Grammar

It is a well-known fact that soon an overweight individual in a loud-colored ensemble and who has the ability to stop time will once again do just that. His purpose, as we all know, is to enter our homes through our chimneys ? even the homes of those who don?t have chimneys ? to deposit quantities of merchandise made by elves in the North Pole who have the magical power to make them look exactly as if they were made by Mattel and (here comes the real magic) to not get sued. Yes, it?

According to a new study, people with Tourette Syndrome may have better mental grammar skills than normal people. This is terrible news. Not for them. For me. How am I, a dyed-in-the-wool smart aleck, supposed to report this important grammar-related news without stooping to making cheap Tourette jokes? Clearly I can't. So my only hope is to quickly explain the highlights of the researchers' findings then move on to a related grammar lesson. The study, conducted by the Georgetown University Medical Center and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, starts off by pointing out that, contrary to what I once learned from an episode of "L.A.

Here's a little quiz that I just made up to test your sanity and that may or may not speak volumes about my own. Which of the following is the best reason to open a book: A. To learn something you don't know. B. To find in print something you already know. If you answered A, you may have a fulfilling life ahead of you as a writer or a real estate broker or an engineer or a homemaker or a teacher or partner in a real-life human relationship. Indeed, an answer of A suggests that you may be completely sane.

I'm writing another grammar book. And my deadline is five days after the deadline for this column. Which means I'd rather talk about almost anything except grammar — like my theory about how the writers of "Lost" will make sense out of all those titillating tidbits that have kept us hooked for so long (they won't), or my proposal to fix congestion on our nation's freeways: Close them to everyone but Corolla-driving columnists (on second thought, maybe the streets aren't big enough for me and Arianna Huffington)

blr-aword10TextG822KEUDA WORD, PLEASE As Americans, we love it when our choices come down to absolute extremes: black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. If we could, we'd categorize everything in terms of dog people vs. cat people, liberal vs. conservative, Rosie vs. Donald. I used to shun such distinctions, especially the idea that the population can be divided into cat people and dog people. Then I got four cats. Now I can say with 100% certainty that I'm a dog person.

Grammar is like religion. There are a lot of shepherds out there capitalizing on our nearly universal desire to act like sheep. Followers of William Strunk and E.B. White learn the gospel that "nauseous" means not "sickened" but "sickening," and instantly they're ready to wage holy war on the heathens in the church of the "Fowler's Modern English Usage," which says, "Any handbook that tells you that 'nauseous' cannot mean 'nauseated' (sickened)...