Have You Eaten Grandma?

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PDF / EPUB File Name: Have_You_Eaten_Grandma_-_Gyles_Brandreth.pdf, Have_You_Eaten_Grandma_-_Gyles_Brandreth.epub

Brandreth is many things, but linguist or language professional is not one of them. This will be important later when he talks about grammar. Ok, forget that. We’re starting off with the bad stuff in this book. Because it’s mostly bad. The bad Lies, lies, lies To me, punctuation matters and good spelling is essential. Clear written communication depends on them. The words we use and the way in which we use them are fundamental, but the nuts and bolts of grammar – and the vocabulary of the grammarian – are less important to me. […] I was on the bus yesterday and I overheard a teenage schoolboy tell his friend: “I was like a bit late like, not like a lot late like, just a bit like late, but he like just went like ballistic, you know like, really totally mad. It was terrible like.’ Best thing ever, laugh-a-lot, spanning everything. Great book, I'm loving this Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2If you are from one of the nations that England colonized and got through that without cringing, here is more. And this is about the name of the book. Brilliant, clear, entertaining, very funny and often outright silly. Brandreth excels . . . in all his linguistic joie de vivre and amusing self-awareness * Guardian *

Lol. The subject of the sentence is absolutely not the person or thing doing the action – that’s the agent and that’s a semantic analysis. The Subject is a term for syntactic analysis and we figure out what it is in a few different ways. But guess what? The subject of a sentence in English can be a noun phrase, a prepositional phrase, a finite clause, a non-finite clause – all kinds of stuff. Again, just a peak into a linguistics book or a grammar would clear this up for Brandreth. But I guess it’s too much torture. This is an amazing reference book for people, who care about correct language usage and auto-correct people when they write something wrong (grammar/spelling/punctuation police such as myself). It can be irritating for some but language is one of the most valuable assets of humankind, and I do not think that we should take it for granted. We're losing important cultural values due to misuse of the language, and technology is usually the one to blame for this. Gyles Brandreth beautifully highlights the most common mistakes that we make when we speak English/write in English. Thus, it's not a book to read and leave it to collect dust on the shelf but it should be treated as a timeless reference guide. And that’s acceptable, too. “End of” as a complete, two-word sentence has even appeared in Hansard, the official record of proceedings in the British Parliament. In 2018, a minister of the crown finished an official statement with a definitive sign-off. “End of,” he said, and sat down. A] witty usage guide… Bolstered with an epilogue giving straightforward definitions for different parts of speech, his passionate, enlightening, and easily navigable manual is certainly the right book at the right time.”

Gyles Brandreth is one of Britain’s busiest after-dinner speakers and award ceremony hosts. He has won awards himself, and been nominated for awards, as a public speaker, novelist, children’s writer, broadcaster (Sony), political diarist (Channel Four), journalist (British Press Awards), theatre producer (Olivier), and businessman (British Tourist Authority Come to Britain Trophy). Some readers might not have predicted that a former Conservative MP would be so liberal and happy about modern changes in usage. He counsels his audience to read “the rappers” as well as Jane Austen, and enjoys the possibilities of expression represented by new terms for sexual orientation, or online initialisms such as FML and YMMV. Even with a usage he personally finds irritating, such as “bored of” (rather than “bored with”), he consults “my friends at the Oxford University Press”, who tell him it is now very common. Only occasionally does he put a fogeyish foot down, insisting that “Can I get?” (the coffee-shop version of “Can I have?”) is “wrong, wrong, WRONG”. It’s hard to see why, since no misunderstanding is possible, and I suspect that “Can I get?” might even be an adorably polite display of diffidence, an unwillingness to focus on my own greedy desire to have something. I admit it. I'm a pedant about the English language. I have a mug that says 'Less sugar, fewer suger-lumps.' Not that it stops me regularly getting things wrong (regularly? frequently? Haley's Comet was regular. You see, this is the sort of thing that I find myself pondering). And I'll admit my spelling is appaulling/ abbyssmal / dredful... If you love digging into English grammar and poking at the inconsistencies, this might be for you even if you don't really need another usage manual. Brandreth's tone is conversational and funny, and his advice is good, if broad. I particularly enjoyed the historical info and info on differences between British and American English. This has a much nicer tone than Eats Shoots and Leaves, so I'd recommend it over that one to people who want to learn more about usage. Brandreth doesn't belittle his reader who doesn't know as much as he does about grammar, which is a huge plus. This book won't take the place of my beloved Garner's American Usage (now Modern English Usage in the 4th edition) but it certainly deserves a place on my bookcase and in my recommendations to students. His past books include; Word Play, Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries.