My love of parentheses.
1. Well, those allergies turned out to be a bonafide cold or virus or whatever. (I can never tell them apart.) I've been sick all weekend. Congestion, skin sensitivity, headaches, a bit of a fever, and total fatigue. I did buy a neti pot; while it helped a little, it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped. I seem to be over the worst of it now, but I have no energy whatsoever. Even simply folding laundry earlier made me want to collapse. Tomorrow should be fun.
2. In addition to my futile battle against the comma splice, I now have another grammar peeve: the lack of commas in parenthetic expressions. I've been seeing these all over the place in the past month. Here's an example from the new issue of Time Magazine, with the names changed: "Mary Smith, a physician's assistant examines Dan Jones in a swine flu triage tent." The writer should've included another comma after "assistant", to set off the phrase as a descriptor. (I might be using the wrong terms here; I know what's right, even if I don't know the specific terminology.) Perhaps I'm too hardcore about grammar. Many errors don't bother me, promise! I've finally made my peace with the obsolescence of the Oxford comma. ;) But comma splices and parenthetical expressions are just so fundamental to sentence structure that I can't quite fathom why they've suddenly become "optional".
(Note to self: RELAX.)
3. This afternoon I watched Last Chance Harvey on DVD. Cute movie, albeit rather forgettable. It reminded me of how I fangirled Emma Thompson way back in the Ken-and-Em days of the early nineties. I was a naive college freshman at the time, and I wrote her a long, gushing fan letter that is rather embarrassing in retrospect even if I don't remember what I said. A month later, I opened my mailbox and found a hand-written note from her. I remember my hands trembling for the first time in my life as I clutched the unopened envelope. It was a very sweet thank-you for the lovely letter, with a note that I might enjoy her upcoming movie, Much Ado about Nothing. I wish I still had it. And since I was really naive, I wrote her back! Yup, another long missive as if we were bestest friends now. She never replied, not that I blame her one bit. ;) Still, it's a fun memory to have!
2. In addition to my futile battle against the comma splice, I now have another grammar peeve: the lack of commas in parenthetic expressions. I've been seeing these all over the place in the past month. Here's an example from the new issue of Time Magazine, with the names changed: "Mary Smith, a physician's assistant examines Dan Jones in a swine flu triage tent." The writer should've included another comma after "assistant", to set off the phrase as a descriptor. (I might be using the wrong terms here; I know what's right, even if I don't know the specific terminology.) Perhaps I'm too hardcore about grammar. Many errors don't bother me, promise! I've finally made my peace with the obsolescence of the Oxford comma. ;) But comma splices and parenthetical expressions are just so fundamental to sentence structure that I can't quite fathom why they've suddenly become "optional".
(Note to self: RELAX.)
3. This afternoon I watched Last Chance Harvey on DVD. Cute movie, albeit rather forgettable. It reminded me of how I fangirled Emma Thompson way back in the Ken-and-Em days of the early nineties. I was a naive college freshman at the time, and I wrote her a long, gushing fan letter that is rather embarrassing in retrospect even if I don't remember what I said. A month later, I opened my mailbox and found a hand-written note from her. I remember my hands trembling for the first time in my life as I clutched the unopened envelope. It was a very sweet thank-you for the lovely letter, with a note that I might enjoy her upcoming movie, Much Ado about Nothing. I wish I still had it. And since I was really naive, I wrote her back! Yup, another long missive as if we were bestest friends now. She never replied, not that I blame her one bit. ;) Still, it's a fun memory to have!