Anything A Squirrel Can Do To A Tree

When did “negativity” become a word? I can comprehend a person having a negative outlook, or exuding negativeness. But what exactly is negativity?

Or, for that matter, “conflicted.”

I have conflicts. Sometimes these conflicts are of such magnitude that I become a “frustrated old man.” The level of the frustration depends upon how overwhelmed I am with conflicts. I never think about being “conflicted.”

One can be addicted. (Think Diet Pepsi or EBay.) But addictivity - the state of being addicted?

Just because Betty Lou or Bobby use a word repeatedly doesn’t qualify it for inclusion into the language. Yet, that seems to be the trend. Our language suffers daily with the attempts to “streamline” our patterns of speech.

I constantly hear people misuse the word, “myself.” Isn’t the use of “myself” to be as a modifier of a pronoun, not a substitute for the pronoun? Have I misunderstood something? Myself offered the solution?

If I were pressed to answer questions on predicates, transitive verbs, or the future positive tense, I would be sorely hardput. But I try to keep the basics intact.

“Going into the stadium our seats were lost.” This was the example that Mrs. Murelle Dean gave as an example of a dangling participle. She would even stand in the chair allowing her left foot to move precariously through the open air in order to make her point. I am not certain that it had any impact on any of us since we always had our tickets firmly ensconced in our wallet before entering any stadium. But she labored on to help us understand our communication with others.

Remember diagramming sentences?

My high school English teachers - Mrs. Dean included - spent endless hours trying to get everyone to explore the language in what I felt was a useless exercise. All those strange lines trailing out from the words of the sentence. Instead, I wound up remembering “formulas” to understand the various parts of speech.

A noun is a person, place, or thing.

An adjective is a modifier of a noun – a person, place or thing.

An adverb is a modifier of a verb and sometimes an adjective.

A verb is a word that tells you what that person, place, or thing is doing.

And most importantly, a preposition is anything a squirrel can do to a tree!

WHAT?

A preposition is anything a squirrel can do to a tree.

Up, to, from, over, in, out, around, by, with……… all things squirrels do to the trees in my neighborhood. Sure they do a lot more, but let’s stick to language and not go there.

With this simple axiom, you will always know where to place the comma.

Do I sense parenthesitivity?