Month: April 2018

Posted in General

What happened to adverbs?

Posted on by Nuntius

“He played aggressive.”
“She ran good.”

The question is not so much, where in the world have people who describe events or activities in such a fashion, been educated? It is more, why has has our education and teaching produced such deplorable grammar?

What has happened to the good old adverb, which qualifies another word, such as an adjective or verb and which, of course, in the examples given should have been ‘aggressively’ and ‘well’?

What has happened to our teachers who have failed to produce students who can speak the English language properly? In my research, I have found that Canadian education standards are pretty high – far higher than those in our friends to the south.

eudemic is a site dedicated to providing teachers and all involved in educating our children and with a mission “Create awesome students”. From time to time it rates educational systems around the world. Unfortunately, I could find only its last available report for 2014. Fortunately for us, Canada ranked 7th, right under Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland and the UK. The USA ranked well below at 14th place.

Another site, WorldKnowing.com ranks, among many categories ranging from olive oil to prostitution, levels of education and students. Here is a table showing the 2017 rankings:

Rank Country Name System Index
1  Japan  90.72
2  South Korea  89.76
3  United Kingdom  88.93
4  Singapore  88.67
5  Russia  88.31
6  Finland  87.96
7  Canada  87.64
8  Netherlands  86.47
9  Ireland  85.58
10  Israel  84.80

In yet another site, it’s interesting to see that in the 2017 WhichCountry.co rankings, Canada is also at seventh place and USA also at fourteenth. The other rankings are:
1.   South Korea
2.   Japan
3.   Singapore
4.   Hong Kong
5.   Finland
6.   UK
7.   Canada
8.   Netherlands
9.   Ireland
10. Poland
11. Denmark
12. Germany
13. Russia
14. USA

Many years ago, when I was young and charming (credit Gilbert & Sullivan’s Butterfly in HMS Pinnafore), I was working as the risk manager for a large international multi-integrated company which built an airport in Sri Lanka, a number of hydro-dams and other large projects in Canada. As part of my job, I was to review the plans, specifications and blueprints for all the projects. In doing my research, I would interview the engineers and ask them to provide me with details in written form as well.

I was astounded.

Virtually all the engineers coming out of university could not write sentences completely. Verbs would be left out. Elementary grammar and spelling errors occurred almost on every line. I could not believe what I was reading. Otherwise well-educated young people who could not complete a simple sentence in English without error.

At the time, I was chair of a school board in metro Winnipeg and I obtained an interview with the Dean of Engineering, University of Manitoba, the object of which was to try to get English as part of the Engineering degree course, and I offered examples of recent graduates’ descriptions of what their part in a current project entailed. I cannot remember anything of the interview from fifty plus years ago, but I do believe I was at the very least instrumental in getting English in as a course in Engineering.

So, although our country is quite well-regarded in educational circles, I still hear many local kids and, worse yet, sportscasters and sports people ignoring the common ly at the end of many adjectives.

Here is a quote from a CAA site: Use your CAA membership to save big. Of course, no-one in today’s world would know that the correct adverb is bigly. And it would sound very strange to most people’s ears. But it could have been written more precisely with still the punch,  Use your CAA membership to get big savings.

Recently, I was reading a recipe in which pork was slow-roasted. To me, that gives the end before the process. Surely, it would be more appealing to write, the pork was roasted slowly  in the oven. I can almost imagine the smell as the pork is becoming more and more succulent as it spends time in the oven. Slow-roasted is inadequate. It just doesn’t imply smelling and juiciness.

Take a look at the chalkboards on Argyle Street or Spring Garden Road the next time you walk down one of those streets or some such restaurant row in your city. See how many fresh-squeezed orange juices, or fresh-caught haddock you can spot.  And writing about food, how about the term eat healthy, which is very frequently used these days. What does it really and literally mean? We know the verb eat and what it means, but healthy can only mean whatever we are talking about is healthy in itself. You may be a healthy person, you can eat apples, but you cannot eat healthy. Healthy is not a noun. Your trainer is healthy. So is your bank account – hopefully. Healthy, a pure adjective describes nothing in the term eat healthy. Advertisers really mean to say eat healthily or healthfully, not healthy.

 

In my estimation, written purely from a lay point of view, for I am neither a teacher nor an educator, although I admit to being a volunteer Chair of an adult literacy network, our governments and school administrators have endeavoured to even the playing field for all children attending public schools. Note that I say, public schools, for private schools, in my estimation, frequently produce a far more rounded personality and a more complexly educated person because they allow for more gifted children advancing at their own pace and giving them latitude to experiment and explore rather than holding them back with the rest of the students in the crowded classrooms. Can that be an explanation – or are the teachers just not as well practised in the English language as they should be?

Whatever the answer, adverbs are disappearing and leaving some of us reading descriptions of scenes or activities directly, head-on crash, not with the wholesomeness  of description that adverbs can describe. Would you want a love scene to be described in the same manner as a news item might describe a crime scene. In the latter, a blood-spattered wall, the victim in a body bag with furniture upset all around demonstrating a frightening struggle. The former might be seen as two lovers sitting quietly, gently stroking each others’ cheeks in the faintly shining moonlight. In the crime scene, there are no adverbs: in the lovers’ scene, there are several, softening and amplifying the evening.

So, we lexophiles, philologists and grammarians will continue to use words wisely, correctly, hopefully befittingly and, sadly, perhaps wistfully, as we witness the describing adverb disappearing slowly.

Posted in General, humor, humour

How much about our health is TMI?

Posted on by Nuntius

Over the past five months, I have subjected my friends and two of our daughters have subjected their FB friends to episodes in my life regarding health.

Ofttimes, I have thought, I wonder if this is TMI – Too Much Information – and whether I should not ask for prayers and positive thoughts. I have wondered whether my friends and all those hundreds on FB, most of whom I do not know, have just discarded the emails or FB posts.

Today, after church, one person came up to me and said, “Mel, thank you so much for sharing. Many people do not have the courage to ask for support. Perhaps your sharing will help them share.”

I had never thought about my emails in that light. It was quite a revelation to me. But on thinking about it, I realised that very often I know friends who are suffering from health or other difficulties of life and, yet, they do not broadcast their woes or seek opinions of others. In my case, I also realised that by telling hundreds of people about myself, hundreds of people, most of whom I do not even know since they are friends of our daughters, gave me huge support with prayers and, equally stimulating for me, words of encouragement, stories of their spouses’ or friends’ experiences. So many people supporting me: me, whom they, too, did not know, but nevertheless took time to let me know they were thinking of me.

I am not a narcissist, nor do I have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I am a person who likes to talk to people. My Beloved knows that I am just as likely to start a conversation with that nice couple at the next table as not. Maybe more likely, particularly if I detect a different accent. I have also been told on many occasions that I am funny. And that is how I tried to write those emails relating to my health issues: not heavy-handed or sorrowful, but with a touch of lightness. To many I related my issues to an old car: you take it in for an oil change and the mechanic says, the radiator has a slight leak – I can really associate myself with that – and, having fixed the leak, I find my brakes are squealing, so I have to get new pads. Having got that fixed, the weather stripping around the driver’s door needs replacing – it actually did need that. After all that, I say my car has had its Spring Tune-up. That’s me.

Pacemaker in Nov-Dec.
One eye cataract in Jan and the second in Feb.
In March, a CAT scan (because I cannot have an MRI with a pacemaker) discovered two “things” in the bladder, so this month, I have had them scraped off the wall.
The following day, I had two basal cell cancers snipped off the tip and the side of my nose – I look like I had a great fight or, as one friend at church put it, “Looks like your wife bit the end off in a moment of real passion!” Yes, in church, yet.
I still have to get a hernia fixed in May, but after that, I will be able to say, my Spring Tune-up was successful and I am ready to run or walk as in the past. Walk, anyway, as I don’t like running. I mean, what’s the point of trying to get from one point back to where you came from in the least amount of time? I like to cover the same ground looking at the hedgerows, the flowers and keeping watch out for the hungry coyote.

Without humour, where would we be and what would our lives be like? (The subject of another post on this Blog, I think.) Life is what we get dealt by genes, fate,  and nothing you or I can do will change those factors. However, our own way of life can be a serious factor by what we eat, believe and how we act. And in how we deal with what we have been dealt and relate that to others, if we feel like doing so, is quite probably the way that others come back to us. As yet another person in church this morning said, “These last few months, you have had one thing after another, but you always come bouncing back cheerfully!”

Life may not be what you make it, but you can sure help to shape the results. And it may be that if you share your issues with others, as I have done, the rewards can be overwhelming, often making me cry.

Cry? Is that a good or happy thing? You betcha, it made me feel one heck of a lot better!

And, so, I share all this with you, dear reader. May you be blessed with good health and a sense of humour.

 

Posted in General, humor, humour

The Pedometer and what it means to me

Posted on by Nuntius

For years I have wanted something that would tell me how far I have walked, or how many steps I have taken.

Once years ago, I bought a pedometer which strapped on my wrist. After a while, it seemed not to be very accurate and I lost interest in what it was telling me. I think it broke: or I broke it. I can’t remember.

So, just recently, I informed My Beloved of 63 years (plus those nine courting years, including 6 in the teen years) that for my birthday I would like a pedometer. OK, she responded, but you will have to choose one. Now this was different, because for the past umpteen years, we have not given birthday or Christmas gifts to each other – oh, occasionally, I might have given in and surprised her.

Now some of our friends have Fitbits. And everyone to whom I talked never mentioned the word pedometer. I thought I must be a dinosaur asking for a pedometer: so was the name Fitbit being adopted like Kleenex as a generic word meaning what I used to call a pedometer? This thought had me starting to search Google for Fitbits.

Oh, they come for your wrist, for your ankle, as a pendant or as an attachment to your belt. Or as a clip-on to your pocket. I had had no idea how many of these Fitbits there are. But then I discovered that there are many fitbits (with a small f), but that they are not called fitbits with a small f, but Fitness Trackers. Oh.

But my friends all had Fitbits, or they said they did. Oh, my! I quickly came to the conclusion that all our Fitbit friends were wealthier than My Beloved and me. The price of Fitbits seemed astronomic: over $300 Canadian. To count my steps?

But wait, the ad said, all the things that a Fitbit can do:

  • Tracks steps, distance and calories burned
  • Syncs automatically to your computer or select bluetooth 4.0 smartphones or tablets
  • Set goals, view progress and earn badges
  • Share and compete with friends throughout the day
  • Free iphone and android application
  • Sync stats wirelessly and automatically to your computer and over 150 leading smartphones

No, no, no! I do not want to sync to my computer; I do not want to earn badges – I have enough; I do not want to share and compete with friends. I JUST WANT TO COUNT STEPS.

So, next was the Omron at little over half the price of a Fitbit. However, in Canada we work in metric and I found one review which told me that it could not be changed to metric. Throw the Omron out!

After looking at a number of similarly expensive machines – and it seemed to me that the smaller the machine, the more costly it is – I concluded that I could not have a birthday present.

But wait! What if I changed my term of reference for Google? How about simply asking if there were such a thing as a Pedometer. And, suddenly, there burst on my screen a zillion pedometers – including my friends’ Fitbit.

And there, alongside the Fitbits were much less costly gizmos. Including one called a
One TweakIMG_20180401_1657465

The One Tweak does a few simple, but one particularly essential one for me: it counts steps. Yes, it also stores a daily and up to a monthly total. And a total memory mode. It also counts calories (which I ignore in more ways than one), the distance in kilometres (yes, it does US standard, too), and exercise time. It does not sync with my computer; it does not share and compete with friends; it does not earn badges! It does what I wanted a pedometer to do: count steps and tell me how far I have walked.

And it clips to my trouser pocket – facing inside the pocket. Or, when I’m doing exercises first thing in the morning, to my underpants. That’s probably too much info. Imagining me in my underpants and a shirt doing exercises. One Tweak doesn’t care – it works anyway.

The photo shows that today, Easter Sunday 2018, by just about 3 minutes to 5pm when I took the photo and put it in this post, I had walked 1,652 steps – most of them at church this morning. Yes, we had a Sunrise Service at 5.30am starting with fire in the parking lot, then candle-light in the church, following which we men’s group provided breakfast of fried eggs (three at least for most), sausages (two for most, but three or four for some), one pancake each, tea, coffee and OJ or apple juice. And then, after an hour and a half break during which My Beloved and I went home, set the alarm for 9am, woke to the alarm, we returned for a more traditional Anglican (C of E or Episcopalian, depending on your country) service at 9.30am.

Oh, yes, my One Tweak tells the time – and in metric! Or 12-hour AM/PM if you prefer. I don’t.

How can you refuse to buy and keep something from Amazon Prime when it arrives with the enclosed card:

IMG_20180401_1659505

I have now had my One Tweak for about a week and how much did it cost? Canadian $80. And I am totally satisfied with it – well, almost: the numbers are rather slow at getting towards my first target of 5,000 steps. I wonder how I can get it to speed up!