History That Never Was

Craig Butz, Public domain (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buffalo_sentence_diagram.svg)

English is weird, difficult for non-native speakers to master, and confusing even to native speakers.

Case in point, check out the diagrammed sentence to the right. I can’t exactly explain what it means, but it’s apparently grammatically correct. So are these other sentences.

While they may be grammatically correct, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to use them. If you’re lucky, they just make you seem clever. But so many of them use technicalities of grammar to deliberately obfuscate the point they want to get across, which is really not something that a fiction writer (or, really, any sensible writer) wants to do.

Tags: english language, fun for friday, grammar

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Friday, October 5th, 2018 at 6:00 am and is filed under For Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.