diffrentcolours | The Friday Five, (Reply)

1. Can you diagram a sentence?

Technically I know what this means, and I expect I could do it, but I don't know the methodology. Breaking up a sentence into clauses, identifying verbs etc. is easy for me.

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?

"Medicinal", which I always spell (and say) as mecidinal.

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?

"Phoenix" really feels like it should be "Pheonix".

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?

Not that I'm aware of.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?

I loved it, because I was a brainy little swot who could remember it very well, and being correct gave me some small vestige of power and authority over the less brainy people who bullied me.

Now I'm older and more secure in myself. Mostly thanks to cosmolinguist's good influence, I understand that perfect grammatical correctness is a racist tool used for oppression. Between those things I'm a lot less critical of other peoples' spelling and grammar, though I'm always happy to help when somebody wants to get it "right".