It is difficult to blog when you brain is enclosed in a thin but inpenetrable* membrane that physically stops thoughts from leaving it without very intense concentration and frowning.

*this proves my point - I really don't know if this is a word or not and, if it is, how to spell it.

This post may be a bit incoherent at times.

I recently consulted Wikipedia about interrobangs: should they be ?! or !?.  I now realise that 'Interrobang' refers specifically to the informal punctuation mark that is a merge of the two - so not just them next to each other. I cannot imagine why its inventor (Richard Isbell) thought the merge was needed...and it wasn't.  Well it didn't catch on anyway.

However, I totally agree that !? and ?! are vital to modern life. Ha. I hate sentences like that!? Or do I?!

This is what Wikipedia says about the merged punctuation mark and the order. It's a bit of a shame because it's what I was going to say but now I can't take credit for it:

"Use of an interrobang may be considered somewhat redundant, considering the same effect is captured in standard English by ending a sentence with both an exclamation point and a question mark, the order of which is determined by whether it is more rhetorical/excited or more interrogative." 

I'll contribute by providing some examples inspired by Nipper's toys:
A trainer wearing rodeo zebra!? (more rhetorical/excited)
Why does that snail have huge nostrils?! (more interrogative)

By the way, I don't know where I was going with the second paragraph but I've left it there anyway. 

I quite like the French 'point exclarrogatif'. Sounds a bit drunk and rambling.

Well, it’s been an interesting year for the abortion debate. There were attempts to change the law in the UK in the summer and now Sarah Palin has stepped into the arena in the US. As ever, my own opinions regarding the ‘rights and wrongs’ (inverted commas deliberate) of abortion are not something I feel comfortable commenting about online and, as ever, it amazes me that people can see it as a black and white issue anyway: even if you personally feel very strongly that abortion either is or isn’t ok, it doesn’t mean that it has become a simple issue.

Anyway, my goat was slightly got today when watching a Youtube video of a preacher saying that abortion is wrong because God started creating life at conception and you just can’t cut across God when he is knitting life together. Fine, but why can’t you cut across God when he’s giving life? I’m not saying you should/shouldn’t but that statement isn’t logical; it’s just a given for lots of people.

I think all I’m saying is that I wish we could have debates about the big stuff in life without there being givens. It’s hard to shed worldviews, probably impossible really. But it might make for fuller discussion.

Well I’m just off to try and shed my Western worldview that logic matters. I assume Sarah Palin has already done so as she is apparently pro-life and pro-death penalty…unless, that is, she doesn’t use the sanctity of life argument when she has her anti-abortion hat on. I don’t know.

I suddenly tired of commas after one entry about them. I will carry it on properly but not now.

The problem with not writing about commas is that there isn't really anything to write about. Well, it's either commas or world poverty/similar...I find it hard to strike a balance!

Seriously though...world poverty. And all this.

We are gruesomely lucky.

What he said.

Here begins a little series on commas. Commas go right to the heart of grammar so they’re tricky things to write about. Gotta do some background work on clauses first.

A clause is a group of words. Clause spotters say that a clause is made up of a subject and a predicate (something that describes the subject). I learnt to find a clause by looking out for the verb and I quite like the focus on the verb because it helps my mind get into gear about other things too – like correct tense or mode and subject-verb agreement…sorry, got a bit boring there.

So, yeah, look for the verb. This is a doing or being word and will be attached to a subject (the thing that is doing/being). I have put all the verbs I used up to this point in bold to help you see what a verb is. Sometimes it made more sense if I included some of the surrounding words in with the verb. This is called a verbal phrase. For example, is made includes two verbs (from the infinitives* ‘to be’ and ‘to make’) so both words merge into a verbal phrase.

*Infinitives. You may remember these from such things as French lessons. We have them in English too. They are the home of the verb. Look at the examples below to see how the verb breaks down from the infinitive so that we can use attach it to lots of different subjects (n.b. I have only included how they break down in the present tense):

Infinitive: to be
I am
You are
We/they are
He/she/it is

Infinitive: to make
I make
You make
We/they make
He/she/it makes

I guess infinitives are a helpful way to identify a verb: ask yourself if can you find a version of the word that you can put ‘to’ at the beginning of to make it into an infinitive. It takes some thought to do this though.

The way this will all relate to commas eventually is that commas can be used to separate clauses to help make writing clearer. And if you find a verb, you've probably found a clause. More on that another time though.

This sort of grammar is hard to get to grips with because, like emotions and thought, language seems to come, at least partly, from within us. It’s hard to explain why we do things that we have always done. Children have such an inherent understanding of grammar that they are sometimes over correct. For example, they know how verbs normally get changed into the past tense so they might say I runned instead of I ran.

Might be worth saying, if you want to see about apostrophes for possession, go to April 15th 2008. This is the one about the other use for apostrophes...

...and it's actually really simple: the apostrophe is just put in in place of some missing letters. Sometimes we want to merge two words together to make it easier to say or read something. For example, instead of saying do not go there we might say don't go there. In this example, and in most examples, nothing changes about the original words other than a letter is missed out and the words are squashed together into one word. Sometimes more than one letter is missed out and very occasionally there are changes to the spelling of the original words*. Here are some examples of the change:

do not...donot...don't
must not...mustnot...mustn't
have not...havenot...haven't
It is...itis...it's
cannot...(no merge - one word already)...can't
I will...Iwill...I'll
would have...wouldhave...would've
will not...willnot...won't*

The blue letters are the ones that get missed out and replaced with an apostrophe.

You will notice that I have included it's in the list above. Only put an apostrophe in the word 'its' if you are saying 'it is' in a shortened way. That is all you need to know. If you are saying 'its' to mean that something belongs to 'it' you DO NOT need an apostrophe. Here are some correct examples:

Its main advantage is that it goes faster.
Its tyres are bald.
It's a shiny red car.

For some reason there is a big debate going on in the world right now about semi-colons. It's not just the usual about what to do with them but whether they should exist or not which I find faintly bizarre...they do exist! Even if someone tells me they don't exist, I will still use them.

Maybe this is because I'm a teacher and feel that it is necessary to say the same thing in three different ways to ensure that I have imparted knowledge thoroughly enough: semi-colons are there to link two sentences (or would-be sentences?) that are closely related to each other. So I might want to say: Semi-colons are cool. All the gangstas are using them. Well, the second statement confirms the first so that's pretty strongly related...you might as well use a semi-colon: Semi-colons are cool; all the gangstas are using them.

There's no rule about how exactly the sentences have to be related...I don't think! There are a few examples below of sentences that are linked in different ways just to give you a feel. I wouldn't say that you ever have to use a semi-colon. You would just use one having made the decision to communicate to your readers that those two sentences were related.

Some examples:

• The goldfish came home from the vets'* today; it had been there for a week.
• Her hairstyle is freaky; I don't think it's normal to have snakes' heads on the end of each hair.
• The effects on the goldfish population were monumentally catastrophic; there has never been such a serious dip in the population.

The other time to use semi-colons is in a list when you need to use commas to describe the things you're listing. (This is ringing a bell...have I posted about this before?) For example: My favourite films are Finding Nemo; Jaws, the all-time classic; and Shark Tale. It just helps make it all a bit clearer. And cleariness is next to godliness in Grammar World.

I do feel like I'm missing something, bearing in mind that there's a global debate about this. Am I? Have I got it all wrong? I haven't consulted anyone/anything about it since my GCSEs 10 years ago.

*I'm assuming this was a practice run by several vets.