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The Write Way 13 May 2005 The Everything Drawer Greetings, Hand up if you have a drawer at your place that's home to all those little bits and pieces that accumulate in human lives. If you don't have your hand up, I have only one thing to say to you: Fibber! Because everyone has an everything drawer!
With a flourish and a jolly cry of "Voilà!" I not only opened the drawer to its full limit, I also removed it and placed it on the bench, sensing that since neither of us had to be out and about for another hour, this was a good opportunity to have a nice little tidy up. We sat in conjugal harmony, sifting through the contents in our happy search for the padded thingummy. We put all the bus and train timetables in a neat little pile and then further classified them into the routes we use frequently, those we use rarely and the "When was the last time we were in Perth, for cryin' out loud?" type. We sorted the elastic bands from the plastic covered wire twist ties and put them in their relevant piles; we found a number of interesting looking buttons and put them in piles to go into my button tin. Along the way, I discovered I'd been falsely accusing The Girls of pinching my clothes pegs, because there were around 27 pegs of various colours and composition reposing in our Everything Drawer. We dug deeper and deeper into the archaeological layers of our life like 21st century Indiana Joneses and unearthed three of those little Christmas brooches you buy at the $2 shop that flash on and off (one still flashed), a collection of safety pins, an assortment of dead pens of different hues, pencils and a pencil sharpener, a pack of playing cards, a number of weak batteries and a card with a battery tester on it. All these we arranged in their relevant piles, congratulating ourselves on our orderliness as we went ... until we tuned in to the radio and heard the hourly news and realised we had just 10 minutes before both of us had to leave the house to Be Somewhere Important. My husband grabbed the drawer, held it close to the bench, and with one deft movement I swept all our piles back into the drawer as he returned it to its slot, and we both dashed off to face the day. We never did find that padded thingummy ... And that's rather a pity really because we need padded thingummies which stick to the chair legs to protect our floor. Yes ... Our old friends 'which' and 'that' are vying for our attention again. Shireen Richardson and Rod Lewis both pondered the plight of these two words when they wrote to me last week, so let's have a squiz and see what we come up with this time! Here we go ... that is a demonstrative pronoun, so it demonstrates differences between things. If you're defining something by distinguishing it from a larger class of which it's a member, you use that. This is the house that Jack built. (Not the house that Tom, Dick or Harry built.) That is restrictive (or defining), which means it tells you a necessary piece of information about its antecedent. In the example above, the that phrase answers an important question: which of the many recently constructed houses are we talking about? And the answer is, the one "that Jack built." Which is non-restrictive (or non-defining): it doesn't limit the word it refers to in any way, so when the general class is not being limited or defined in some way, which is appropriate - and you always use a comma before AND after the non-defining clause introduced by 'which': The trees he planted, which are called eucalyptus rosea, have grown well so far. And ... we need padded thingummies, which stick to the chair legs, to protect our floor. Here that is unnecessary: the which doesn't tell us which of the many trees called eucalyptus rosea we're considering; it simply provides an extra piece of information about the trees we're already discussing. And the which doesn't tell us anything that's vital to the key meaning of the sentence. In other words, you can safely leave out the which clause and not alter the essential meaning of the sentence, but you can't leave out the that clause. The trees he planted have grown well so far. (Leave out the which clause and it makes sense still.) The trees he planted that are called eucalyptus rosea have grown well so far. (You can't leave out the that clause because doing so would completely alter the meaning of the sentence ... Here we're specifically referring to the growing habits of trees called eucalyptus rosea, not just to trees in general.) So, if you can tell which thing is being discussed without the which or that clause, use which; if you can't tell, use that. If you still have difficulty keeping them straight, just imagine by the way following every which: "The trees he planted, which (by the way) are called eucalyptus rosea, have grown well so far. The which adds a useful, but not grammatically necessary, piece of information. On the other hand, we wouldn't say "The house which (by the way) Jack built." because The house on its own isn't enough information - which house? A paradoxical mnemonic: use that to tell which, and which to tell that. ever sounds right. Other matters are more worthy of your attention! This 1965 comment from Fowler's Modern English Usage sums up the problem: If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity and in ease. Read more here. This week's quiz: Try matching up these words for the sorts of things you may find in Life's Grand Everything Drawer ... lagan, flotsam, jetsam, tidbit, smithereens, morsel, gob, soupçon, moiety chaw 1. part, portion, or share 2. goods thrown overboard from a ship in danger of sinking in order to give it more buoyancy 3. a small piece of food 4. a small mass or lump 5. goods (or wreckage) on the sea bed that is attached to a buoy so that it can be recovered 6. a wad of something chewable as tobacco 7. wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk 8. a very small amount; a trace 9. a choice morsel, as of gossip or food 10.fragments or splintered pieces Chatting last week about mnemonics and ways to remember things, reminded Charles Denzler of this: PEBKAC - a technical support acronym that's synonymous with "user error," but literally stands for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair." And this little take on a traditional tale comes from Mark ... it's sort of relevant ... Well, we are talking about bits and pieces, odds and bobs this week: Mary had a little lamb, its
fleece was slightly grey, And soon it had a fellow clone,
and soon it had some more, No other could control the sheep,
since their programs didn't vary, Last week's quiz: salient, aver, impassive, piquant, equipoise, intrepid, demur, morose, loquacious, raffish 1. affirm, assert, prove, justify - AVER 2. fearless, brave, undaunted - INTREPID 3. without feeling, not affected by pain - IMPASSIVE 4. conspicuous, highly relevant, prominent - SALIENT 5. gloomy, sullen - MOROSE 6. low, vulgar, base, tawdry - RAFFISH 7. talkative, garrulous - LOQUACIOUS 8. agreeably pungent, stimulating - PIQUANT 9. to hesitate, raise objections - DEMUR 10. equal distribution of weight; equilibrium - EQUIPOISE Don't forget to give Dr Morgenes and the gang a bit of a helping hand in the Never-Ending Story: http://write101.blogspot.com (Use the Comments button at the end of the entry to add your contribution.) Dave sent me this story with a moral ... ignore it at your peril: "One Saturday morning I got up early. I put on my long johns. I dressed quietly. I got my lunch made, grabbed the dog and went to the garage to hook up the boat to the truck, and down the driveway I went."Coming out of the garage rain is pouring down, it is like a torrential downpour. There is snow mixed in with the rain, and the wind is blowing 50 mph. Minutes later, I returned to the garage. I came back into the house and turned the TV to the weather channel. I find it's going to be bad weather all day long, so I put the boat back in the garage, quietly undressed and slipped back into bed. There I cuddled up to my wife's back, now with a different type of activity on my mind, and whispered, "The weather out there is terrible." "To which she sleepily replies, 'Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in this?'" Have you made your Mark on the World yet? No? Then stop by our Map of the World and read the messages. (Just click List) and add your mark: http://pub37.bravenet.com/guestmap/view.php?usernum=3170114826 A Little Something Extra Writer, Jenna Glatzer shares a valuable lesson this week, about what to write: "Sometimes
I can be dense when it comes to realizing the potential of my own life
experiences as essays for magazines. I,
of course, fully believe that everything in my life is newsworthy, but sometimes
have trouble figuring out which experiences will hit home with other people. "I recently learned the secret, and it can be summarized in one word ..." Read what that one word is. Word of the week: Picayune (adj) of little value or importance; paltry dictionary.com gives the following explanation of the fascinating origins of this word, "Louisiana French 'picaillon' small coin, from French, from Provençal 'picaioun,' from 'picaio' money, perhaps from Old Provençal 'piquar' to jingle, clink, from Vulgar Latin 'piccare' to pierce." Notice how so many of our words originate in Latin, despite taking a few twists and turns before they arrive. Portmanteau of the week: Larry Lowrance suggested a bit of a change from the oxymoron, so this week, we're trying portmanteau words ... blended words, you know, that are made up from two or more other words. There are the usual suspects like: motel (motor + hotel), smog (smoke + fog) and brunch (breakfast + lunch) and more modern neologisms like: infotainment (information + entertainment) and infomercial (information + commercial) If you have any more, send them along for next week! (Just click Reply to send me an email.) And this week's Latin phrase continues our theme of bits and pieces: Par pare refero (I return like for like; tit for tat retaliation) [PAR pah-ray ray-FAY-roh] Kind regards, Jennifer P.S. Want to donate to the upkeep of this newsletter? Here's how: 1. Pay by PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/affil/pal=jennifer@write101.com OR 2. Click here to subscribe for a full year OR 3. Use your credit card on my secure order form: http://www.write101.com/fund.htm (You can also access the PayPal subscription link from this page if the link above didn't work for you. With PayPal, you can use your credit card, PayPal account or pay online using your own cheque account.) OR 4. Send a cheque (made payable to Jennifer Stewart): http://www.write101.com/fund.htm To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: mailto:WritingTips-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to the web site, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WritingTips This menu will also let you change your subscription between digest and normal mode. Copyright 2005 Jennifer Stewart Individual articles copyrighted by
their authors.
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