The Friday Five for June 16, 2023

[anais_pf]

1. Can you diagram a sentence?

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?

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Comments

[sallymn]

1. Can you diagram a sentence? I had to look this up because we never did that when I was learning! Having looked it up... yep, I could. Not gonna though...

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what? Cheif Chief, even though I don't have a problem with most i and e words, this one trips me up so often. And it is very annoying, because Cheif Chief is the nickname one of my Heroes calls another in a major fandom of mine...

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn't? Business, for a start, don't ask me why. Every word that starts with ps. A lot of the more esoteric ones I use for specific characters' speech. And I've had to learn to steer austerely past so much US spelling...

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal? No.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school? I don't think I felt either, but from a young age knew it was something I needed if I wanted to write, and I did.

[diffrentcolours]

1. Can you diagram a sentence?

Technically I know what this means, and I expect I could do it, but I don't know the methodology. Breaking up a sentence into clauses, identifying verbs etc. is easy for me.

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?

"Medicinal", which I always spell (and say) as mecidinal.

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?

"Phoenix" really feels like it should be "Pheonix".

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?

Not that I'm aware of.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?

I loved it, because I was a brainy little swot who could remember it very well, and being correct gave me some small vestige of power and authority over the less brainy people who bullied me.

Now I'm older and more secure in myself. Mostly thanks to cosmolinguist's good influence, I understand that perfect grammatical correctness is a racist tool used for oppression. Between those things I'm a lot less critical of other peoples' spelling and grammar, though I'm always happy to help when somebody wants to get it "right".

[intothisshadow]

Really good questions :D Here's my answers: https://intothisshadow.dreamwidth.org/568215.html

[falkner]

These are fun questions! My answers are here: https://falkner.dreamwidth.org/1283512.html

[anagramofbrat]

https://anagramofbrat.dreamwidth.org/1510381.html

[archersangel]

https://archersangel.dreamwidth.org/360923.html

[ahunter3]

1. Can you diagram a sentence?

Yes, I can. I remember us being shown sentence-diagramming in 5th or 6th grade and picking it up pretty easily. I may be a little fuzzy about what symbols and lines to use to indicate "this modifies that" but I've still got the basics.

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?

I have a handful of those. Quandary always comes out as quandry. I'll perhaps catch it during proofreading but quandary just looks wrong to me. Then, for recurrent typos, there's a major city in Michigan that my fingers want to render as Detriot. It's not like quandary where my brain thinks it ought to be Detriot or anything, just my fingers.

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?

Aside from quandary, buses hurts my brain — as spelled, it ought to rhyme with fuses and excuses and abuses, but for some silly reason the plural of bus isn't busses although the kisses are allowed to have that.

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?

Don't tend to need them, so no.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?

Mostly enjoyed. I picked up most of the rules sponge-style just from reading, so in grammar class I was getting the formal rules I already knew informally, and I liked seeing the official structure spelled out like that.