Spider Pilots

Spider Pilots

While golfing the other day,
I noticed lots of tiny spiders
on strands of web,
drifting through the air,
an interesting way
to get around.
Another afternoon,
a while back,
the dragonflies
were out,
thousands of them,
and the next time,
none.
Like Yogi Berra said,
"You can observe a lot
by watching."

Language Notes

A student asked a punctuation question yesterday in my comp class. A student wrote: "It was so hot, I felt sick." She wondered if there should be a period instead of a comma. The answer depends on the meaning she wanted to convey. "It was so hot. I felt sick" separates the two ideas so that they are coincidental. Both are true. It's hot. She felt sick. Both are occurring at the same time, but there is no causal connection implied. "It was so hot, I felt sick" says there is a causal connection: the reason she felt sick was because it was so hot. In speaking those two versions, suprasegmental phonemes would provide verbal cues to a listener. Suprasegmental phonemes include differences in stress and pitch. In the causal formulation, the word "hot" would likely be accented and might either raise or lower a bit in pitch, and "I felt sick" would lower in pitch. In the non-causal formulation, "hot" would likely lower in pitch, and the "I" in "I felt" would likely raise in pitch and be equally stressed and the "sick" would lower a bit in pitch. In the examples above, the punctuation drives the meaning in written English and the suprasegmental phonemes in spoken English. Unlike Victor Borge's comedy routine about punctuation, we do not normally provide punctuation in speech, although we might say, "I'm not going, period." ***********************

Another student wrote: "the crickets’ chirping, the birds’ singing, and the rooster crows." This was at the end of a perfectly good English sentence about helping her grandmother in a rice paddy in her home country of Vietnam. Several grammatic aspects came to mind when I read this: the plural genitive case of "crickets''" and "birds''", but not "rooster," the participle/gerund forms of chirping and singing, but not "crows." And perhaps there was only one rooster. And the word "crow" can also be a different species of bird. "Chirping" in the usage above is a gerund, a noun, as is "singing." "Crows" can either be a verb or a noun in the phrase above. I would prefer "crowing" above to be parallel in form to "chirping" and "singing," that is to say, the present participle form of the verb as a gerund. The phrase "and the rooster crows" can either be the last element of a series, a, b, and c as a noun phrase, or it can be a new independent clause at the end of the sentence. "The crickets chirping" emphasizes the crickets as a plural form; "the crickets' chirping" emphasizes the chirping, as so also "bird's singing" and "birds singing." In one formulation the emphasis is on the action of chirping. In the other, the emphasis is on the aggregation of chirps. The construction is a melange of gerunds, participles, genitive case v. plurals, parallel verb/noun forms as a style issue, with each version or possibility with slightly different nuanced meanings. As English was the student's second language, and she had bigger language fish to fry, I let most of that go and suggested "rooster's crows."

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Teaching Punctuation of the Age of Trump

This morning I awoke to news of a devastating earthquake in Mexico City, Hurricane Maria clobbering islands in the Caribbean, our president (no capital ‘p’ for him) threatening nuclear annihilation on North Korea, Republicans wanting to take away affordable health insurance from tens of millions of people, more protests of a police shooting in St. Louis, wildfires raging throughout the western part of the country, Texas and Gulf States dealing with flood damage from Hurricane Irma, and my job this morning is to go teach writing. You know, the proper usage of semi-colons, what a grammatic sentence is, principles of rhetoric and persuasion, critical reading/writing/thinking, the Oxford comma, syntactic structures, what a gerund phrase is, how to write a good simile or metaphor, subject/verb agreement, and on and on......infinitive phrases, participial phrases, absolute phrases. ***************************
How important is it really that one use an Oxford comma, when our president (no capital ‘p’ for him) lies about virtually everything, everyday, all the time, and suffers no consequence? One hint regarding discernment: if the president (no capital ‘p’ for him) calls something ‘fake news’, you can bet it’s true. How important is it really that a semi-colon be properly placed while rivers are being polluted, air dirtied, chemicals dumped? How important is it to be literate, when our president (no capital ‘p’ for him) shuns literacy and bluster-blathers at the level of a seventh grade bully? You get the idea by now, I’m sure. *************************
Ultimately, I think the answer is ‘very’. Standards should be upheld, communication should be clear, profound and uplifting ideas should be expressed well, and rhetoric should advance knowledge, reflect truth, motivate our higher selves, and not obfuscate, corrupt, mislead, or inflict hurt on innocents.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

The Secret World of Women

So I was shopping
at a local department store,
and inadvertently found
myself walking down
the women's undergarment
aisle. I tried to look
straight ahead, not
noticing the lacy underwear,
the delicately translucent fabrics,
the gently uplifting bras,
the diaphanous............
oh, never mind.
Fortunately, there were
no women shoppers
to encounter in that
foreign land.
I safely made it out
of that secret world
and found my new
dish wash scrubbers and
a windshield wiper and
made my way back home.

Distant Thunder

Saturday morning,
distant thunder
rumbles closer.
For some, it's not distant
at all, but a surprise
violent bark
outside a window
or in a baseball game sky.
Time to head
for cover.

Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland

I don’t know much about
Olivia de Havilland.
Now 101 years old, she
resides in Paris, France.
She was a Hollywood star
and made movies from the 1930s
to the 1970s. She had affairs
with Howard Hughes and
James Stewart, and campaigned
for Franklin Delano Roosevelt
in 1944. She made dozens of movies,
married twice and had children.
But what you may not know
is that Olivia de Havilland
once rode in an elevator with my
mother at Robinson’s department
store, a high end store of the day,
in Los Angeles when my
mother was a “skinny” young
teen, to use her words.
It must have been the late
1930s or early 40s we figured
as we sat around the dining room
table telling stories on the evening
before her 92nd birthday. All of us
siblings will be in town.
Mother was visiting her
Aunt Gertrude who worked in the
fabric department designing
drapery for Hollywood stars
and regular folk.
Olivia was wearing
a royal blue suite and a
“pill box” hat, mother said.
I didn't know what a "pill box" hat was,
but it was explained to me.
Mother also shared another teenage
story of visiting her cousin Charlainde
in LA. Mother lived in San Jose at the time.
She and Charlainde went to a dance
sponsored by a local celebrity
for visiting troops during
the early years of WWII.
The dance was at a Hollywood mansion.
Mother would have been 18 or 19.
She danced with one soldier all
evening long and heard his many stories.
He was “very handsome,” she said.
And finally, mother told the story of
flying above Hollywood in a
Goodyear blimp. The cabin was
like a small bus. "We saw mansions, swimming
pools, and tennis courts,” she said.
I will let mother know today
that Olivia is still living.