Brooklyn Comedy Company

Panel 1, not panel 3

Please. Don’t say “on accident.”

But maybe it is!

It does suggest a writing topic. And I see the sign got the apostrophe correct!

The word in question is “contentious.”

Contentiousness is a human emotion or behavior. It’s not something that inanimate objects such as evidence do.

So I say the sentence should say:

Such a shift of Earth is called “true polar wander”, but the evidence for this process has been a source of contention.

What do you think?

Here’s a picture from the article:

“Comprise” means something like “is composed of” and a lot of people, wanting to sound high class, get it wrong. Here’s how to use “comprise”:

By at least 55,000 years ago, the first Australians had navigated open seas in boats to reach the super-continent of Sahul, or Greater Australia (comprising Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania, which were one land mass when sea levels were lower). 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03497-0

The whole thing comprises its parts. Got it?

The sentence is from a book review. The book is Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs Pat Shipman Belknap (2021) and here’s a picture from the review:

Both “eager” and “anxious” can refer to one’s attitude about the future, but they represent opposite attitudes.

• Eager means you’re looking forward to something.
• Anxious means you’re fearful about something.

This guy gets it wrong:

Don’t get those words wrong, and don’t be that kind of guest!

When you have a sentence that’s contrary to reality!

I’ve mentioned this in the past (use the search box on the right) but I thought this example was clear (funny) enough to justify a repeat:

Anyway, he should have said, “I wish I were less gullible.” I know a few people who could use one of those rocks…

Well, I find it easiest to quote Wikipedia:

A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light, or revealing something unknown or spurious about them. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. Wikipedia

I should add that the meter is rather informal.

I subscribe to Scientific American. Recently the renewed a practice of including a page of poetry in their magazine. Seems weird to me, but so far the poems have been pretty much science oriented, so they fit, even if the practice feels funny to me. Their Clerihew page has been littering my desk for a couple months now, and I’m finally getting around to posting about it.

So I challenge you to write a Clerihew and post it. Here’s one off the top of my head:

Rogers George writes Writing Rag
At first he thought it’d be a gag
But comics and grammar go together,
So he wrote a post and then another.

Your turn!

The verb I’m thinking about is “to blend in.” Do we have an adverb for it? Well, here’s the pattern I’ve seen in this situation. Last panel.

How would you say it? What verbs can you think of to change into adverbs?

Use the past perfect when something ends in the past, not merely happened in the past. This guy should have used the past perfect! Last panel.

“I wish I had known,” not “I wish I knew,” because the knowing could end in the past, and the simple past implies the knowing is still happening. Too late!