I\u2019m a slob.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always been a slob, and I come from a family of slobs. Mrs. Cornell, a non-slob, isn\u2019t too happy about my whole slob motif, and I\u2019ve tried to adapt to living in the real world where people expect you to have an ironed shirt and don\u2019t want to find Filet-O-Fish wrappers on the floor of your car, but I\u2019m still struggling with it. I just don\u2019t care enough to pick up after myself. I\u2019m the opposite of an anal retentive, which is a pretty gross metaphor if you interpret the original description literally.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s all the more surprising that I\u2019m a Grammar Nazi. Perhaps I\u2019m overcompensating for my irretentive anus in other ways, but nothing peeves me off more than lousy grammar. This, too, is a source of endless annoyance to the lovely Mrs. Cornell, who is exceptionally bright and literate, but does not share my contempt for ending sentences with prepositions. Some of our most gruesome marital squabbles have centered on sentence construction. I don\u2019t know who originally said this, but ending a sentence with a preposition is an effrontery up with which I will not put.<\/p>\n
But just as she\u2019s learned to tolerate a certain amount of detritus in my living conditions, I\u2019ve bitten my tongue a number of times to avoid obsessing over irrelevant grammatical imperfections. Currently, I\u2019m coming to accept that many people I love see the verbs \u201clie\u201d and \u201clay\u201d as interchangeable, and they can say the sentence \u201cI\u2019m going to go lay down for awhile\u201d without feeling like they\u2019re scraping nails down a chalkboard.<\/p>\n
The correct thing to say would be \u201cI\u2019m going to go LIE down.\u201d \u201cLay\u201d always takes a direct object \u2013 you lay something down, whereas you lie down when you\u2019re talking about yourself. Complicating the equation is the fact that \u201clay\u201d is also the past tense of \u201clie,\u201d so you can say \u201cI lay down for awhile\u201d if you\u2019re talking about what you did yesterday. It\u2019s all very convoluted and doesn\u2019t really matter. It doesn\u2019t matter. It doesn\u2019t matter at all. Nope.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve got problems.<\/p>\n
It gets worse. When I went to USC, I took a class in phonetics, where I learned standard American pronunciation. I was already a grammar and spelling compulsive \u2013 I\u2019m forced to correct these hastily written blog entries when I discover typos and trivial errors, like misspelling Karl Malone\u2019s name yesterday or using the word \u201choisted\u201d instead of \u201cfoisted\u201d \u2013 but this class allowed me to become a pronunciation freak as well. There\u2019s a slight difference, though. Phonetic irregularities aren\u2019t necessarily incorrect; they\u2019re just regionalisms. Standard American speech eliminates regional dialects and makes everyone sound like they\u2019re from an upscale Connecticut suburb. It\u2019s the way all newscasters in the country speak, as well as many actors \u2013 Robin Williams is a pretty standard American speaker, and Kelsey Grammar is compulsively so.<\/p>\n
What was interesting when I began the class was that my own dialect didn\u2019t actually reflect the region where I grew up. I should have sounded like a Southern Californian, with a flat, surfery \u201cO\u201d vowel sound in \u201chello\u201d or \u201cno way!\u201d Instead, I have the hard, Jimmy Stewartish R sound that comes when you roll your tongue too far back in your mouth. That\u2019s very typical of the Salt Lake area, and I\u2019ve since discovered that most American Mormons have that same regionalism in their speech, regardless of where they live.<\/p>\n
A Utahism that really bugs me is the clipping of the vowel in words like \u201creal\u201d and \u201cdeal,\u201d so that when you go to order a burger and fries, you ask for the \u201crill mill dill.\u201d That little phonetic tick has never crept into my own speech, but you can never be too careful.<\/p>\n
The danger in all of this is that your speech starts sounding affected and artificial, and that\u2019s why I\u2019ve allowed my Rs to revert back to their natural, Kermit the Frog-style default position. I can speak standard American if I want to, but I simply choose not to.<\/p>\n
Crap. I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Time to go lay down for awhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ma slob. I\u2019ve always been a slob, and I come from a family of slobs. Mrs. Cornell, a non-slob, isn\u2019t too happy about my whole slob motif, and I\u2019ve tried to adapt to living in the real world where people expect you to have an ironed shirt and don\u2019t want to find Filet-O-Fish wrappers on ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}