Writing Winning Proposals

In addition to doing stand-up comedy, I also write and edit technical proposals. Last night, I had the great privilege of presenting my seminar, "Writing Winning Proposals" to the San Gabriel Valley STC. I enjoyed it a lot and I hope that the audience did as well. Many people seemed to like it afterwards, so I hope that people learned a lot from it. What a privilege to talk with the sober! :) More coming soon on this, I hope, including my presentation.

Diphthong versus Digraph

I've been getting requests for "diphthong" and "digraph" from various homeschooling moms. At my eight-year-old's birthday party, one mom asked about one of these and I looked it up. May you never say that you leave the Gingerbread House without learning something. Here's what I found:

A diphthong is especially exciting to me because there exists both a rising diphthong and a falling diphthong.

Perhaps we should do an all rising diphthong Peni$ Game at Canoga Park Bowl one day. Or maybe a falling diphthong game, depending. For now, however, we can take comfort that a rising diphthong is "a diphthong in which the second element is more sonorous than the first (as \\wi\\ in \\ˈkwit\\ quit)." A falling diphthong is vastly different: It is a diphthong (as \\ȯi\\ in \\ˈnȯiz\\ noise) composed of a vowel followed by a less sonorous glide. I'm tellin' ya, we'd have to put on those thinking caps on a rising or falling diphthong Peni$ Game night at Canoga Park Bowl. A diphthong itself is a "gliding monosyllabic speech sound (as the vowel combination at the end of toy) that starts at or near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves to or toward the position of another." Its meaning is akin to a digraph, but a most interesting thing is the letter of Old English, which I don't know how to reproduce on this blog (you can see it in the link to the definition), is also called a diphthong. I don't remember knowing that.

Here's the exciting digraph news, as with its etymological cousin, it is a fabulous candidate for the Peni$ Game at Dante's Divine Comedy show, each Monday and Tuesday night. For now, we'll have to settle for the regular old dictionary definition, which is a "group of two successive letters whose phonetic value is a single sound (as ea in bread or ng in sing) or whose value is not the sum of a value borne by each in other occurrences (as ch in chin where the value is \\t\\ + \\sh\\)." Heavy, I know; I have to absorb it as well. Digraph also means, literally, "two letters."

Therefore, a consonant blend is a digraph, but a digraph may or may not be a consonant blend.

It's Never Between You and I!

You know, there is a part of me that's really super afraid to write this blog. When you point out English grammar stuff, or when you say you've been an English teacher, people are either afraid that you're going to correct them or they think that you never ever make a grammatical mistake. I'm full of grammatical mistakes, and mistakes in general. But the point is that I know what's correct. Do you?

This morning, I was talking to a friend of mine, a wonderful person whom I met in an English class. During the course of conversation, she said something about "for him and I." I said nothing, of course, and I'm guessing that this guffaw is so prevalent in our society because it's been on television. I've heard college graduates say it. It's ubiquitous. But it ain't right. Never use a subject pronoun, such as "I," after a preposition, in this case, "for." Never ever. No matter who else does it. It seems to me as though a Journey song from the eighties used this ungrammatical thing to make a song rhyme. Rhyme it did, but it also set off a long line of people who now say such this as "against him and I" when they would never ever say "against I." Think, people, think!

Subject pronouns are used in the subject of the sentence, which is often, though not always, before the verb: I, she, he, and they are subject pronouns.

Object pronouns are used in the predicate part of the sentence, i.e., the part that holds the verb: Me, her, him, and them are subject pronouns.

That Ain't Right!

My third grade teacher, an interesting character whom, at times, I've called a bitch of enormous proportions, had, as one of her many innovative activities, an "ain't graveyard." As Jeff Foxworthy would say, "If I'm lyin'; I'm dyin'. Well, I'm still alive here; so all I can say is that Miss J., who eventually became Mrs. M., made a wall display that had a green construction paper background. On it, she placed white tombstones. You, and please keep in mind that the you here is a third-grader, received a tombstone whenever someone heard you say "ain't." In typical government school fashion, the ain't hearers were encouraged to snitch on you when they heard you say "ain't." Oh, and you had to write 100 times, "I must not say ain't." I guess it was okay to write it, however. One hundred times, anyway. That is, after all, the punishment we received. Well, other than that whole tombstone thing. Although there were a couple of people who were quiet enough never to be caught, I was eventually not one of them. Someone caught me saying the forbidden word and my name was entered on a tombstone for the "ain't graveyard." The hideous idea of this thing seemed to be that ain't was somehow to be killed or to die. Or I suppose those who say this word were destined to die. Nonetheless, the message that all of us got out of this was that a good education would teach us not to say something that went from Shakespearean times to colonial America to the present-day South and . . . , oh, wait a minute. I think I got it: The South is what they were trying to kill. And we all knew that we were hicks merely because we were from the South.

This exercise lasted for days before Miss J. figured out that she couldn't quite get everybody. Or maybe it even lasted until the end of the year. She certainly did try to kill the Southern in us, making snitches out of our Southern friends. Yes, this kind of educational-college-inspired crap was supposed to be part of our learning experience in third grade. I suppose there's some value in seeing your name on a tombstone, although I still can't imagine what, exactly, is that value.

After receiving my undergraduate degree in Speech Communication at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, I worked at a place that was, well, less death-oriented than the supposedly wonderful government school that I attended for third grade. At Alcatel in North Raleigh, a wonderful editor, Lyndal Warren, helped me to appreciate the value of the English language. One fine day when I was waiting for Lyndal to hand me some more work, I started reading the dictionary that was on my desk. (This event occurred, of course, before the Internet.) I remember fondly reading dictionaries when I was a child and I have always been intrigued by these word tomes. While reading, I came across an interesting usage note. It stated that the word "ain't" is a proper contraction for "am not." People who would never think of using this supposedly hick-sounding Southern word, however, would say "Aren't I?" in a minute. Sure enough, I wonder how many "Aren't I?s" I've heard from college graduates, even those from Ivy League-esque schools. Performing a bit of simple syntax manipulation, one sees that the subject-verb inversion of this question is "I are not." Okay, how many people know that this is wrong? And yet how many people have you heard say "Aren't I?" Perhaps there should be an "Aren't I?" graveyard as well in Mrs. M.'s class, but there will never be. Far too many Yankees make the error and, by golly, as we learned in government school that year: if a Yankee does it, that makes it not an error.