Archive

Tag Archives: English

Mama Was an English Teacher

February 2, 2014
Silly
10 Comments

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a lazy post.

I saw this a few minutes ago:

He quotes Bill Nye; my favorite part is this:  ”We need scientifically literate voters and tax payers for the future….”

Does Nye think that Creationists don’t pay taxes, or something?

Mama said there’d be days like this…. so she taught me to diagram sentences! Really! I don’t know about you, but when I was in school they didn’t teach this any more, but my mother made sure that I learned. She promised me that one day, I’d be thankful. Today is that day!

A diagram of the sentence, "We need scientifically literate voters and tax payers in the future."

Me, I’d be happy just to stop at step three with literate voters and taxpayers.

The New York Times Has Me Pegged

January 6, 2014
Uncategorized
9 Comments

The New York Times website as a fun little quiz that asks a series of questions and comes up with a heat map showing which areas of the United States your dialect most resembles. I took the test and all of the United States was stone cold blue with the notable exception of the Greater New York area. It said that my speech most resembled the speech in Paterson, Newark, New York City and Yonkers. My parents grew up in Paterson, I went to high school in the same county as Newark and lived for many years in New York City. Yonkers is the only town on the list to which I have no connection.

Questions are things like “What do you call a sweetened carbonated beverage?” I remember when my college roommate from California suggest we go get a pop and everyone just stared at her.