Long ago, in Bisbee, Arizona, I\u2019d be finishing up wiping the breakfast dishes and getting ready to walk to school when the morning radio talk show, Arlo and Ray, was signing off. \u00a0The commercial that came on next was for Dreft, a powdered dish soap. \u00a0Because Dreft was my mother\u2019s choice of dish soap, I always paid attention. \u00a0It went like this. \u00a0\u201cHere comes my mother-in-law, and did she make me burn.\u201d \u00a0It would appear that said mother-in-law, in attempting to school her daughter-in-law on the right choice of dish soap, would pour Dreft in one hand and the daughter-in-law\u2019s choice of soap in the other to see which hand suffered the most from the ensuing chemical burns.<\/p>\n
My son and daughter-in-law Kathleen came to visit this past weekend. \u00a0First off, I love Kathleen to pieces. \u00a0Having raised four boys mostly on her own, she is not exactly a shrinking violet. \u00a0She works as the manager of community outreach for a network of credit unions in eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana. \u00a0Naturally she and her co-workers are currently working mostly from home. \u00a0She was telling us about a series of chats that had devolved into something that could have been considered unseemly had it gone viral. \u00a0When I mentioned that, she said it wan\u2019t a problem\u2014that it was just a conversation between the five of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oops. \u00a0Like the mother-in-law from hell handing out fistfuls of Dreft, I couldn\u2019t help myself. \u00a0I signaled an immediate pause in the conversation to point out that between is used when there are only two alternatives. \u00a0Among is used when there are three or more. \u00a0An example of two would be found in the phrase, \u00a0\u201cbetween me and thee.\u201d \u00a0(By the way, between is a preposition. \u00a0Objects of prepositions must be in the OBJECTIVE CASE!!! \u00a0In other words, it has to be between you or me or or between him and me (objective case) rather than between he and I (subjective case.). \u00a0An example of three or more alternatives would be “among us seven kids” rather than \u201camong we seven kids.\u201d \u00a0These days most of the kids being taught what\u2019s currently referred to \u00a0language arts have never heard of prepositions to say nothing of objective or subjective cases\u2014probably because their teachers weren\u2019t ever taught them, either.<\/p>\n
With that momentary grammatical interruption handled, the conversation continued unabated, and I don\u2019t believe there was any permanent damage to Kathleen\u2019s and my DIL\/MIL relationship. As to whatever happened to that young woman on the radio, the one left standing there with her handfuls of powdered soap? \u00a0I\u2019m not so sure.<\/p>\n
But getting back to grammar, Colt calls me his Grammar Grandma, a title I am more than happy to claim as my own. \u00a0Although I didn\u2019t necessarily appreciate it at the time, I attended Bisbee High School during a golden era where we had utterly outstanding English teachers. \u00a0Mrs. Riggins was kind but very precise, and when she marked up one of your papers with her red pencil, she expected you to pay attention. \u00a0Miss Reavis, who hailed from Mexico, Missouri, loved Shakespeare beyond measure. \u00a0Under her firm direction we were all required to stand and recite the Ode to A Grecian Urn \u2026 or else! \u00a0(I believe, some of the people who suffer from a lifetime of poetry-induced PTSD probably had their own versions of Miss Reavis lingering somewhere in their past lives.)<\/p>\n
Miss Shreve was the diagramming dictator. \u00a0You had to be able to take a sentence apart, putting it on the applicable lines, and see what word, clause, or phrase modified what. \u00a0She was the one who unlocked the mysteries of the differences between gerunds and participles. \u00a0Gerunds are ing words used as nouns. \u00a0Participles are ing words used as adjectives. \u00a0Years ago, Bill and I went to the Seattle Rep to see Tom Stoppard\u2019s play, The\u00a0Real Thing. \u00a0<\/em>In it, a curmudgeonly English professor\u2019s sweet young thing of a wife has fallen for another man while off on a whale-saving expedition. \u00a0When they return, and the professor learns what\u2019s happened, he pitches a fit by saying, \u201cF… the whales. \u00a0Save the gerund.\u201d \u00a0Two things about that statement. \u00a01: \u00a0Using the first letter of a bad word and spaces for the rest and allowing the reader to fill in the blanks is a trick I learned from reading Zane Grey novels when I was in the sixth and seventh grades. \u00a02: \u00a0Only three people in the theatre laughed at that bit of dialogue\u2014Bill and I, along with a woman somewhere in the audience far behind us. No doubt she, too, had someone not unlike Miss Shreve buried in her past life.<\/p>\n Just in case some of you are still a bit mystified about the difference between gerunds and participles, and because I, too, want to save the gerund, I\u2019m going to go out on a limb here and serve up a pair of examples. And because I suspect most of my readers are what could be called “consenting adults,” I\u2019ll warn you in advance that they might be considered for MA (mature audiences) rather than the PG-13 version. \u00a0And once again, you\u2019ll need to fill in the missing letters on your own: \u00a0Gerund: \u00a0“F\u2026ing is fun.\u201d \u00a0In this case F\u2026ing is an ing word used as a noun and as the subject of the sentence. \u00a0Participle: \u00a0No f\u2026ing way you’re going to do that! \u00a0In this case, f\u2026ing is an ing word used as an adjective to modify the noun way. \u00a0Got it? \u00a0Never in a million years would Miss Shreve have used that example, but it makes the point and from now on you\u2019ll KNOW the difference between the two. \u00a0(Between as opposed to among, see paragraph 3 above.)<\/p>\n Back at good old BHS, once you made it past Miss Shreve, it was time for Mrs. \u201cHell\u2019s bells, you hounds!\u201d Medigovich. \u00a0She was a tall, striking woman with coal black hair which she wore coiled like a snake at the back of her neck. \u00a0She had narrow, hawkish features and a prominent mole in the middle of a very sharp chin. \u00a0In other words, she was not a beauty, but she dressed like a fashion-plate in stylish knit sheaths, strode through life with her hips out-thrust like an Old West gunslinger, and was never, not once\u2014not even at our senior picnic\u2014seen in public without wearing a pair of high heels. \u00a0Her classes were conducted with an iron fist, and if you said something stupid, or if you just weren\u2019t getting what she was telling you, she would rap her knuckles on the black board and bellow those famous words, \u201cHell\u2019s bells, you hounds, don\u2019t you know anything?\u2019<\/p>\n So yes, we may have been terrified at the time, but if you walked away from Mrs. Medigovich’s senior English class with an A, you could pretty well expect to find yourself in an honors English class wherever you ended up going to college.<\/p>\n Nearly sixty years later, the words of all those long-ago English teachers still linger and rule my life. \u00a0They molded me into what I am\u2014a writer\u2014and something of a grammar evangelist, if you will.<\/p>\n When Colt calls me his Grammar Grandma, I consider it a badge of honor, one I wear with pride.<\/p>\n I just hope Kathleen can forgive me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Long ago, in Bisbee, Arizona, I\u2019d be finishing up wiping the breakfast dishes and getting ready to walk to school when the morning radio talk show, Arlo and Ray, was signing off. \u00a0The commercial that came on next was for Dreft, a powdered dish soap. \u00a0Because Dreft was my mother\u2019s choice of dish soap, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[49,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-family","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3nsBA-2122","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2122"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2127,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions\/2127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}