apply one transformation to a singular noun to arrive at a...

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June 5, 2008

Grammar for Idiots, Part II

In English, we use the apostrophe for several purposes. Two of these uses are most common: we use the apostrophe to indicate that some noun possesses something ("This is John's book" or "That is my cat's favorite toy") and to indicate contractions ("I'll be back" or "He's more machine, now, than man"). We do not use the apostrophe to indicate plurality--ever. So all those fucking signs out there that advertise "CD's" are not only wrong, they are offensive. That's all fairly simple, I think, but now it's going to get complicated--if you're an idiot. See, people seem to have trouble...

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April 2, 2008

Grammar for Idiots, Part I

In English, subjects and verbs have to agree. For example, "He runs" is correct, but "They runs" is incorrect. The latter should be "They run." When the noun is singular, as in "he runs," the verb must also be singular. When the noun is plural, as in "they run," the verb must also be plural. Now it's going to get complicated--if you're an idiot. You see, our language has many words for things that are really collections of other things. For example, instead of forcing us to say "a number of animals of the same species doing stuff together," English...

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