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Continual Mistakes
As long (or even short) time readers of gamboling will know I have a rather casual acquaintance with grammar. We have never really been friends, I know about grammar, grammar doesn’t know about me, and that annoys me. So I don’t waste too much of my precious time on something that never returns my calls.
I mention all of this because after my post on the subject of five items or fewer Nick asked me to prove why it made a difference and after thinking about it for a bit I think that a) I can’t and b) I don’t care. Nick has exactly nailed the point that I’ve been arguing for years with Kris that most of the things that the grammar Nazis* complain about doesn’t actually matter for sense.
I mean I know that in reality, as I did in that article, you can explain the difference between the two words. And I know that when I see a van which says, “warning this van continuously stops” I laugh because of course that would mean that it can’t ever move. But I still know what it means. I don’t just know “what it’s supposed to mean” I actually know “what it means”. I appreciate the wrongness after I appreciate the meaning. Therefore to all intents and purposes** I know exactly what it means.
So, I apologise for the post. Kris has his own blog, he can write his own grammar based posts from here on in. And while we are at it this is probably also a lot like the kind of post that Kris might write too: Cul de Sac as the story about the derivation of Cul de Sac is one he told me.
* I was going to, as a joke, write “grammar Natzi’s” but my credentials are probably so low you might think it was an accident so I didn’t.
** But clichés are right out.
Rooting Around – Part 3
[This is part 3 of the 4 part short story Rooting Around, you may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already]
Sean was fully awake now, looking at this box. Could it actually be true? A time machine? It seemed so far fetched. He suddenly realised he’d just been sitting there staring at it. He tore his gaze away from the box for a second. He tried to digest what it could really be, or even if it was real. He looked back, it was still there. He was so unsure of what it could be that he wasn’t even sure that it would still be there when he looked back. But it was. The cold reality of the situation was that the box was still there tempting him. Still there reaching out towards him. Calling him to use it. But should he?
When would he go back to? That question almost seemed impossible to consider. It almost wasn’t worth a question, the answer was so obvious. He would have to go back to that night – the night that he took Jen to the party. Could he just stop her from meeting his boss? He’d surely be able to convince himself to not go. He could remember how nervous he’d been to go to the party in the first case, so surely it would be easy to convince himself that his worry was founded.
But what would happen if he didn’t take Jen to the party? Sean suddenly realised that the only reason he’d decided to go to the party in the first place was as a last ditch attempt to keep Jen. So maybe it wouldn’t save Jen. Or at least he’d have to come up with something else really brilliant. But what could he do. Anything he thought of instantly gave Jen the chance to hook up with somebody else. Maybe the problem had come earlier in the relationship?
Perhaps he should go back to earlier and convince himself to be more considerate earlier. Maybe if he went back to the very beginning then he could make things better. Make things right for Jen right from the very start.
So it was decided. He would go back, maybe an hour before he met Jen, and tell himself what he needed to do differently. And with that decided, he got up onto his knees and shuffled forwards and touched the box.
[Tune in for the final part next Friday (or Saturday, sorry about the delay on these everyone)]
A man walks into a chip shop
And says, “Fish and chips twice!”
The man behind the counter says, “I heard you the first time.”
Five items or fewer
In one of my short stories from the other week (A meeting in the park) I used the correct grammar for the number of balloons my spies could expect to find in the museum. They would find “fewer” rather than “less”. This is something that is increasingly difficult to deal with in the English language because it is seen incorrectly all over the shop – quite literally ho, ho.
In Supermarkets there is almost always a “Five items or less” queue when it should, by rights be “Five items or fewer”. I do happen to know of one special pace in the UK where this isn’t true. Apparently the Paisley branch of Marks and Spencer there are three queues, two of which are labelled “Five items or less” and one which is labelled “Five items or fewer”. Maybe we need a group trip?
So for those struggling with the grammar how does it work? The answer is “Fewer” is right if there is a whole number of things that you are describing”. You can’t have “less” children because there are only a fixed number of the little darlings, you must have “fewer”. And to counter that there is always “less” time not “fewer”, because time is on a continuum. Basically if fractions are possible use “less”, if not use “fewer”.
So lets see how this works in my Supermarket example, here’s what I bought from the Supermarket the other day.
0.52 grams of Apples
1.2 Kg of Rice
1.25 packets of cereal (there was 25% extra free).
But I still had to use fewer, because even though there appears to be fractions in each of the items descriptions, each of them is a single thing. Well except the apples, they were unwrapped and really meant that I had 7 items and so I had to go into a different queue anyway, even though I was rightly sure that they would appear on the bill as a single item, I couldn’t be sure that the person standing behind me tutting would see it that way.
Another ultrashort today
RIP John: Incidentally, you were innocent.
New Lily Allen Album
As you may know lil’ Lily Allen has cancelled the rest of her tour of America to get back in the studio and record her new album. You know you’ve really made it when the Evening Standard puts out a billboard in your honour. But clever Lily has chosen a subject close to the London paper’s heart for her follow up.
Here it is:
It features such tracks as:
Yearning for 6 X earnings
My fake rate mate
Love in a sub let apartment
and the #1 smash single, Breaking your contract
Buy it now.
The question is simple
If you feel the need for a creator to explain everything why don’t you need to explain the creation of the creator? God was begotten not made they say, you’re passing the buck I say.
People ask me what happened before the big bang. And I can tell them, time didn’t exist before the big bang so there isn’t a before the big bang for anything to happen in.
If we’re alone in the universe then what is the point people ask me. Well personally the idea that people are still moral without God is the biggest excitement of all. We have created this paternal figure to hand down judgement upon up because the idea that we might actually be in charge is too scary to comprehend. But the fact is we actually are in charge, and so to pretend otherwise now is even more scary. The world needs us to think more. We can no longer rely on the greatest minds of 2000 years ago. Now we must admit: Daddy’s dead, it’s time to grow up.
Rooting Around – Part 2
[This is part 2 of the 4 part short story Rooting Around, you may want to read Part 1 if you haven’t already]
Sean dragged himself up through the hatch and into the attic. He stood up and found the light switch. He’d only been up here once before, but he’d already worked out that it was a really stupid idea of whoever it was to put the light switch up so high that you couldn’t reach it from the ladder. It was bad enough coming up the ladder, but going back down in the dark was particularly hair-raising.
What this room needed was a particularly good clean. That’s what Sean would have done if he was keeping any of this stuff, but this stuff was all going to be loaded into the back of Sean’s car and taken to the dump. He’d get all of the stuff out and then he could work out how to clean this space. He turned around slowly trying to take in the sheer amount of stuff that was here. How many trips to the dump would it take? 10? 20? Far too many was what he decided.
He looked at the floor and realised that it was completely covered in dust and grime. He shifted one pile of boxes to one of the clear spaces and saw, as he had hoped, that the floor under the boxes was relatively clean. He climbed over some of the boxes and sat in the clean space he had made. It was like he was in the kind of fort that he used to build as a child. It felt relatively safe and reassuring. Since he’d moved into the house he’d never really seemed to be able to fill it enough. He’d always thought that this sensation wasn’t really anything to do with the amount of stuff that had turned out to be Jen’s so he hadn’t been able to take with him, and that it was more about there not being another person there. The silence of somewhere empty is deafening. It’s partly the way they aren’t speaking but it’s partly the way that you know as you return home each time that everything will be in exactly the same place as you left it. When he was living with Jen he had resented the fact that she kept moving everything, now he knew that he missed it.
But maybe there was more to the amount of stuff side of things. There were, after all, some rather strange spots in some of the rooms downstairs. There was an empty room that really looked like there should be a dining table in it. And in the living room the fact that there was only a tv and a single-seater arm chair certainly hinted at being alone. But, Sean thought as he settled in up here between the boxes, here for the first time he felt safe.
The light from the florescent bulb was creating a shaft of light that fell just a few feet in front of Sean, and as he looked through it he could see all of the dust particles dancing through it. He watched them fly in every direction and it was very peaceful. Something truly distracting. He let out a giant sigh as he slightly decompressed, letting go of a very small part of the stress that he’d been carrying in between his shoulder blades for the past few months. As he exhaled all of the particles of dust sped up, and moved in different directions. And he watched as they slowly came back to their normal non-interrupted pattern and fell again as they had before he had disturbed them. He was very tired, he hadn’t been sleeping well at all, and now as he looked at all of this around him he started to feel very sleepy. His eyes slightly lost their focus, but then something suddenly snapped them back, and he was suddenly wide awake.
Just beyond the shaft of light, the box just beyond it, had written on the side of it, in professionally printed lettering – “Time Machine”.
[Tune in for Part 3 next Friday.]
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