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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (3709)	2/27/2001 7:36:22 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

I did invite comments? I don't recall writing any invitations. Perhaps you just couldn't stop yourself from correcting me. LOL. gaff vs. gaffe. I'm wrong there all right. I should've caught that one. "It's like an insult". I could've used "They're" there, but I decided it is not necessarily "the gaffes" per se. I want "It" to refer to more - the significance of education, my dismay at Harvard, the majority of people's indifference, my ignorance of the language, the triumph of regionalism over sophistication, etc. That whole thing (it) is like an insult (to me). Ellipses: "So... eventually... I guess I will lighten up." From "The Punctuation Handbook" (I'd underline book titles if I knew how), p. 40: "Ellipses may be used (infrequently and with discretion) in narrative prose A. To indicate an implied expansion of thought B. To indicate the passage of time." I use ellipses too much. But in the instance you referenced, I'm not sure at all that it was inappropriate. To my mind, those ellipses are there to suggest an implied 'sigh' as I face at least four years of listening to Mr. Bush's language. "Not a subject to waste time on." and others: Since I prefaced my first post with an alert that I was venting, and since you can tell I'm somewhat excitable, I offer that I am entitled to write in a way that reflects that. So I have capitalized some expressions and put a period at their end. This might apply: Strunk and White, (1979), p. 7, "It is permissible to make an emphatic word or expression serve the purpose of a sentence and to punctuate it accordingly." However, I might still be wrong, because the authors then state "the emphasis must be warranted, lest his clipped syntax seem merely a blunder in syntax or in punctuation." Well, I assumed it was warranted, but I forgot that there would be people here who would miss the middle when they concentrate primarily on the low (the periods and commas) and the high (the capital letters). -g- Paul Senior