Grammar Wednesday #3

Are we ready for more grammar? This one is a pet peeve of mine, so hopefully my tip can spread throughout the world and end the egregious practice of using "everyday" when we really mean "every day."

What's the difference? "Everyday" is an adjective, i.e., it can describe things. "Every day" is a another way of saying "each day." It's a phrase. But because it's one thing to know this and another thing to use them well, here are my tips:

Check to see if "everyday" is correct:
Try to substitute an adjective (such as "normal" or "blue") for "everyday" and see if it works.
"It was an everyday occurrence" = "It was a normal [or blue] occurrence."
"These are my everyday pants." = "These are my normal [or blue] pants."

Check to see if "every day" is correct:
Try to substitute a day of the week with "every day".
"I come here every day." = "I come here Tuesday."
"Every day, I get the blues." = "Tuesday, I get the blues."

Now that we know this, we can apply it in any situation. Is the phrase "Lunch specials are available everyday" correct? Well, are lunch specials available blue? I hope not.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Done and Mostly Done

Check it out--the yogi legwarmers are done:

I can give them to the teacher at class next week. I hope she likes them!

And the dress I was making out of the fancy Liberty of London fabric I got over the new year just needs some hand sewing and a hem:

The pattern is the basic shift from the Built By Wendy Dresses book (again), modified this time to have a round neck and bell-ish sleeves. I wanted to copy something like this, but I'm wondering if the sleeves get a little too "1970's Sleeping Beauty" when combined with a print that includes owls, horses, bunnies, deer, and roses.

I guess we'll see if I start singing "Once Upon a Dream" while wearing my little forest friends.

Courage

Here's some Rilke to get your inner hippie on board for the week. (My new thing is trying to trust the universe, so of course I liked this):

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; if there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples--the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are waiting for us, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. This has been making the rounds lately, but I like it. Sadly, that last one isn't currently true. (Click for larger.)

2. It would have been the 57th birthday of Steve Jobs today. Here he is on creativity:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people...The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

(from Wired, February 1996)

Better Than A Space Picture

Can you even stand the cute?

In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, "There's more where that came from."

Happy Birthday, Edna

It's the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay today. You have to love a woman who wrote sonnets and built an artists' colony.


IV

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,–
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

(From from A Few Figs from Thistles (1922).

It's Tuesday (That Feels Like Monday)

Sit on a dining chair and turn your back on it.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. For cat lovers and font lovers: 20 Cats as Fonts. Including:




2. Comic Sans Cat looks like I feel after this week.

3. I continue to cope with hippie songs. Any song where you can sing "Om" is a good one:

The Universe Loves You

The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not. --The Upanishads

(Image from the Heart and Soul nebulae via Bad Astronomy; quote via my inner hippie. )

Grammar Wednesday #2

Today's tip is courtesy of my lifelong friend Amber, and is dear to my heart after all the years I spent working in social stationery:

How do you remember which spelling of "stationery/stationary" is the correct one in a given situation?

• Stationery that means paper you write on and send in the mail has an E in it, for ENVELOPE. Envelopes go in the mail!
• Stationary that means standing still and not moving is the other one. (You can also remember it with an A for stAnding still.)
  

Tuesday Project Roundup: I'm Glad I Knit

I'm glad I knit because yarn is much easier to buy than anti-anxiety meds, and nearly as effective. (I don't travel well, if you couldn't tell.) Look what I got (nearly) done on the business trip yesterday:

These are the legwarmers for my yoga teacher. I think I will knit the fold over cuff, as discussed before--probably because I just. kept. knitting. on the plane and the ribbing got a little long anyway.

Guess Where I Am Today?

One-day business trips, you are brutal. But at least this destination gives me a catchy tune to have stuck in my head.

Friday Unrelated Information2.

1. Have you seen Better Book Titles yet? It redesigns book covers "to give you the meat of the story in one condensed image"--one hilarious condensed image, that is:





So many more here.

2. Happy birthday to Marxist/alienist playwright/composer Bertolt Brecht today. I don't know about you, but I'm going to be singing "Show me the way to the next whisky bar" when this week is finally over tonight.

Bad Days

Sometimes all you can do is accept that the bad day wins, get takeout, make a drink, and listen to Bob Dylan (who I find soothing; your mileage may vary). My inner hippie really loves "Mr. Tambourine Man," because my inner poet thinks the lyrics are so pretty:

Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves:
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

That last line is like a tagline for bad days! Also, be sure to watch the video soon if you find Bob soothing; I found it on a Turkish (?) site and it may not be up long.

Something To Consider

Does anyone else do this? Build up events so they seem to "mean" more than they really do? I didn't even clearly know I did it (just wondered why I felt disappointed so much) until I encountered this part of The Hours years ago. So let's revisit the helpful quote for the third time on this blog:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book.

[...] What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

"It was happiness...that was the moment, right then. There has been no other." Michael Cunningham, you simultaneously destroy me and make my life so much better.

Tuesday Project Roundup: The Longest Project Of All

This week will mark the one-year anniversary of my being in the house. Since it's really the biggest and longest-term project I'll undertake, why not look at the progress made through the year?*

Still under construction.


Moved in, with cat head.


With an Eames chair and real window coverings.


And with a coffee table and Arco-esque lamp. Things are getting fancy...


And here's the orange sofa and grown-up art over the fireplace.

And on the other side of the room, there are curtains and fabric art I made (and more than two people can dine in comfort).

Hooray for home decorating!


*No, I haven't finished any sewing this week. Can you tell?

Mountain Things

What does Millcreek Canyon look like on a hike in February? Oh, you know, some mountains, some trees, a waterfall, some snow:





It's my inner hippie's happy place.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. If you ever wanted to branch out from "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," here's a list of pangrams--even some in other languages!

2. This was on kottke.org this week, but I find it hilarious: Fake pronunciation guides. They're eight seconds of pure awesome.




Celebrate the weekend with a glass of chimpoopisto!

3+2 Things: Book Report

So it's February 2--how about that goal of reading a book a month? I picked Brideshead Revisited as the first one, as I knew the Granada series from the 80s well but had never read the novel all the way through.

However, it's slow going: Because I know the plot from the TV series, I'm tempted to skip ahead, and I keep hearing Jeremy Irons in my head as I read. I'm also out of the habit of reading, I think; I tend to open my laptop instead of a book lately.

But I'm pushing through--can't get too behind on the year of book already!

A Grammar Tip

I have a few tricks I use to keep things straight mentally (and to help explain my copy edits at work), but I've never shared them with anyone. Are you interested? Shall we see if this makes sense and start a Wednesday grammar tip series? Let's try.

Today's tip is about getting the possessive version of "its"--that is, the one WITHOUT the apostrophe--right. My tip? See if you can substitute "his" for "its".

So, for example, take this sentence:
"The chair was missing one of its legs."
Using our trick, we can pretend we live in a cartoon universe and say,
"Mr. Chair was missing one of HIS legs."
Yes, this makes sense! DO NOT add an apostrophe to that "its" in the original sentence.

Another example:
"Paris is famous for its lights, its food, and its wine."
Let's use our trick again and substitute "his":
"Bob Paris is famous for HIS lights, HIS food, and HIS wine."
Yes! Resist the urge to add an apostrophe to "its" as it is used here.

You can also reverse this if you see an "it's" with an apostrophe and you're not sure it is correct:
Does changing "It's going to snow tonight." to "HIS going to snow tonight" work?
No, that makes no sense. Therefore, this apostrophe is OK.

So remember: If you can substitute "his" for "its" in the sentence you're worried about, that "its" does NOT need an apostrophe.