I Used To Know That Part 1

I used to know that : stuff you forgot from school.

Caroline Taggart.

Introduction.

When I started to write this book, I realized that I did remember lots of different things, but I didn't always remember those facts completely, or necessarily accurately. I knew, for example, that "The a.s.syrian came down like a wolf on the fold" was a perfect example of-what-a dactyl or an anapest? I had to look it up. I remembered a bit about sines and cosines but had no idea why they were important. I used to know most of the princ.i.p.al bones in the body. How did that song go? "The head bone's connected to the neck bone, the neck bone's connected to the..." Hmmm. And after years of study, I could not seem to name the dates of important wars or, for that matter, why they were fought (I'm still having some trouble with that).

Geography was especially challenging-just when I thought I knew the capital of Burma, they change everything. Myanmar is tragically all over the news, and I'm left scratching my head in bewilderment as to where it is exactly. There's also a wealth of general information that I thought I knew, like Roman numerals and the Roman equivalent to the Greek G.o.ds.

Sometimes I hear a symphony and all I can remember is that it was composed by a man whose last name starts with V...or was it B?

In the course of talking to other people about what I should include in this book, I discovered two things: one, that everybody I spoke to had been to school, and two, that that was pretty much all they had in common. They had all forgotten completely different things. So with every conversation the book seemed to grow longer. One chat with an editor friend sent me rushing to add the active and pa.s.sive voices to the English chapter. Another friend could recite British poetry verbatim but could not remember if the poem she so eloquently performed was by Keats or Sh.e.l.ley. Yet another friend confessed that she had completely forgotten what a square root was (though I have no idea why she suddenly wanted to know). In the end I had to stop discussing it, or this book would have surpa.s.sed the size of War and Peace. I also found in the course of researching the things I used to know that I learned more than a few things that I didn't.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I hope you, too, will learn something new or find things here that strike a chord, however faintly. Things that make you say, "Oh, yes, I used to know that." Because by the time you read this, I will almost certainly have forgotten most of them again.

ENGLISH.

Learning to read and write was just the beginning. After you had mastered that, you had to study how the language worked and, when you started to write your own stories, how to stay focused, develop content, organize material, maintain a consistent voice and style, and use proper grammar. If (perish the thought) you had to write poetry as well, there was a whole new set of conventions....

Parts of Speech.

This is a way of categorizing words according to the function they perform in a sentence, and there are nine of them: adjective: a describing word. Some examples include tall, short, brown, and blue. With one possible exception-blond/blonde-adjectives in English (unlike most European languages) are invariable; that is, they don't change according to the number and gender of the thing they are describing.

adverb: a word that describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Adverbs answer such questions as how, when, or where: She walked aimlessly; light brown hair (where light is an adverb describing the adjective brown); they lived fairly frugally (where fairly is an adverb describing the adverb frugally). Most, but by no means all, adverbs in English are formed by adding -ly to the adjective.

article: Merriam-Webster defines an article as "any small words or affixes...used with nouns to limit or give definiteness to the application." That's not very helpful, is it? It may be easier just to remember that the definite article is the and the indefinite articles are a and an.

conjunction: a joining word. Examples include and, but, though, and so on. Conjunctions link two words, phrases, or clauses together: Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's most popular book, but I also love Sense and Sensibility, though Marianne can be really annoying.

interjection: a word to express emotion. For example, Aha! or Alas!

noun: a naming word. There are three categories:* Collective nouns describe a group of things. However, they are funny things. There are some genuinely useful ones to describe animals that live in groups-you wouldn't talk about a gaggle of elephants, for example, or a flock of lions. But at some stage in history, someone thought it was useful to give collective names to almost a hundred birds where you might have thought that group, colony, or a whole bunch would serve the purpose. And there are many variations. If you are talking about a group of ducks, for example, you could say a badelynge, brace, bunch, dopping, flock, paddling, plump, raft, safe, skein, sord, string, or team. A charm of goldfinches, an exaltation of larks, and a parliament of owls are often quoted but rarely used in real life-but once you start Googling for this sort of thing, you also come across a dopping of goosanders. (Goosanders? Some people have too much time on their hands.) * Proper nouns name a person, place, or thing that requires a capital letter, such as Caroline, Paris, or the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution.

* Common nouns cover general terms, such as street, book, and photograph.

preposition: a word that links nouns, p.r.o.nouns, and phrases and indicates their relationship to the object in a sentence. Prepositions include words such as beside, through, over, during, at, in, to, on: The boy stood on the burning deck; it was Greek to me.

p.r.o.noun: a word that stands in the place of a noun. For instance, Caroline has forgotten a lot of stuff. That is why she is writing this book-where the p.r.o.noun she in the second sentence takes the place of the proper noun Caroline in the first. Other examples include it, he, her, his, me, and they.

verb: a doing word. A verb indicates the occurrence or performance of an action, or the existence of a state or condition, such as to be, to do, to run, to happen. This form of a verb (normally containing the word to) is called the infinitive. Verbs change their form according to tense, person, and number: I am, I was, you were, he is, they are. Verbs can also be in the active or pa.s.sive voice-I bake the bread is active; the bread is baked is pa.s.sive. English also has three verb moods: the indicative makes a simple statement-I bake the bread; the subjunctive indicates something that is wished or possible-If I were you, I would bake the bread; and the imperative gives a command-Bake that bread!

Phrases and Clauses.

Now it is time to take a look at the building blocks of sentences: phrases and clauses. Each depends on the other to express a complete thought, but knowing the difference between them can be quite confusing. Generally, you can rely on the following definitions:* A phrase is a group of words (in a sentence) that does not contain a subject or predicate-or either one: In the afternoon, we went to the store.

* A clause does contain a subject and a verb and may stand alone as a sentence or as part of a sentence. However, in the sentence He loves dogs but doesn't have one, the clause but doesn't have one is the subordinate clause.

Sentences-and each clause of a sentence-can be divided into a subject and a predicate.* The subject is the noun or noun phrase that the sentence is about, the thing that does the action expressed in the verb.

* The predicate is everything else. In sentences involving the verb to be, what follows the verb is known as the complement, as in Silence is golden, where golden is the subjective complement of the verb.

* A verb may be transitive or intransitive, which means it may or may not need a direct object in order to make sense. The object is the thing on which the subject performs the action of the verb. In the sentence He hit the ball, the object is ball.

To see some examples of all this, consider a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream: I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows.

The main statement or princ.i.p.al clause is I know a bank. Not very interesting, but it stands alone as a sentence. I is the subject, know a bank is the predicate and can be subdivided into the verb know, and the object (answering the question What do I know?), is bank. Know in this sentence is a transitive verb-it doesn't make much sense without the object.

The subordinate clause is whereon the wild thyme blows. The clause has a verb (blows) with a subject (the wild thyme, which is a noun phrase), but it isn't a sentence. Note, however, that blows makes sense on its own-it doesn't need an object, so it is intransitive.

Blow is one of many verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive, depending on context: The wind blows intransitively, but you can blow a horn or blow gla.s.s in a transitive way.

Taking a sentence apart to a.n.a.lyze its components is called parsing. You may remember drawing a pa.r.s.e tree or sentence diagram in elementary school.

Synonyms, Antonyms, and the Like.

The suffix -nym derives from the Greek for name, but in fact, these words are currently used to refer to meaning. So a synonym is a word that has the same or similar meaning as another, while an antonym has the opposite meaning.

Here are some examples:* Spooky, scary, frightening, and eerie are synonyms, as are pale, wan, and ashen.

* Mean is an antonym of generous.

Illogically, a h.o.m.onym is a word that has the same spelling as another, but a different meaning. A h.o.m.ophone sounds like another word but doesn't have the same spelling. Confused?

English abounds in h.o.m.onyms and h.o.m.ophones, which are often completely unrelated in the etymological sense.* Eerie (spooky) is a h.o.m.ophone of eyrie (an eagle's nest).

* Pale (light in color) is a h.o.m.onym of pale (a fence, as in beyond the pale) and a h.o.m.ophone of pail (a bucket).

* Mean (miserly) is a h.o.m.onym of mean (intend) and a h.o.m.ophone of mien (appearance).

All those silly mistakes that spell-checkers fail to detect, such as there and their, are h.o.m.ophones.

Diphthongs.

Diphthongs are complicated things. What most people think of as a diphthong is actually a digraph or ligature, and true diphthongs are often written as a single letter, which makes them less obvious to readers.

Huh?

OK. Merriam-Webster defines a diphthong as "a gliding monosyllabic speech sound that starts at or near the articulatory position of one vowel and moves to or toward the position of another."

Try it for yourself and feel the difference when you say late and bat or loud and catch. Listen for the glides (y or w) at the end of the vowel sound.

Diphthongs may be written as a single letter (the i in white and the o in no, for example) or as two (ui in fruit, ea in heat). Any combination of two letters, whether vowels or consonants that produces a single sound is known as a digraph, so that includes not only the ui in fruit and the ea in heat but also the ph in photograph and the dg in bridge.

Many North American words that are spelled with a single letter are represented by two letters in their British counterparts. The ae written together in the British spelling of encyclopaedia or mediaeval is, strictly speaking, a ligature, which means that the two letters are joined together as one. This has its origins with medieval scribes who were simply trying to save time and s.p.a.ce by combining the two letters on the same block when it was transferred to hot metal type. Modern typesetting doesn't recognize ligatures, so the tendency since the 1950s has been to write the two letters separately or, increasingly, to drop one of them altogether-with the result that, in British English, encyclopaedia and mediaeval look rather old-fashioned, while in American English encyclopedia and medieval have become the standard.

Figures of Speech (and other devices for spicing up your writing).

A figure of speech is technically an expression used in a nonliteral (that is, a figurative) way, such as when you say My lips are sealed. Obviously, this is not possible unless you have put glue over them. When most people learn ways to expand their writing style, they are often directed to utilize such techniques as alliteration and onomatopoeia, which poets also use for effect. Here is a basic list that you may (or may not) remember: alliteration: when a number of words in quick succession begin with the same letter or the same letter is repeated. For example, Full fathom five thy father lies, as Ariel sings in The Tempest.

a.s.sonance: similar to alliteration, but now with the repet.i.tion of vowel sounds. For example, And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling-my darling-my life and my bride,/ In the sepulchre there by the sea,/ In her tomb by the sounding sea. (Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee) euphemism: replacing an unpleasant word or concept with something less offensive, as in subst.i.tuting the term Grim Reaper for death. Some are also intended to be funny, as when morticians refer to corpses as clients.

hyperbole: p.r.o.nounced hy-PER-bo-lee. Not HY-per-bowl. Exaggeration for effect, as in I've told you a hundred times. This is the opposite of...

litotes: understatement for effect, as when not bad means completely wonderful. Litotes can be interpreted differently, depending on culture and verbal emphasis.

metaphor: an expression in which a word is used in a nonliteral sense, saying that x is y rather than x is like y, which would be a simile. For example, Macbeth's Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.

metonymy: Merriam-Webster defines this as "a figure of speech consisting of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is a.s.sociated." For example, the term press, which originally was used for printing press, now connotates the news media. Easily confused with synecdoche.

onomatopoeia: a word or phrase that sounds (a bit) like the sound it is meant to convey: buzz, purr, or Tennyson's the murmuring of innumerable bees.

oxymoron: an apparent contradiction for effect, the cla.s.sic example being jumbo shrimp.

personification: giving human qualities, such as emotions, desires, and sensations to an inanimate object or an abstract idea. Emily d.i.c.kinson's The Railway Train is often cited as an example of personification:I like to see it lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious step

Around a pile of mountains...

simile: a comparison that-unlike a metaphor-expresses itself as a comparison, usually with the words as or like. Examples include dead as a dodo or like a bat out of h.e.l.l.

synecdoche: a form of metonymy, but in this instance specifically "a whole for the part or a part for the whole." For example, a set of wheels used to denote the term automobile, or the command All hands on deck to summon a crew of sailors.

Prosody.

Confusingly, prosody has nothing to do with prose-it is defined by Merriam-Webster as "the study of versification; especially: the systematic study of metrical structure."

The basic unit of a line of poetry-normally comprising two or three syllables-is called a foot, and the most common feet are: iamb (adj. iambic): a short syllable followed by a long one. The most widely used foot in English poetry. Much of Shakespeare's verse is written in iambic pentameter, which means that a line consists of five iambic feet, or ten syllables in all:Shall I / compare/ thee to/ a sum/ mer's day?

(Sonnet 43) If mu/ sic be/ the food/ of love,/ play on (Twelfth Night) trochee: a long syllable followed by a short one, although the final syllable is often missing: Tiger!/ Tiger!/ burning/ bright In the/ forest / of the/ night (Blake, The Tiger) dactyl: a long syllable followed by two short ones (again, the final syllable is often dropped). It produces a gentle, flowing rhythm:This is the/ forest prim/ eval. The/ murmuring/ pines and the/ hemlocks (Longfellow, Evangeline) anapest: two short syllables followed by a long one. In contrast to a dactyl, this conveys pace and action. It is often used in comic verses such as the nonsense poem by Lewis Caroll, The Hunting of the Snark: In the midst of the word he was trying to say/ In the midst of his laughter and glee/ He had softly and suddenly vanished away/ For the Snark was Boojum, you see.

spondee: two long syllables, giving a heavy, rhythmical effect. The following example combines spondee and trochee so that you can almost hear the soldiers marching along: We're / foot-slog/-slog-slog/

-sloggin'/ over/ Africa-

Foot-foot/-foot-foot/-sloggin'/ over/ Africa-.