It's National Grammar day!

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Drat, I wish I'd read this earlier. This would have been a perfect excuse for a party after school. I'm sure my kids would have been thrilled to spend all day in standardized testing and then come home to a cake with nouns, verbs and punctuation marks all over it. :rolleyes:
 
I just can't get excited about this the way I did in my youth - it's just become so commercial. Everyone gets lost in the hype, glitz and glamor, folks it supposed to be about THE GRAMMAR! :mad:
 
Bazookadale, I see nothing wrong with combining a little hype with some grammar, and in fact I have a cake baking in the oven this very minute. I won't have time to decorate it with nouns, verbs, and punctuation marks but I decided that my kids would surely have a lot of adjectives to contribute after a full day spent in testing.

If you can't handle the hype, I suggest that you C-H-I-L-L by taking ten and reading your dictionary.
 
I have a few verbs I could conjugate here, but it's a family forum!
 
I'm with Bazookadale - the holiday is just so commercial. What with the cards, the decorations and the presents under the Grammar Tree, it makes you wish for the good old days when Grammar was either something you learned in school or was your mother's mother! :p
 
i get a lot of email in my custom cone business and i get so many emails typed like this post im typing with no punctuation no capital and nothing but run on phrases my daughter teaches english and this type of thing drives her nuts so in honor of national grammer day i take it upon my self to correct all emails sent to me that are like this i don't comment about it i just correct it in the reply i send:p

[Man, talk about a trying to break a habit, that was hard to type!]
 
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I'm with Bazookadale - the holiday is just so commercial. What with the cards, the decorations and the presents under the Grammar Tree,

Remember when we had real Grammar trees instead of the fake ones they have now.

it makes you wish for the good old days when Grammar was either something you learned in school or was your mother's mother! :p

My Grammar Greene was just the sweetest lady on earth:)
 
If you tell me that you're also against the singing of "Conjunction Junction" in public places, I will be so crushed.
 
Alas, but I can't participate. My grammar passed away about 14 years ago....

-Kevin
 
I think the title of this thread ought to have been:

"its national grammar day!"

:eek::D
 
If you tell me that you're also against the singing of "Conjunction Junction" in public places, I will be so crushed.

Nope - Grammar Carroling is traditional. Not to mention "A Noun Is A Person, Place Or Thing." One of the classics.

I do have to admit that I always loved hunting Grammar Eggs when I was a kid. :rolleyes:
 
"Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here" always got my toes tapping.
 
I agree with all of those who have previously posted on this thread. People just do not seem to recall the true spirit of Grammar Day anymore. I blame it on the onrush of modernism. It all started when scientists finally split the infinitive a few decades ago, and it has just been steadily going downhill ever since then.

MarkII
 
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I agree with all of those who have previously posted on this thread. People just do not seem to recall the true spirit of Grammar Day anymore. I blame it on the onrush of modernism. It all started when scientists finally split the infinitive a few decades ago, and it has just been steadily going downhill ever since then.

MarkII

Au Contrair, mon frere. It began to go downhill when we had to secularize it to make it accessible to the artsy and mathematical types. I tried to get an art major to celebrate grammer day by conjugating with me but she declined claiming that dangling participles had no relevance in the modern world.
 
Au Contrair, mon frere. It began to go downhill when we had to secularize it to make it accessible to the artsy and mathematical types. I tried to get an art major to celebrate grammer day by conjugating with me but she declined claiming that dangling participles had no relevance in the modern world.
Well, I'm a man of letters, and I can assure you that I have always kept the faith (baby), not just during the Grammar Season, but all year long. Just as we have done every year, we spent this Grammartime with family. On Grammar Eve, we gathered together in the living room after dinner, and had the traditional reading from Strunk and White. Then we spent the rest of the evening in quiet contemplation of the mystery of the Trigraph. On Grammar Morning, we exchanged glyphs.

MarkII
 
Well, I'm a man of letters, and I can assure you that I have always kept the faith (baby), not just during the Grammar Season, but all year long. Just as we have done every year, we spent this Grammartime with family. On Grammar Eve, we gathered together in the living room after dinner, and had the traditional reading from Strunk and White. Then we spent the rest of the evening in quiet contemplation of the mystery of the Trigraph. On Grammar Morning, we exchanged glyphs.

MarkII

None of those things really matter. To celebrate the true meaning of the occasion, you must come together as a family and diagram sentences.
 
While we're on this subject, 'impact' is not a verb.
Unless the accent is on the last syllable, and then the meaning is totally different from that used by the new media talking heads.
Look it up.
Sorry, this has just been driving me crazy.
 
Well, I'm a man of letters, and I can assure you that I have always kept the faith (baby), not just during the Grammar Season, but all year long. Just as we have done every year, we spent this Grammartime with family. On Grammar Eve, we gathered together in the living room after dinner, and had the traditional reading from Strunk and White. Then we spent the rest of the evening in quiet contemplation of the mystery of the Trigraph. On Grammar Morning, we exchanged glyphs.

MarkII

I'm envious, Mark. It sounds like you had a very rich childhood. Having been deprived of such myself I took the opportunity to turn things around for the next generation after school yesterday. My children arrived home and were greeted by the smells of homemade chocolate cake wafting through the house. Of course it had to cool for awhile, which only added to the anticipation. They all gathered around while I frosted the cake in cheery yellow with a decorative orange border. You should have heard the shrieks when they realized that I was piping the word "Grammar" in large letters onto the center of the cake! As I'd predicted, they started calling out adjectives--lots of them.

It was a memorable experience, but from it I concluded that my family isn't quite ready to gather together for diagramming sentences. Perhaps it's too much to expect that first year? I feel yesterday was a step in the right direction, though, as there were some real signs that they were getting into the spirit of the holiday. I was especially encouraged when my oldest lad had finished his first piece of cake and headed back for another while saying, "Mom, I need more grammar. I didn't get enough in school today."
 
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While we're on this subject, 'impact' is not a verb.
Unless the accent is on the last syllable, and then the meaning is totally different from that used by the new media talking heads.
Look it up.
Sorry, this has just been driving me crazy.

I just checked Oxford (which I recently learned was the definitive record of the English language) and it suggests otherwise. Perhaps the verb form has been a recent addition? I know change it hard. Why, when I was growing up, the word "google" was still in it's primative form!
 
Bazookadale, I see nothing wrong with combining a little hype with some grammar, and in fact I have a cake baking in the oven this very minute. I won't have time to decorate it with nouns, verbs, and punctuation marks but I decided that my kids would surely have a lot of adjectives to contribute after a full day spent in testing.

If you can't handle the hype, I suggest that you C-H-I-L-L by taking ten and reading your dictionary.

How'd the cake turn out?
 
The cake didn't turn out at all like I planned. I found it necessary to exercise my parental veto powers over the right of free speech when it came to adjectives, so one of my kids took matters into his own hands and piped on "I <3" on top of the word "grammar". Of course this use of symbolism in place of the words only drives home how needed this national observance is...and I'm sure he was well aware of that when he did it. ;) Then my daughter finished up the decorating.

You're very fortunate to get to see this picture because I caught my kids in the process of deleting them. I know they don't fully appreciate it now, but I'm sure they will someday look back and remember this day fondly.

grammar - Copy.jpg
 
I'm envious, Mark. It sounds like you had a very rich childhood. Having been deprived of such myself I took the opportunity to turn things around for the next generation after school yesterday.
Rich in ideas, perhaps, and somewhat rich in books (mostly hand-me-downs), but mostly I was lucky enough to have entered school in 1958 - exactly when the US was perceiving that there was a national emergency in education, and when it decided that investment in education was a national security issue. It is something that might be applicable in today's world, too.

My children arrived home and were greeted by the smells of homemade chocolate cake wafting through the house. Of course it had to cool for awhile, which only added to the anticipation. They all gathered around while I frosted the cake in cheery yellow with a decorative orange border. You should have heard the shrieks when they realized that I was piping the word "Grammar" in large letters onto the center of the cake! As I'd predicted, they started calling out adjectives--lots of them.

It was a memorable experience, but from it I concluded that my family isn't quite ready to gather together for diagramming sentences. Perhaps it's too much to expect that first year? I feel yesterday was a step in the right direction, though, as there were some real signs that they were getting into the spirit of the holiday. I was especially encouraged when my oldest lad had finished his first piece of cake and headed back for another while saying, "Mom, I need more grammar. I didn't get enough in school today."
What a very creative and fun way to gently drive home the lesson! Your children are very fortunate to be growing up in that environment. Will you adopt me? :D

MarkII
 
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