Confusing Sentences That Actually Make Sense

Let’s face it: Sometimes the English language can be downright bizarre. The plural of ox is oxen while the plural of box is boxes, ‘rough’ rhymes with ‘gruff’ even though the two words only have two letters in common, and there are actually more than nine hundred exceptions to the infamous “i before e except after c” rule.

If you’re still not convinced that the English language is full of oddities and conundrums, take a look at these five wacky sentences that are actually grammatically correct.

1All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life.

Well, talk about lexical ambiguity. But as strange as this sentence might sound, it is actually grammatically correct. The sentence relies on a double use of the past perfect. The two instances of “had had” play different grammatical roles in the sentences—the first is a modifier while the second is the main verb of the sentence.

2One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

This famous Groucho Marx joke takes advantage of the fact that the same sentence can often be interpreted in more than one way. The first sentence can be read in two distinct ways: A) The man shot an elephant while he was wearing his pajamas or B) The man shot an elephant that was wearing his pajamas. It’s unclear who is wearing the pajamas—the man or the elephant. Most people interpret the sentence the first way and are subsequently startled to read the second part of the joke.

3The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

This is what we call a garden path sentence. Though grammatically correct, the reader’s initial interpretation of the sentence may be nonsensical. In other words, the sentence has taken the reader down a dead-end.

Here, “complex” may be interpreted as an adjective and “houses” may be interpreted as a noun. Readers are immediately confused upon reading that the complex houses “married,” interpreting “married” as the verb. How can houses get married? In actuality, “complex” is the noun, “houses” is the verb, and “married” is the adjective. The sentence is trying to express the following: Single soldiers, as well as married soldiers and their families, reside in the complex.

4The man the professor the student has studies Rome.

This awkward but grammatically correct sentence is a product of what is known as center embedding. In English, we can typically put one clause inside of another without any problem. We can take “the man studies Rome” and add a bunch of additional information between the noun and the verb. However, the more information that is added, the harder it is to interpret the sentence.

In this particular case, the sentence conveys the following: The student has the professor who knows the man who studies ancient Rome. Each noun corresponds to a verb (the man studies, the student has). But because of the sentence’s syntax, this is hard to decipher. Remember: just because a sentence is grammatically correct doesn’t mean it is acceptable stylistically.

5Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

No, your eyes are not playing tricks on you. You read that sentence right—it reads “buffalo” eight times. You see, “buffalo” is a noun that refers to the large, shaggy-maned North American bison, a city in upstate New York, and a verb that means, “to intimidate.” First devised by professor William J. Rapaport in 1972, this notorious sentence plays on reduced relative clauses, different part-of-speech readings of the same word, and center embedding. It’s also a pretty prime example of how homonyms (words that share spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings) can really confuse things.

While it might be hard to parse, the sentence is coherent. If you stare at it long enough the true meaning may even miraculously come to you: “Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.” For further clarification you might also want to check out English indie rock band Alt-J’s song “Buffalo,” which was famously inspired by this conundrum of a sentence and used in the soundtrack of the Oscar-nominated Silver Linings Playbook.

So, in conclusion: English is weird. But in spite of its oddities, it is also a strangely beautiful language. You can do all sorts of crazy things with it without breaking any rules. The bounds of proper English are virtually endless—test them in your writing today!

10 Best Grammar Resources for Students

Something great happened on March 4, 2008. Martha Brockenbrough, through The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, established National Grammar Day in the United States. It’s a day to celebrate all that grammar does. Would you like to wish your friends a Happy Grammar Day? Make sure you don’t have any errors in your messages! How can you make sure your grammar is in tip-top shape? Check out this list of grammar goodies:

1 Apps English grammar—yes, there’s an app for that too. Test what you learned in class by taking the interactive quizzes in the English Grammar app. Try to beat your best score and watch your writing proficiency improve.

2 Movies Actors can make you laugh, cry, and master challenging parts of speech! Teachers have long been incorporating movie clips into their lessons, but you don’t have to wait until you are in a classroom to benefit from your film library. ESLcommando.com has published links to lesson plans and worksheets that you can follow on your own. Now you have a great excuse to watch your favorite movie tonight!

3 Media There’s good news for English language learners. Newspapers and magazines are excellent sources of grammar practice. Challenge yourself to identify verb tenses, nouns, adverbs, and other parts of speech. Breaking News English prepares learning materials related to current events. On the site, you gain a greater understanding of how grammar works as you answer comprehension questions, guess the missing words in gap-fill exercises, and place words in logical order in word jumble activities.

4 Video Visual learners will benefit most from video lectures. Both LearnersTV.com and EngVid.com have dozens of videos created by experienced teachers and native speakers. Go directly to a subject that interests you or ask your teacher which skills you need to reinforce.

5 Podcasts and Radio Broadcasts Smartphones make it possible to take your learning on the go. Wouldn’t waiting in a doctor’s office be more interesting if you were learning at the same time? You can download programs in advance or stream podcasts wherever you have Internet access. Most podcasts don’t require a large time commitment. BBC Radio presents grammar tutorials in a broadcast series called Six-Minute Grammar. Can you find six minutes to listen and learn?

6 Games Games are useful resources for learners who have a short attention span. While you are focused on getting points or rescuing a noble, you won’t even realize that you’re practicing your grammar. Buy a grammar board game from a teacher resource store or download a free game board. If you don’t think you will be able to round up other players, play single- or multiplayer games on ESL learning websites.

7 Music Have you ever caught yourself humming a song that you don’t particularly like? The catchy tune might have gotten stuck in your head because music is a powerful memory aid. You can listen to songs specifically designed for grammar instruction or print the lyrics to your favorite melody. As you hum along, pay special attention to grammatical structures. Many times, you will hear “errors,” but even identifying these artistic mistakes is a unique way to practice your skills.

8 Online Courses If you prefer the systematic approach, consider an online course. Online courses work well for students with busy schedules or those who prefer to learn at home. English Grammar 101 is an introductory class for beginning English learners or native speakers who need to build a stronger foundation of the essentials. More advanced instruction is available on Alison.com. There, you can track your progress through coursework without cost and earn diplomas and certificates with a paid enrollment.

9 Websites What can’t you find online? About.com tackles everything from basic grammar to complex constructions. Quizzes and exercises accompany most of their grammar lessons. You can also print worksheets to test your knowledge.

10 Books Sure, you can read a grammar guidebook. But if that thought doesn’t appeal to you, get in touch with your inner child. Brian P. Cleary’s picture books for children may be just what you need. They cover basic grammar concepts with clever rhymes and memorable illustrations. You can download Feet and Puppies, Thieves and Guppies: What are Irregular Plurals? or one of his other books in the Google Play Store.

March fourth is quickly approaching. It’s time to get ready! Which of the ten resources will you use to expand your knowledge of grammar? It wouldn’t hurt to try them all!

We’re Snoring Because Your Poem is So Boring

Welcome to one of our favorite holidays of the year: Bad Poetry Day. August 18 brings with it the license and the freedom to let those terrible sonnets fly.

Sure, many of us remember our high school days when just about any drama would send us scurrying to the page to dash off a few lines. However, the resulting text is not exactly what we mean by bad poetry. Even those stanzas, penned when we were young, were important to us. They may not have had the literary brilliance that age and experience brings, but they were full of real emotion.

In the context of Bad Poetry Day, bad poetry means boring poetry. It means penning dull lines about uninteresting topics. Perhaps the best way to learn about a “bad” poem is to explore some important elements of a “good” poem.

Structure: Most beginning poets get this element wrong right away. How do you properly break up your lines and stanzas? Is it all random? Do you just make a break whenever you are tired of a block of text? Well, if you want a bad poem, then the answer is yes. It’s true that lines and stanzas lend shape to the poem, but they also suggest meaning. Generally, they help guide the audience in reading, or reciting, the poem correctly.

Something to say: How many articles or poems have you read that don’t seem to have any point? What is the author’s purpose for writing the piece? Nothing loses an audience quicker than an obvious lack direction. There is plenty of idle chatter out there, so make sure that what you write is relevant to your audience.

Clarity: Being succinct and clear is important in any communication. This is just as true with poetry as it is prose. If you muddle the reader’s head with images that are bizarre or meaningless, how can you expect them to understand what you are trying to say?

Mood: The overall mood of a poem can shift, even in great poetry. However, if the mood is all over the place, then the poem begins to sound like a cacophony of different emotions. It’s important to know which feelings you are trying to evoke in your reader. Keep the mood clear, and only shift it when it becomes necessary to make your point.

Obtuse layers: Bad poetry is often impenetrable poetry. Shrouding your poem in thick, heavy symbolism forces your readers to work too hard to understand your meaning. For the most part, good poetry should be more like an apple than an onion. Your readers want to take a juicy bite, rather than sit around all day peeling layers.

Clichés: Another mistake made by beginning poets is the use of clichés. They make a poem heavy and dull as lead. One of the greatest joys of poetry is the chance to say something in a new way. It’s the perfect place to break out those fresh metaphors. When you start writing in clichés, it becomes clear as glass that you have not really given the poem much thought.

Rhyme: All poems contain lines that rhyme, right? Absolutely not. In fact, with the appearance of free verse poetry, rhyme became an option rather than a rule. Anything goes in poetry, now. However, it’s important to be familiar with the traditional rules of poetry before you begin to break them. Rhymes are not random. It’s not a good idea to sit around with a dictionary just to get a good rhyme in your poem. It creates far more problems than it solves.

There you have it, a few guidelines of some of the elements of good poetry. Feel free to break them all and write a truly bad poem. We can’t wait to read those awful lines. Have fun!

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Cases of Pronouns: Rules and Examples

Case refers to the form a noun or pronoun takes depending on its function in a sentence. English pronouns have three cases: subjective, objective, and possessive.

Subjective Pronouns

The subjective (or nominative) pronouns are I, you (singular), he/she/it, we, you (plural), they and who. A subjective pronoun acts as a subject in a sentence. See the sentences below for illustration:

I have a big chocolate bar.

You have some ice cream.

He has a cake.

We could have a party.

They could come, too.

Who should be invited?

Objective Pronouns

The objective (or accusative) case pronouns are me, you (singular), him/her/it, us, you (plural), them and whom. (Notice that form of you and it does not change.) The objective case is used when something is being done to (or given to, etc.) someone. The sentences below show this use of the objective case:

Give the chocolate to me, please.

Why should I give it to you?

You could give it to him, instead.

Please share it with all of us.

Do we have to share it with them?

Possessive Pronouns

There are two types of possessive pronouns. The first type is used with nouns my, your (singular), his, her, your (plural), its, their, our. The other type of pronouns are sometimes called independent possessive pronouns, because they can stand alone. They are mine, yours (singular), his, hers, ours, yours (plural) and theirs. The possessive pronouns show that something (or someone) belongs to someone (or something).

That’s my shirt.

That shirt is mine.

The house is theirs.

It’s their house.

The dog is scratching its ear.

Nauseous vs. Nauseated: What’s the Difference?

Even though nauseous and nauseated are often used to mean feeling unwell, many purists insist that nauseous means “causing nausea” while nauseated means “feeling sick.” Casually, it is probably OK to use both words to mean feeling ill. However, in more formal situations, use each word correctly.

Find helpful usage tips, clarifying examples, and spelling tricks below.

Usage Tips

• Nauseating is a good substitute for nauseous when you’re talking about something that causes nausea.
• Nauseousness is not a word. Nausea is the correct noun form.

When to Use Nauseous

Nauseous originally meant sickening, loathsome, or inducing a feeling of disgust. In that sense, things that are nauseous might include:

• getting a whiff of a garbage dump
• two-week-old meatloaf
• certain rickety roller coasters
• particularly unattractive zombies

But nauseous is so often used to refer to experiencing those feelings that Merriam-Webster Dictionary has updated their definition of nauseous:

• feeling like you are about to vomit
• causing you to feel like you are going to vomit
• causing disgust

Here are examples of nauseous used with its original meaning:

Certain it is that minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort, and like them, are often successfully cured by remedies in themselves very nauseous and unpalatable.

—Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

The council may prohibit and prevent the sale of every kind of unsound, nauseous, and unwholesome meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, or other articles of food.

—Digest of City Charters (Chicago)

And here’s an example of its contemporary usage, of feeling sick to one’s stomach:

The family […] would rush out to get lobster, but then the patient would take only one bite, or wouldn’t want it at all, he would smell it and feel nauseous and push it away.

—The New Yorker

The crowd draws in a collective breath and then you can hear a pin drop, and I’m feeling nauseous and so desperately hoping that it’s not me, that it’s not me, that it’s not me.

—Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

When to Use Nauseated

The definition of nauseated is the same as the second, more recent definition of nauseous: feeling sickly. Or, according to the official definition, to feel nauseated means:

• to become affected with nausea
• to feel disgust

Here’s the trick: “to nauseate” is a verb meaning “to cause to feel disgust,” so turning it into a participle—that is, adding the “ed” at the end—means that something has caused you to feel that way. Times you might feel nauseated include:

• The morning after a wedding
• When you take a sip of milk that’s past the expiration date
• When you see a zombie eat brains without proper table manners

. . . and any other time your tummy gets a bit grumbly. Here are some examples of nauseated in a sentence:

Once, when she was six years old, she had fallen from a tree, flat on her stomach. […] Now, as she looked at him, she felt the same way she had felt then, breathless, stunned, nauseated.

— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food.

— Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

And, to cover our bases, here’s an example with “nauseating”:

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Nausea can be pretty existential, it turns out.

Spelling and Pronunciation Tricks

Any way you slice it, these words have got a lot of vowels. So how do you say them, and how do you remember how to pronounce them?

Nausea

Some people say NAW-zee-uh, some say NAW-zhuh, where the “zhuh” sounds like the “s” in “measure.” Here, take a listen.

There’s no surefire trick to guarantee you remember the spelling, but think about how lots of people who go sailing get seasick. That is, they get sick of being on the sea. Even though the “sea” part of the word nausea isn’t pronounced like the big body of water that might make your stomach a little choppy, it can help remind you how the second half of that word is spelled.

Nauseated

If you figure out nausea, chances are you can figure out nauseated: just add a “ted” to the end of the noun.

As for pronunciation, try to say it like this: “NAW-zee-ay-tid.” Here’s how that one sounds out loud.

Nauseous

This one’s a toughie. Some people say NAW-zee-us, but NAW-zhus is more common. Listen to it here.

As far as spelling, it’s the “eou” that causes confusion. A quick fix: think of something that makes you feel nauseous—or, if you’re more traditional, something that is nauseous. For example: eating oily urchins. Sounds pretty slimy, and probably smelly, too. But if you can fight back the nausea long enough to spell nauseous correctly, then you’re on the right track.

Now you can stop feeling nauseated by the nauseous distinction between these two confusable words. We can only hope that avoiding zombies is as easy.

5 Inspiring Authors to Read During Black History Month

February was officially recognized as Black History Month by the US government in 1976 as part of the US bicentennial, although its beginnings date to the establishment of Negro History Week in 1926. It’s a month to remember important events and people in African-American history. We’ve selected five inspiring authors to read during Black History Month as a remembrance of the great contributions of African-Americans who achieved literary acclaim.

1 Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was a prolific author and civil rights activist. Her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, follows her journey from childhood in the south to womanhood in San Francisco and explores how love, strength, and reading the works of great authors keeps her free.

2 Langston Hughes (1902–1967) is famous for creating “jazz poetry” that revealed the lives of poor black people living in America. His poem “Let America Be America Again” talks about the inequality experienced by African-Americans and its contradiction to the American values of freedom, independence, and equality for all.

3 Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a poet, novelist, and journalist who was born in Jamaica. He began writing poetry at the age of ten. Banana Bottom, now lauded as his greatest work, didn’t sell many copies upon publication. It tells the story of a girl who has trouble reconciling the values she was taught in England with those of her native Jamaica.

4 Toni Morrison (1931– ) is an American novelist and the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; she is also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Morrison was born in Ohio and became a professor after earning her master’s degree from Cornell University. Song of Solomon, Morrison’s third novel, tells the story of a black family living in Michigan in the 1930s and deals with racism, violence, and the connections that keep us together.

5 Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) was the first African-American female poet whose work was published. Born in West Africa and sold into slavery, Wheatley nevertheless went on to prove to America that blacks could contribute to the fields of art and intellect. “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield” was published in Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, and London and brought her international acclaim.

February is a month to reflect upon and appreciate the contributions of African-American authors and poets whose works honestly portray the lives of African-Americans throughout history.