when bijou are you coming back? when am i gonna see you again? i will. soon. not soon enough. you will be at home with your girlfriend and your dog. i will be at home with a stick of nag_champa and a billie holiday record, lover man oh where can you be? 010626 ... soia i won't. not soon. not soon enough. 010626 ... FlamingMushroom Did This red blather Come about... perplexing Brain is severed in two halves neither know what the other is thinking 020924 ... DammitJanet when he looked at me to say hello. when he brought me coffee. when he showed me around. when he said how great i looked. when he put his hand on my arm. when he stared a little too long. when he stood against me. when he walked really slow. when he talked for an hour. when he listened even longer. when he hugged me goodbye. that's when. 021221 ... eatingstars when we sleep we dream we wake fresh start 070312 ... epitome of incomprehensibility When I'm supposed to be the teacher, I feel dumb if I don't know something. So - in the sentence "She always knew when to ask for help," is "when" an adverb or conjunction? And if an adverb, does it modify "knew" or "to ask"? 140903 ... e_o_i ...This just led to a discussion with my parents. I accosted my father at the door and he said that "to ask for help" is a nominal clause (that is, an object, something that replaces a noun, like you'd say "She knew geometry"). Then my mother put forward the example, "When you're finished your dissertation, can you spare a moment to say hello?" My father kissed her and asked her how she was doing before parsing that sentence. She said that a grammar guide he mentioned wasn't definitive, since it was always saying, Maybe X, maybe Y; he said that once things get complex enough, grammar is never definitive. "But but but," I persisted, "if I'm teaching a grade eight or nine student who's supposed to underline all the adjectives in a sentence and draw arrows to the words they modify, should he underline the 'when' or not?" "They shouldn't have included that example," he said. "It's too complicated. It opens up too many possibilities." 140903 ... past I'd say it modified knew, but also can work as a conjunction. Pulling aside the curtain to the complexities of language (or any discipline, really) isn't the worst thing you can do, unless the kid relies on reified structures to keep reality together. I enjoy floating through a baseless world, myself. (Baseless not in the usual sense, but meaning that everything has meaning only in relation to other things.) Some people really hate it, but I'm okay with that too. 140903 ... e_o_i Yes, agreed, it makes sense to say it does more than one thing. I was going to go over that "when" function conjunction when I had class with him today, but we didn't get to that unit. Reminds me a little of the whole prescriptive (proscriptive?) vs. descriptive grammar discussion that goes on in LinkedIn's Grammar Geeks group. LinkedIn, aka Business Facebook, isn't always that useful, but there are some interesting talks on making grammar rules vs. describing things that already exists. Maybe "vs" is the wrong idea, since you can't have the rules side without the description side and vice versa. But if you feel in the mood to read passionate arguments on split infinitives and the usage of "like" (etc.) it's a fun place to hang out, even if much of it goes over my head. Words are so arbitrary sometimes. If I could write how I liked, I'd follow William Faulker, James Joyce, and TV Tropes and put two-word nouns together whenever I felt like it. A mistake I made frequently in high school was to write highschool as one word instead of two, like that. To my eye it looks better that way. Elementaryschool would be a bit long, though. 140905 ... e_o_i Faulkner. With an N. If I wrote enough like Finnegans Wake, nobody would be able to tell if I made typos or not, and the intelligent reader could nod her head and say, "Ah yes, clearly Faulker is a reference to the German word for folk, as well as a phonetic approximation of the word fucker, because everyone knows female!Joyce likes her dirty words..." etc etc. 140905 what's it to you? who go blather from