Thursday, September 27, 2007

More to Grammar

It always amazes me how much there is to the smallest things and how little there is to the largest.

I am like many many; I do not write and go back and fix it. I like to fix my writing along the way. Sometimes, however, I have to to finish my thought and then fix it. Often just to catch the words that might be misspelled I will use a spell-check, but the way I learned how to spell is often different than what a spell-check "knows". The thing I never use is a grammar-check. The reason for this is, I find grammar-checks mistaken and never grasping the principles of grammar. The reason for this is the designers of grammar-checks do not grasp the principles of grammar.

So again, I wish to adumbrate things to come. I wish to speak of three things: the voices of verbs, the moods of verbs, and an old Latin saying from medieval times.

For those who have forgotten what the different voices are and the different moods are: of the former, there are active, passive and, in some languages there is a middle; of the latter, there are indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and optative.

The old Latin saying is: Repetitio est mater studiorum. To which I like to add: Et signum stultorum et insanorum est. I add this not because I think the old saying is not true. I know it to be true. I add it because, like all great and true sayings, people repeat it without thinking. They do not do so maliciously. They actually do it out of love.

If you say true sayings without thinking, it is not nearly as bad as repeating false statements without thinking. Nonetheless, there is a responsibility to all true sayings to understand why they are true. Their dignity should be respected and not taken for granted.

These are to be the next subjects.

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