Sunday, October 5, 2014

Blog 6

This week’s homework was very helpful with the vocabulary distinctions it covered.  Some distinctions were a little more tricky than others. The comprise/compose distinction is one I’ll have to focus on because I’ve been using them interchangeably for as long as I can remember.  The tip from the powerpoint that “the whole comprises the parts, The whole is never comprised of the parts” is something you’d do well to commit to memory.
Another helpful tip was the omission of the of when saying “off of.”  It makes sense that the double preposition should be grammatically illegal, but if in conversation someone said “get off of my bumper” I would, before this class, never noticed the mistake.   A lot of these distinctions can seem pretty minor individually, but when you learn to commit to all these little rules of grammar collectively your writing and speaking will improve become more streamlined.
While camping the other weekend I caught my friend say something pretty funny.  He was referring to a park job when he said it was “misskewed.”  I then asked him how someone could mess up in the skewing something, and that the word he just made up is redundant.  It reminded me of the time George W. Bush said in a speech that “they misunderestimated me.”  Seems that adding a mis to a word that can’t technically receive the prefix has the potential to create a comical situation.

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