Rules Project: Blind Items Revealed

This post comes from another crazydaysandnights.net "Blind Items Revealed." It is a short one so I included the entire post here. 

      "For someone apparently in love, this B list talk show host/sometime actress sure does talk badly

        a lot about her soon to be husband."

The point of grammar is "talk badly a lot." Is this correct grammatically? To me, it does not sound right. It made me stop and think of "talk rather a lot" or think that "badly a lot" is some sort of expression for something.

To me, it just sound's wrong.

By the way, the celebrity is Jenny McCarthy.

Rules Project: A Hunger Games Name

For today's Rules Project post, I turned back to dlisted--the "go-to" site for new words and insanely long run-on sentences. For this post, I want to look at one part of a sentence and a particular aspect of language. The post describes Cam Gigandet, who apparently is the Hunger Games and was on the television show the O.C, as having had "a Hunger Games name long before the Hunger Games was written."I guess this means that he was very popular, perhaps with the tween age group, before he became popular again with this age group in the Hunger Games.


This point reminds me of how people can be referred to as a"Cam Gigandet" to mean someone who is similar to "Cam Gigadent." They may say something like, "for this movie why don't we get a Cam Gigadent or a Robert Pattison." This may lead some to say, "why not het "Cam Gigandet or Robert Pattison."


Link to post: http://dlisted.com/2014/06/26/cam-gigandet-hated-everyone-on-the-o-c/

Rules Project: Celebrity Blind Items

The "Blind Item" may be the gossip piece that keeps checking out celebrity blogs. It is a piece of gossip about a celebrity that is kept anonymous, at least for a time. Readers can guess about who the celebrity in question is in the comments sections and the name of that celebrity is sometimes revealed at some point in the future.


The writing sometimes makes the "Bind Item" that much more difficult to figure out. And, of course, the writers of this item is not a professional writer.


This comes from the website crazydaysandnights.net.


     Blind Item #6

     The people of this A list diva and everything else in her mind are threatening her ex with a
     restraining order because he won't stop calling and texting everyone around her. He wants more
     money.


To me, the most confusing part of this is the subject. Is it the A list diva, her people. or everything else in her mind. What does this mean? How can everything besides the people in her mind be threatening her ex?

Rules Project: Celebrity Blogs

Reading celebrity gossip pleasures is  a guilty pleasure of mine. But, there have been times when I have realized that I have no idea what they are talking about, and not because I have no idea what "reality" star they are talking about. As much as I enjoy amateur writing, there are posts that remind me what I feel the true purpose of grammar is--clear expression.

One of the particularly confusing sites I know of is dlisted.com. Consider the following post about the Jonas brother, Kevin,

                       The Zac Hanson of the Jonas Brothers has been super-committed to his transition                 
                       from “wholesome fresh-faced Disney twink” to “Dayum Daddy, you got a license for those 
                       guns?” ever since posting his first shirtless beefcake pic to Instagram last year, and it looks like 
                       he’s checked off the next box on his to-do list by shaving his head.

The first obvious issue is the length of the sentence. So many words are used to convey the message. Some slang is used in the sentence. The word "twink" for example is defined by urbandictionary.com as,

                  An attractive, boyish-looking, young gay man. The stereotypical twink is 18-22,                         slender with little or no body hair, often blonde, dresses in club wear even at 10:00                   AM, and is not particularly intelligent. A twink is the gay answer to the blonde bimbo                   cheerleader."

Next, is the word dayum, which I did not know is a slangy way to say damn. According to urbandictionary.com, "an explative, not unlike whoa. It is a more emphasized version of the word "damn" when it is used in the same way."

Once I looked up those words I understood that this sentence means to say that Kevin Jonas is working on building his physique. 

Link to the post: http://dlisted.com/2014/06/21/open-post-hosted-by-a-jacked-up-nick-jonas/

“Introducing English [IZ]-infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond”.

I am currently taking an online Linguistics course along side this one. In Linguistics class, we studied morphology and, in particular, affixation. English speakers  practice affixation when they use prefixes and suffixes. That is the same for many languages.


There is a much less common affix called the infix. As opposed to the prefix and suffix which are attached to the beginning and end of words respectively, infix are placed in the middle. The only languages I know of that use infixs are some Phillipino dialects
 
That is until Snoop Dogg.


According to an essay called "Introducing English [IZ]-infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond," Snoop Dog introduced the use of infixs into English.


See this examples:

 “…The surgeon is Dr. Dr[IZ]e (Dre) / so l[IZ]ay (lay) and pl[IZ]ay (play) / with D O double G[IZ]ee (G) / the fly human being…”

Snoop Doggy Dogg; Tha Shiznit: Doggystyle (1993)

And following his lead, Kanye West sang:

“I drink a Boost for breakfast, a Ensure for dizzert / Somebody order pancakes, I just sip the s[IZ]yrup (syrup) / That right there could drive a sane man bizzerk / Not to worry, Mr. H to the [IZ]O (O)’s back to w[IZ]ork (work)…”

Kanye West; Through the Wire: College Dropout (2004)

The Prounoun "Yo"

Have you ever felt stuck writing to someone who you do not, like when applying for a job, and not knowing whether you are writing to a male or female? It is baffling to me that we do not have a gender neutral pronoun.

I heard an npr story about this problem. It said that linguists and grammarians have tried to invent gender neutral pronouns like zee or zeer, but they haven't caught on.

But, according to the story, a teacher in Baltimore heard her students using a pronoun "yo" for either male or female and when they do not know, as in "yo" left a sweatshirt on the desk.

Find the story here:

 http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/25/178788893/yo-said-what