• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 309 0

with every conversation the book seemed to grow longer. One chat with an editor friend sent me rushing to add the active and passive voices to the English chapter. Another friend could recite British poetry verbatim but could not remember if the poem she so eloquently performed was by Keats or Shelley. Yet another friend confessed that she had completely forgotten what a square root was (though I have no idea why she suddenly wanted to know). In the end I had to stop discussing it, or this book would have surpassed the size of War and Peace. I also found in the course of researching the things I used to know that I learned more than a few things that I didn’t.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I hope you, too, will learn something new or find things here that strike a chord, however faintly. Things that make you say, “Oh, yes, I used to know that.” Because by the time you read this, I will almost certainly have forgotten most of them again.

ENGLISH

Learning to read and write was just the beginning. After you had mastered that, you had to study how the language worked and, when you started to write your own stories, how to stay focused, develop content, organize material, maintain a consistent voice and style, and use proper grammar. If (perish the thought) you had to write poetry as well, there was a whole new set of conventions.…

Parts of Speech

This is a way of categorizing words according to the function they perform in a sentence, and there are nine of them:

adjective: a describing word. Some examples include tall, short, brown, and blue. With one possible exception—blond/blonde—adjectives in English (unlike most European languages) are invariable; that is, they don’t change according to the number and gender of the thing they are describing.

adverb: a word that describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Adverbs answer such questions as how, when, or where: She walked aimlessly; light brown hair (where light is an adverb describing the adjective brown); they lived fairly frugally (where fairly is an adverb describing the adverb frugally). Most, but by no means all, adverbs in English are formed by adding -ly to the adjective.

article: Merriam-Webster defines an article as “any small words or affixes…used with nouns to limit or give definiteness to the application.” That’s not very helpful, is it? It may be easier just to remember that the definite article is the and the indefinite articles are a and an.

conjunction: a joining word. Examples include and, but, though, and so on. Conjunctions link two words, phrases, or clauses together: Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most popular book, but I also love Sense and Sensibility, though Marianne can be really annoying.

interjection: a word to express emotion. For example, Aha! or Alas!

noun: a naming word. There are three categories:

• Collective nouns describe a group of things. However, they are funny things. There are some genuinely useful ones to describe animals that live in groups—you wouldn’t talk about a gaggle of elephants, for example, or a flock of lions. But at some stage in history, someone thought it was useful to give collective names to almost a hundred birds where you might have thought that group, colony, or a whole bunch would serve the purpose. And there are many variations. If you are talking about a group of ducks, for example, you could say a badelynge, brace, bunch, dopping, flock, paddling, plump, raft, safe, skein, sord, string, or team. A charm of goldfinches, an exaltation of larks, and a parliament of owls are often quoted but rarely used in real life—but once you start Googling for this sort of thing, you also come across a dopping of goosanders. (Goosanders? Some people have too much time on their hands.)

• Proper nouns name a person, place, or thing that requires a capital letter, such as Caroline, Paris, or the Smithsonian Institution.

• Common nouns cover general terms, such as street, book, and photograph.

preposition: a word that links nouns, pronouns, and phrases