Burnt or burned? The participle conundrum (or how to talk about your toast correctly)

Posted on 1 December, 2011 by rebekahguy

Did you learn about linguistics at school? To be more precise, are you over the age of 27? If the answer to either of those questions is “yes”, then you might know about participles. If you answered “no’” then you probably don’t. If you answered “yes” and then “no”, or vice versa, well… I don’t know. I’d hoped that wouldn’t happen.

The difference between learned and learnt, or burned and burnt, lies within the scope of a tiny but important English variant: the past participle tense. It’s created with the use of participles – your learnts, burnts, spilts and lepts.

If you’re unfamiliar with the use of participles it’s because these days, due to the downfall of the institution which I like to call Speaking Correctly, and because humans have learnt (HA!) that a fewer number of variables is a better number of variables (especially when the people who like those variables are puny and easily physically bested), those words mentioned aren’t seen as holding differing meanings (so don’t believe the first few entries on Google Answers). But they do! Example:

I learned French.

I’ve learnt French.

When you say you learned something, the meaning conveyed is not only that the learning event was in the past, but that it’s probably finished now. The ‘learnt’ meaning is that yes, the learning happened in the past, and its application may still exist today and in the future – maybe you’re still learning it. Probably in that case you’d add another word to the sentence: “I’ve learnt French before”; similarly, “I’ve burnt toast before, and I plan to do it in the future, many times”. Been is a participle of the verb to go, as in “I’ve been to Disneyland before, and I plan to do it in the future, many times” compared with “I went to Disneyland when I was five”.

Surprise Educational Experience: Apparently, the word cookt used to exist: “I’ve cookt for my mother for the last fifteen years, and she still won’t acknowledge my brilliance” (the cooking started in the past and will continue, as will the lack of maternal respect). Sadly, that wee gem isn’t around anymore (although I plan to use it).

There is one definite rule with participles – they need an auxiliary verb. That’s just some lingo you can throw around if you want to seem smart, cos it really just means you need to use have or had before the participle, like in the above examples. Otherwise it won’t make sense. Well, it will make sense to those who don’t care, but to us puny and easily physically bested dorks it’s tantamount to gibberish.

One last thing – learned, burned, leaped, spilled, blessed, and all those other –ed words can be used as present participle qualifiers. Now, that sounds dumb, but really it means that you can add a syllable to the -ed word and make it describe a thing in a very scholarly-sounding way, like this: “Queen’s Brian May is actually a very learn-ed man”, or “Indeed, this French toast has bless-ed us all”, or “Yikes, this stove has burn-ed me”… VERY cool.

Rooves or roofs? (or how to make a writer die inside)

Posted on 12 October, 2011 by rebekahguy

How do you say it: roofs or rooves? Even I’m confused about my preference. I know that the spelling for rooves looks ridiculous, and that the sound of roofs makes me die a bit, but that’s all I know. Time for some delving…

The Oxford English Dictionary (it’s the George Clooney of all source material – everything it says is correct) explains that the norm for pluralising words that end in /f/ is –ves; so wives, lives, knives etc. BUT there are six and only six /f/ words (titter) that have irregular pluralisation and just need –s: beliefs, chiefs, dwarfs, gulfs, proofs, and our pal roofs. Also, no dwarves eh? Controversial. But it’s the OED, so it’s the truth.

Thus, we’ve cleared up the spelling. Unfortunately, if you don’t recognise the OED as an authority then I can’t help you at all. But there must be a reason the roofs/rooves confusion arose in the first place, right…?

Well, FOLKS caused it, didn’t they! Grammatical Pet Peeve #1: Usage suggesting a different spelling, then people, lazy, lazy people, changing the accepted spelling willy nilly (remember that from the last post? Yeah, it’s a theme). Of course we say rooves because of the aforementioned dying-inside, native English speaker’s reaction to trying to combine that /f/ sound with an /s/ immediately after – but there are five other words that have this sound too! Granted, I’ve never tried to say chieves or proves but dwarves coulda been a contendah. For what reason? I don’t know! Silliness!

Tune in next week when I’ll be trying to staple jelly to the wall…

Hate speech (marks), (or how not to use bunny ears)

Posted on 30 September, 2011 by rebekahguy

We talk; we write. Sometimes we write the things we say. And sometimes we write things that are approximations, or that are ironic, or that have many meanings. So of course the grammar gods would decide that all these things shall be indicated using the same symbols. Of which there are two kinds, and consistency is really the only rule. Nooooooo!

[The above is a basic rundown of what this blog post will be: some bold facts, then some examples, and lastly some panic-ridden statements that only add confusion and take away from any real resolution. You on board? Good.]

Speech marks. Inverted commas. Quotation marks. Bunny ears. “”. ‘’ – I’m going to call them bunnies so I’m not being biased towards one kind of usage. And also because I like bunnies. I also like to call them The Sluts of Grammar because they’re used all over the place, for heaps of different things, and I think they’re dirty. Oh and you might think that double and single ones are regional… Wrong. They may have started out that way, but, as is the wont of the bunny (and as you will see), things are now a big free-for-all.

They pop up in direct speech: “Hey you kids, get out of my boggy marsh!” (unnecessary bunnies, I’d have known that was direct speech via context); they’re used to show that the meaning of the word/s inside isn’t quite applicable: crystals somehow ‘know’ what shape to grown into (duh, I think I’m safe from being fooled here); they’re used to highlight irony: Charlie Sheen derives his “wisdom” from his vast experience in the industry (god, so obvious it’s about to punch you in the face); and they can indicate the names of artistic works: Frank Zappa’s ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’. That last one could mean an album or a song but you’d have to check consistency to know. GOOD. SIMPLE, THEN.

So, they all mean different things at different times and willy nilly seems to be the suggested dosage. You can use either the double ones or the single ones however you like, and they don’t even really hold much meaning within a context.

I know of three definite rules for these things:

- Use the same style for the beginning and end of whatever’s inside them (and thereby consistently within the wider text itself, pleaseandthankyou).

- In British English (the more commonly used variety in NZ) the full stop or comma comes after the bunny ears.

- If a bunny-able phrase appears inside a bunny-able phrase, use the other style, like this: “He just yelled out his window, ‘Hey you kids, get out of my boggy marsh’,” she explained.

My suggestion for bunnies is to be sparing. And, actually, that includes using your fingers to denote a bunny-able phrase. Meaning can be lost in both situations if you’ve got too many bunnies – they look cheap and off-putting. Much like sluts. You may notice I used italics where bunnies might have instead been used in this post, and that’s really where I think the solution lies, because slanty typing is so much prettier, and uses the actual words to connote the deeper meaning, not some candy-ass superscript. There, I said it.

And also, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was written with no quotation marks at all, even with plenty of direct speech in it. In Early Modern English quotation marks were used only to denote pithy comments, let’s go back to that! “There are no stupid people, only stupid punctuation”. Nice.

The point of the bullet point (or controlling Jar Jar Binks)

Posted on 19 September, 2011 by rebekahguy

If your document is Star Wars, the bullet points are Jar Jar Binks… Because they look like they belong and they grab attention, but they’re unpredictable and sometimes completely out of control. You’ve got to know how to keep them reigned in. (I was going to use a Clint Eastwood-style opener like, “are you feeling lucky, Point?” but couldn’t follow it through – ah well…).

So why use them, you ask? Good. You’re already dubious as to their relevance. To be brief, bulleted lists are really only useful in business or technical documents, or for notes magneted to the fridge; they’ll ruin a narrative like no other thing could. If you’re listing in a narrative, please use semi-colons, and keep it brief, okay? The first nice thing about bullet-pointed lists that I must concede is their contextual practicality: depending on your bullet format you can make one point more important that the others, or make them all the same. A good example is the “darling please do” list:

Water plants
Take out garbage
Feed dog
Mend hole in my socks
Churn butter

Using the plain bullet keeps the relevance equal. Darling must do all the things, but it doesn’t matter in which order (the mending could probably be done while the butter’s churning, etc). Compare with a technical how-to list:

Wash hair with volumising shampoo.
Condition with silkising treatment.
Separate hair into sections and attach curlers.
Allow hair to air dry to 75%.
Take out curlers and blow into desired style.

So, this stuff has to be done in the correct order or your hair will look horrible (or so society would have us women believe – ha HA!), hence the use of numbers. It’s this type of list which can really only be presented as bulleted, otherwise the directions can get too wordy and complicated: word reduction and conciseness is the second nice thing I’ll concede about bullet points. As long as the first word in each point begins with a verb (in the same form, please, and preferably the bare form: wash, condition, churn, mend…) you don’t really need many more words, and you’re allowed to forget about ones like ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘your’! It’s so rebellious! (Look at the picture – Bill Gates did that bit all wrong, shame. Even having all of the money won’t make you good at some stuff).

There are really no linguistics-based rules about punctuation in bullet-pointed lists – you can use semi-colons, full stops, full sentences, part sentences, single lines of text or many lines – but the important thing is consistency. You don’t have to start each point with a capital letter, because sometimes informality is ‘cool’ (groan), but be sure do it the same way for every one; similarly with full stops. But then if you use full stops at the end of each point you have to use a capital letter to start each new point – you see? When in doubt, do what the MS Word grammar check suggests.

Oh and another thing, don’t use CRAZY CHARACTERS in place of bullets, like hearts or arrows or pizza slices. Especially if you’re writing to me. Oh man they’re so stupid, and since bullet points are only going to be used in formal documents from now on (right? RIGHT??) they’re also unprofessional. As Pope John Paul II said*, “a good bullet in the right place will do wonders for your career”.

*I can’t back that up.