More Rebellion Against Overzealous Grammarians (But Not By Me)

Grammar serfs, unite! All you have to lose are your copies of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves!

Or is it Eats Shoots and Leaves? I guess it depends upon whether you are talking about a panda in his natural habitat or one that walks into a bar with a gun. (If you don't get it, I respectfully suggest the book, however it's punctuated).

Disclaimer: Actually, I did read the above mentioned book and I did enjoy laughing as I did so. I am not a complete grammar 'Philistine.' And I am a Yekke myself--oh, not literally, no ancestors of mine come from Germany--but my Yekkeism has to do with shoes!
We all have our...erm...foiables.
So if you are weak of heart, or get high-blood pressure at the mere thought of differences in usages, why then, just surf on by.

I had to laugh at the Grammar priggishness that is home grown right here in New Mexico. Who'd have thunk it? On Wednesday I opened our local and independent Albuquerque Journal Newspaper to read this headline:

"1 in 4 Teenage Girls Have Sexually Transmitted Diseases."

Being that I was rather shocked by the information, (Oy), I did not prepare myself for the letters to the editor and e-mails to the editor the next day. Not about how very serious this problem is for a multitude of reasons, mind you. No, the messages to the editor were about the grammar in the headline. And it provoked this response:

TO OUR READERS

"Wednesday's headline...touched a nerve among offended grammarians who said it was just plain wrong. Many grammarians agree, taking the position that the verb in such constructions should be the singular "has" to agree with the subject "one."

However, other grammarians say such phrases as "one in (a larger number)" should take a plural verb in keeping with "notional agreement" of subject and verb, because the phrase carries the notion of a larger number rather than an individual.

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says:
'This appears to be a case where actual usage (emphasis added) is more often governed by notional agreement than by grammatical agreement; the writers who use the construction realize that it represents a statistical proportion and thus stands for a multitude of individuals.'

...Who's right? It's debatable...."

Steve Williams, News Editor
(The Albuquerque Journal, Thursday, March 13, 2008, page 2).


Did you notice the emphasis I added?
Actual usage.
In this case, as in the one I wrote about a few days ago, actual usage appears to trump the picky rules. I have been accused of having "difficulties with people" because I pointed this out right on my blog. It's probably true. But if I do, so does Steve Williams, News Editor of the local Newspaper.

Viva la compagnie!

And have a great weekend, everyone: grammar serfs and grammar yekkies alike!

Ask A Stupid Question...

I just e-mailed the take-home portion of my Psychological Assessment midterm to the professor, and now I have completed midterms.



I had a test on the construct and measurement of intelligence yesterday in that class.

I also had a presentation on the reliability of motoneurons in the pontine nuclei for Neuroanatomy and Physiology. I did quite well on the presentation and actually managed to generate some discussion. It was an interesting paper and I enjoyed it.


I don't know how I did in the Psychological Assessment exam.


I find that I am having trouble changing the "set" (as they call it in psychology) from Neuroscience to Psychology as I run from one to the other. The neuroscience classes tend to have a very tightly focused research orientation and the psychology class seems to be looser and more clinically based. Also the culture of the departments is different, especially with respect to the interactions between students and professors.



It gets really difficult for me to change my set when the subjects interact, as they did on Tuesday, when in Psychology, the professor did a presentation on basic brain anatomy. At one point he was discussing the Pons and he said that injuries to the Pons tends to cause widespread neurological problems due to the importance of the Reticular Formation to the function of the higher centers.



I was excited by his comments. At last! Something that I could relate to my other class. I was, after all, in the middle of developing my PowerPoint for the Hu paper on the Pons. My focus, alas, was on that research, so I asked the following:
"Do clinicians look for visual-motor signs that could indicate Pontine Reticular Formation damage? Like problems with saccades?"

The professor paused for a moment and gave me a funny look.
Then he said: "Well, generally people with massive damage to the Pons are either dying or dead."



The class giggled. I felt like a total idiot. I was thinking of the research level, in which induced lesions in the deep nuclei of the Pons are shown to have specific effects on saccades--which are a quick movements of both eyes in the same direction in order to direct focus at a new stimulus. But the good professor was talking about clinical situations in which a person suffered massive head trauma. And anyway, he was introducing general brain anatomy to the class. He wasn't interested in tightly focused details. We were talking on completely different wavelengths.



I didn't get the social cues. At times like these, I am sure that the apple does not fall far from the tree. N. has Aspergers, an Autism Spectrum Disorder. I can see that I do display the Broader Autistic Phenotype, as Tony Attwood calls it. This is probably why I do better in neuroscience than in psychology.



And you know what they say:

'Ask a stupid question and you get a stupid answer.'

That's exactly what happened.



Naturally, my curiousity led me to take a look at Kandel--our neuroscience text.

It turns out that there are two problems that can arise from lesions in the Pontine Reticular Formation that can lead to visual motor problems.

One is nystagmus--the inability of the eye to fix on a stimulus after saccading to it. This means unwanted, repetitive saccades because although commands are coming from the frontal lobes to pay attention to certain sights and sounds and not others, the visual-motor neurons are compromised and cannot carry them out.

The other is seen in patients with MS. It is called internuclear ophthalmoplegia, and is caused by dysfunction of the motor commands to the medial rectus muscle--the one on the side of the eye nearest to the nose--but only when it moves laterally in saccades.



You see, I asked a stupid question. That is, wrong focus, wrong time, wrong place.
And I got a stupid answer. That is, one not directed to the level at which I was asking the question.



I did learn from it.



But I am especially mortified because as we talked about intelligence tests and the concept of intelligence, this professor specifically stated that understanding social situations--that is issue like "set"-- are an important component of intelligence.



I guess that makes the somewhat socially inept, technical geniuses in my family...stupid.



What we need to do is make a new movie in which introverted neuroscience grad students take over the psychology department by virtue of their higher performance IQs.

We could call it Revenge of the Geeks!

Geeking Out, R3D3, & Why Prep Takes So Long

Some people geek out on Star Trek, Star Wars, or computers. Some geek-out on Harry Potter, science fiction, or even subway schedules.

But my beloved husband gets the geek-gleam in his eye over tools and DIY equipment.
And he has to have just the right thing to do the right job--perfectly.

Which is why, six days past FLOORING--THE BEGINNING, we are still in the preparation stage. I took the above pictue last night. You can see that in the dining room, the carpet is finally out, and the carpet is rolled up under the window. And why did it take from Sunday until yesterday to get this far? Bruce needed just the right tool to get up the carpet tack-strips. And he was just waiting until he could get to Harbor Freight.

Sigh.

But as you can see in the picture to the left, the carpet is completely out of the hallways as of today. It's amazing what a geek can do with the perfect tool.

Yesterday, I finally moved the dining chairs that were stacked on top of each other from the living room. I also removed the basedboards that had been removed. They were marked with mysterious marking on the back in indelible ink. Markings like: "OFF 2 W" (office, 2 west) and "LR 3 NE." I put them in the garage, in one stack, on the other side of the table in the middle. The one we use to hold all sorts of stuff that would probably be rejected by Good Will. Then I straightened up the living room and vacuumed the only carpeting left in the main areas of the house (other than bedrooms).

I just wanted to have one place to sit where things looked (relatively) normal.

When Bruce got home from work and looked at the living room, a worried furrow appeared in his brow. "Where's the baseboard?"

"I put it in the garage," I said. "Zoey nearly punctured her paw when she stepped on one."

"H-h-how'd you move them?" He asked.
Me: "I carried them into the garage one at a time."
Bruce: "But did you vacuum them first?"
Me: "Huh?"
Bruce, starting to breath rapidly: "Well..where'd you put them?"
Me: "By the table."
Bruce, hyperventilating: "But did you use my system?"
Me, with weary patience: "What system, honey?"
Bruce: "D-d-d-did you stack them according to room and direction and number?"
Me; "Huh?"

You get the picture.

So today I went to town to go to the bakery for Challah--it's too hot to bake. I even had a breakfast burrito for lunch, giving Bruce and much time alone with the prep as possible.


When I got home, Bruce had re-stacked the flooring boxes and removed the carpet in the hallways.

While I put the Challah and groceries away, Bruce swept the halls--twice. Then he re-swept the dining room. With a broom!

While I vacuumed the kitchen and dining room, he re-swept the halls.
I thought I'd be helpful and vacuumed the dining room edges. You know, where the baseboards and floor meet, if the baseboards are on. Which they are not. I looked up to see Bruce looking at me, brow furrowed again.


Bruce: I'll just get R3D3."
Me: "Huh?"
Bruce: "You should use R3D3 to get the job done right."
Me: "Is R3D3 related to R2D2?"
Bruce, pulling the gynormous shop-vac into the house: "...Come on, R3..."

Of course, he re-did the dining room with R3D3.
He is now getting R3D3 to help out with the hallways.

I thought they looked pretty spiffy in the picture above.
But apparently not spiffy enough.

The Beam Central Vac is not the right tool for the job.
To get it perfectly spiffy you need...

[Dum, dum, dum-de da-dum da-dum (Star Wars theme)]

R3D3!

I'll let him get it perfect for at least 30 more minutes. Then I'll tell Bruce "Skywalker" that it's time to have a bath for Shabbat.
Han Solo is coming to dinner. With the Wookie.