My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?)

Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

Caroline Taggart, J. A. Wines

• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781843176572
• eBook ISBN: 9781843176268
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A runaway hit and Sunday Times bestseller, My Grammar and I has continued to grow in popularity, becoming the go-to guide for grammar. My Grammar and I offers amusing examples of awful grammar, while steering you in the direction of grammatical greatness. Taking you on a tour of the English language through the minefield of rules and conditions that can catch you out, from dangling modifiers to split infinitives, it highlights the common pitfalls that every English language user faces on a day to day basis. Refreshing everything you should have learnt at school and more, My Grammar and I is informative yet entertaining - an ideal buy for any English language enthusiast.

1.

SPELLING
AND CONFUSABLES

ABC:
EASY AS 123 (OR, SPELLING)

‘My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.’

A. A. MILNE, Winnie the Pooh

In the late 1500s, the state of English spelling and the ‘invasion’ of foreign words was troubling scholars and schoolteachers to the extent that some of them took it upon themselves to harness the language by compiling dictionaries. But even with the help of education and dictionaries, spelling can still be an uphill climb.

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Smart Alec: More than one-tenth of English words are not spelled the way they sound.

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We have an overwhelming tendency to leave letters in words even though they are no longer pronounced (think of the g in weight or daughter, for example, or the b in subtle, or the p in pneumonia). And we are surely the only language to have nine ways to pronounce a single four-letter combination:

A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.

Then we have things called eye rhymes, which are words that look alike and perhaps used to rhyme but which, due to shifts in pronunciation, no longer do. In Shakespeare’s day,

Blow, blow thou winter wind

Thou art not so unkind

would probably have rhymed, as would

I am monarch of all I survey…

From the centre all round to the sea

when Cowper wrote those lines nearly two hundred years later.

Then there is another problem. Many words that sound the same are spelled differently.

aloud/allowed	fair/fare	pale/pail
beach/beech	knot/not	plane/plain

which makes English a wonderful language for puns but a nightmare for non-native speakers and for those who aren’t confident in their spelling (or who rely on their spellcheckers).

‘They went and told the sexton, and The sexton toll’d the bell.’

THOMAS HOOD

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Smart Alec: A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same or differently.

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It’s my bizness to be definate

Here are the correct spellings of a random selection of commonly misspelled^*6 words:

accidentally	cemetery	liaison
accommodate	definite	millennium
allege	diarrhoea	necessary
avocado	ecstasy	niece
association	embarrass	privilege
broccoli	grammar	separate
business	height	sincerely

Take my advice

In these commonly confused noun/verb pairs, the noun has a c and the verb has an s.^†7

Noun	Verb
advice	advise
practice	practise
device	devise
prophecy	prophesy
licence	license

Useful mnemonic: I’d advise you not to give advice. Advice/advise is the only pair in the list whose verb and noun are pronounced differently, but the rule of c = noun, s = verb applies to all the others, too.

That’s if you’re British, by the way. If you are American, it is often, but not always, the other way round. Did we mention that spelling was...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Very Brief History of English Grammar
• Grammar Rules (to Avoid)
• #1. SPELLING AND CONFUSABLES
• 2. PARTS OF SPEECH
• 3. SENTENCE STRUCTURE
• 4. PUNCTUATION
• 5. ODDS AND SODS (OR, ELEMENTS OF STYLE)
• Bibliography
• Notes