Live and Let Di

Nothing to loose

Two people who share my disdain for the sorry state of grammar and usage in the English language happened to e-mail me on the same day, both inadvertently inspiring me to write.

Leigh (author of Flipper and Me and a fellow blogger on Mom2Mom) is dumbfounded that the confusion of homonyms and similar words has become practically accepted. We commiserated on the use of "loose" (rhymes with "goose") for "lose" (rhymes with "chews"). I was recently doing some work that required me to read college entrance letters from high school seniors and I found that the loose/lose confusion was rampant. It bothers me that the confusion exists in the first place. But what bothers me more is that these kids didn't feel it necessary to have their letters proofed before sending them to people they should be trying to impress!!!

Amy sent me an article from The Amateur Gourmet concerning dress codes in restaurant. I think she thought I would be inspired to weigh in on this matter, but what I ended up noticing was the poor usage in this phrase in one of the comments:  "if you'd like to be apart of what they are trying to convey, be apart of it." It should be "a part" instead of "apart."

This got me thinking about the people who use "alot" or, worse still, "allot" in their writing when they mean to convey "many." First of all, when I was growing up, I was taught that "a lot" was OK for the spoken word, but in writing, one should explore other words to convey the same meaning. Obviously, this was a rule that went the way of the serial comma, and I can handle that. But if you are going to use "a lot" in your writing, please bother to spell it correctly.

Maybe my concerns about the status of grammar and usage of English put me in the same category as the commenters in The Amateur Gourmet's Anti Dress-Code Violation article who insist that men wear suits and women wear dresses to certain restaurants. Maybe I am headed toward becoming part of the new older generation, steadfastly embracing the "old days" when good writing skills were required and people cared enough to proof their work before sharing it. Maybe I need to lighten up...

What do you think?

Di

A delightful spot of online shopping!

Real Simple, my favorite non-Golf for Women magazine, had a picture of this very cute top. The models in the picture looked carefree and happy and windblown. I decided that could be me! So I packed my bags and trekked over to the Boden on-line store.

What is it that took me all the way to England to shop? Maybe it was that I miss Nicholas, who is off somewhere in Great Britain without internet access. Maybe it was that the lovely shade of turquoise shown on the model in the magazine (which is naturally sold out) would look great on me. Maybe it was because having a double digit US size wasn't quite horrifying enough for me...I had to go two sizes higher to convert to the UK size. (That just decided it for me! I'm never moving to the UK. If I ever move abroad, it is going to be to a country where my numeric size gets SMALLER!!!)

Whatever got me there, the experience was wonderful. I ended up ordering the coral version since the turquoise was sold out. Here are the things I love about shopping in England:

1. Tick-tock - All through the site, if there is a checkbox, you are asked to "tick" it instead of "checking" it or "clicking" it. And parcel. I like the fact that I am expecting a parcel instead of a plain old package.

2. Dispatch - They don't send your order. They don't ship your order. They "dispatch" your order. It sounds so much more quick and efficient.

3. Garanimals for Grownups - This is how I like to shop. No. this is how I NEED to shop. I need all of the pieces laid out for me otherwise individual pieces languish in my closet wondering if any of the other pieces are going to ask them to come out and play.

4. Expiry date - I love that!

I felt like I was sashaying through a cute little boutique in London (although I've never been there.) When I went in the virtual dressing room, I felt like a lovely British lady was assuring me that all of the coolest people have sizes in the teens. When I handed over my virtual credit card, I felt like someone truly appreciated my business...after all, they are going to "dispatch" my "parcel" post-haste. (They didn't say the post-haste part, but it felt like the right thing.)

Happy shopping!

Di

And if the cow bowls alone weren't cute enough...

How about the juxtaposition of the cow bowl and my sad little egg whisk? I think the little guy on the whisk is sad because I am making him beat up his friends.

Dooce would have portrayed these items so much more artfully!

Di

Oh yes it does!!!

For my whole life I have been hearing, "a watched pot never boils." This morning I was poised at the stove, about to set the timer on my iPhone for the hard-boiled eggs I was preparing. (I have a bad habit of forgetting that I have eggs boiling and coming back several hours later to near catastrophe.) As I stood there, kind of lackadaisically staring at the pot...it boiled!!!

Another old wives' tale debunked here on LiveandLetDi.com!

And are the cow nesting bowls adorable? You can't really see in this picture, but the outside of the bowls are cow-print. A birthday gift from my friend Suzanne...thanks Suz!

Di

More Decline and Fall of our Language

I know I've been really ranty-ravey about grammar and punctuation errors lately. But it really bugs me. I recognize that the fact that something bugs me does not mean that the world is going to instantly straighten up and get moving on fixing it. I'm not sure why that's true because it would be REALLY cool if the world acted that way.

I try to be understanding, considering the source of subtle grammar errors and punctuation faux pas. But when the source is a teacher of LANGUAGE ARTS, my normal saintly impatience is really tested.

Did they change the name of the course from English to the more generic Language Arts because they didn't want to commit to which language it was they were supposedly teaching?

In the sheet describing my son's end-of-year project, was the following:

The purpose of this project is for you to demonstrate your ability to express your thoughts, feelings, and opinions about a particular musical artist and a sample of their work.

I'm not even going to comment on the extra comma, the necessity of which I thought had been eradicated in some sea change of grammar teaching since I was in school. You know what it is. We've been here before. BUT FROM THE LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHER???

And lest you think that I am being way too persnickety about one teeny, tiny error, this was also part of the instructions:

If you are forbidden to go to your artists web site you need to pick a different artist or group.

There are two sort-of crescent-shaped thingies that I think need to be included in this sentence.

Please tell me. Be brutally honest. Do I need to just get over it? Is it too much to expect that a Language Arts teacher would set a stellar example of grammar and punctuation to THEIR students...sorry, couldn't resist! Oh...and click on the image above or here...because there really IS an interactive Punctuation Pyramid.

Di

Summer starts here...

Today is my birthday. I'm not coy about my age...I'm 46. I'm pretty proud of it. Wouldn't trade it to be 23 again. Stevie Nicks is 60 today!!!

To celebrate, I'm tweaking my design using just the TypePad basics. I would love to have someone create an actual design for me and I would probably even pay her for her trouble. But I don't know where to start in this quest, so let me know if you have any suggestions.

Despite huge acclaim for the pink hair picture, I'm switching to a picture that looks like me on pretty much any given day in the summer. I'll be on the lookout for something a little more glamorous or spectacular or goofy in the photo department.

My husband got me this:

It's a Sky Caddie...GPS system for the golf course. I'm very excited about using it!!! I just LOVE new technology.

Happy Birthday wishes go out to people I know who share my birthday...Ken, Carol, Eddie, Susan...

Di

The decline and fall of our language

I know I have to somehow accept that the English language, such that we learned it, is rapidly eroding. I recently read that some astoundingly large percentage of high school students have used emoticons in writing assignments. Our state writing test for 4th graders emphasizes colorful images and creative descriptions. Students are NOT evaluated on grammar or punctuation. LOL will soon be an acceptable part of speech...jumping right past the stage of actually needing periods to separate the letters. L.O.L. would just be too much work. I think that even that most famous of TLA's (three letter abbreviations), IBM, started with periods between the letters.

[Note to those who care: Are you aware that the term "acronym" is not appropriate to abbreviations such as those mentioned above. Acronyms are specifically abbreviations that form a word. Examples include: NASCAR, scuba and Fannie Mae.]

Now we are apparently eliminating extraneous spaces between words. Observe:

The rooms in which we live and the rooms in which we dine can now be indicated using just one word.

Maybe the removal of that space between "living" and "room" is why the are able to offer this "3 Pc Livingroom" so cheap!

Di

Afterglow

The daylight is sliding into dusk. The frogs are starting to sing their tunes. Several adult beverages have been consumed. So what do average American, slightly inebriated adults do on a Friday night? Drive around in the dark on golf carts and and try to hit glowing little balls with long sticks. It was our first "Glow Ball Tournament" at the golf course.

If you think for a moment that I am kidding, click here. There is a whole industry geared toward helping avid golfers find ways to make a difficult game even MORE frustrating.

With the promise of small plastic loving cups as prizes and an array of glow-in-the-dark accessories, we took off from the clubhouse in teams of 5 and 6 to play 5 holes of golf. I won't say that our golf staff knows its clientele, but they strategically avoided having us play any holes with water or bridges on them. There's nothing that sucks the fun out of a golf event like having to call the fire department to pull golf carts and people out of the lake!

It was wildly fun and our co-ed team managed to turn it into an R-rated comedy event. I was so relieved that we didn't have one of the young golf phenoms on our team because there would have been a whole lot of oops-ing and shush-ing of inappropriate innuendo.

When we proudly turned our card in, we had scored an impressive 5 under on 5 holes, including an Eagle on the first hole. But one team triumphantly waved a card with 6 under as the score, prompting good sportsmanlike comments like, "They cheated!" Next time you are trying to think of something to do on a dark, Spring Friday night...get some balls, make them glow...and see what happens!

***ANNOUNCEMENT*** Earlier that day, I witnessed a spectacular golf feat when my friend and "golf partner for life," Stef, scored an Eagle on the first hole by putting the ball in the hole from 80 yards out. I was so excited for her and utterly impressed by seeing such a rare event.

Di

Change of Heart

Oh Jodi. I keep trying. I want you back. I want the Jodi Picoult of The Pact and Plain Truth. I want you to back off on the research and immerse yourself in the characters. That's what I love about you. The two families from The Pact are etched in my brain. The Amish mother and daughter in Plain Truth are still with me years after my initial reading. I can't speak for everyone, but for me, the "issues" in your books are intriquing and thought-provoking when they are an integral part of the development of the characters and their relationships, not when they seem to be the reason for the characters and their relationships.

My 15 year old daughter Haley (she actually turns 15 in June...she will be so delighted if she reads this and sees that I have promoted her early) was on a Picoult binge when Change of Heart came out. So we picked it up on one of our surgical strikes on Quail Ridge Books. (I was just there yesterday and came away with seven books that when viewed in a stack were the definition of eclectic.) It moved between her floor and mine for a while. Then I found myself in need of a regular novel with a plot. I was surrounded by memoirs, anthologies and the occasional muckraking diatribe on some social ill.

I never loved it. By the end I did feel compelled to finish it. To see how it ended. But there is a huge difference between being compelled to finish a book to see what happens and not being able to put a book down because you are emotionally connected with the characters and the subject matter. It's the latter that I know Jodi Picoult is capable of...which makes it all the more frustrating to read her more recent books.

A tragic combination of circumstances robs a woman of her husband, her child and her second husband and leaves a man on death row awaiting execution by lethal injection for the crime. Her second child, born after her second husband died (it's really, really tragic) is in the hospital slowly dying from a congenital heart defect and awaiting a donor heart. I won't go further into the plot so as not to spoil it for potential readers.

The story involves and is told from the variousl perspectives of a prison inmate suffering from HIV, the mother, a priest and an ACLU attorney. I know. It kind of sounds like the beginning of a long and complicated joke. And speaking of jokes...I loved this paragraph which was incidental to the story, but so true. At one point in the book, a priest and a rabbi are talking (sounds like a joke, right...well, it is) and the rabbi says:

Jesus was a Jewish man after all. Just look at the evidence: he lived at home, went into his Dad's business, thought his mother was a virgin and his mother thought he was God.

So the plot revolves around religious issues, the death penalty and to some degree the politics of organ transplants. The prison scenes become a little too Green Mile-esque for my taste. Picoult actually references The Green Mile at one point, so it is by no means stealing the idea. But King did it well. (Lauren, if you are reading this...remember when we took turns buying the serialized episodes of The Green Mile?) Picoult, not so much.

There was a little bit too much going on in this book. Oh...and how annoying is this? The font changed in each chapter depending on from whose perspective it was written. Ugh. Very annoying. I felt like the publisher was saying, "These readers are too stupid to realize that each chapter is written from a different perspective, so we are going to beat them over the head with it in a way that they simply cannot be so dense as to miss."

Come back Jodi! You are prolific, no doubt. You are beautiful. And you look happy on the book jacket. This faithful, longterm reader gives you permission to take a year off. Your "brand" will not suffer if you don't publish for a while. Especially if the resulting novel is back to what you are capable of. I'll be waiting!

Di

What the hail?

Whither we wander...weird weather waits.

Yup, we moved to Raleigh in 1999 leaving memories of Hurricane Andrew behind. What a relief to not have to worry about a tree falling through your guest bedroom window and your satellite dish that was "secured" in 3 feet of concrete falling over on the neighbor's house. You don't hear people talk about Floyd much anymore. That's because Floyd's wrath in the Triangle was limited to our cul-de-sac. I woke up and looked out the window to find a 15 foot root system staring me in the face and the attached tree blocking access to and egress from our house. We met neighbors over chainsaws and coffee. Want to meet people after a storm? Get a generator. Walk out into the street where your shell-shocked neighbors are milling in their pajamas and mention, "I just made coffee!"

When we moved here from Florida, we warned the children that they shouldn't start planning sledding parties since we should only expect an inch or two of snow per year. The following January, I awoke to find that 18 inches of snow had been dumped on us overnight. As per usual, my husband was traveling on "business"...in Florida...calling me from "business" meetings on the golf course. For almost two weeks, I was snowed in with two small children, a dog and a dwindling supply of wine. (During that time, my husband got wrongly arrested and jailed in Panama...wrong place, wrong time; subject of a different post...but still, I think I took the worst of it!)

This past weekend was perfect. Every minute of the golf tournament was exquisite. The sun shone, but not enough to make you sweat. The breeze blew, but not enough to take the ball out of bounds. And my partner and I won! OK, we won the eighth flight...the last flight, I should add. But we played out of our minds and won! But the last two holes on the second day were played in a downpour that would have sent Noah searching for the last errant animal husband and getting ready to shove off. But did I mention that we won? Just in case I didn't:

And then it was Tuesday. My son's game was cancelled because of the incipient weather. We were all sitting around doing what you do when you find yourself with two hours you didn't expect to have. We were all on our laptops. I heard a sound. My immediate thought was, "Oops, must have left several golf tees in my pocket that are now pinging off the inside of the dryer." Then I remembered I wasn't doing laundry. I looked outside and:

See those little things on the ground? Hail. As big as two-carat diamonds. I was going to say golf balls, but that would have been an exaggeration. Then I decided to use the diamond analogy which would leave my readers with one of two responses:

1. Wow! She must be dripping with jewels if she knows how big a two-carat diamond is!

2. What the hail is she talking about? The last gem she sported was a plastic toy ruby ring she won in a silly golf tournament.

It was an amazing show of Mother Nature's wicked sense of humor!

Di