"It is not the ctitic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

~Theodore Roosevelt

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Sentence Parsing

~We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
~John Locke

I'm just sitting here, trying to parse sentences. It sucks. I am honestly fascinated by the English language. But it is so dang complicated!

I had problems with parts of sentences in elementary school. Never got it. I remember the big, yellow, soft-cover text books we used. I had no clue what a direct object was. Nor did I care. Didn't think it was that important.

I knew what a noun was-person, place, or thing, right? covers just about everything :) And verb-"it's what you do!"

Psh! how wrong I was. I am now to forget everything I learned-haha, good, never really learned it-and learn about the system of N, V, P, A, D, I, and C. Ya, N is nous, V is verb, and so on. But we're not using the traditional way of figuring it all out. Of course not.

We have to go through tests of free-order stacking or first-order stacking. And if it's mobile and subject-to-verb linking and subject/object linking and if plural inflection is possible and comparative/superlative. Aahhh!

I found it kind of funny reading the 12 page, small print packet I printed on it when it said, "This is not gross injustice on the part of language and grammar teachers. It's just life."

Oh, funny funny. And to have this due on a Saturday and go over it in class on Friday... I spent a good three hours last night parsing and an hour already today... and I'm not done!
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