A great night of darts yesterday. I threw a coveted 180 (highest possible score), which by my reckoning, makes four this year already. That’s usually my annual output. Even rarer and more unusual than a 180; we made it through the entire tournament without losing a single leg (a match is best of three, we never lost once). A special night indeed!
I treated myself to a Sunday morning breakfast out today at the Jewel restaurant. I was faced with a dilemma: banana pancakes or French toast? This was my solution:
Sometimes you’ll see something on the internet that just really hits home in an “if the shoe fits, wear it” kinda way.
Congratulations to Donald Trump on beating the impeachment rap for the second time. Even more impressive is that he did it once as President and once when he wasn’t even in office. Amazing! Of course the whole thing was a farce as this video makes abundantly clear:
Anyway, I’m glad I am so far away from all the madness. I honestly can not imagine ever living in the USA again. I probably wouldn’t in the best of times either, but I ain’t about to be woke. Or even pretend to be. What I have been enjoying is throwing the occasional grenade out at my lefty Facebook friends just to give them a taste of the bullshit they dispensed for the previous four years.
I stole the above meme from Kevin Kim’s blog. Speaking of Kevin, I’ve been a long-term project of his when it comes to improving my grammar. Especially punctuation, and commas in particular. You may have noticed his comment to my post yesterday for example. I am trying to improve, but my failure rate is still quite high. I struggled mightily trying to get the first paragraph of today’s post right. Not sure that I succeeded.
Anyway, I mention this because a friend had posted this video on his Facebook timeline this morning. I’d actually seen it before but it was still enjoyable to watch it again, especially if dark humor is your thing. I did check to see if I had posted it here on LTG previously and didn’t find it. Now, Kevin proudly wears the mantle of “grammar Nazi”, so this one is for you!
That’s all for today. Thanks for dropping in.
[REPOSTED. ERRORS FOUND IN PREVIOUS COMMENT. YES, I POLICE MYSELF, TOO. PLEASE DELETE MY PREVIOUS REMARKS.]
Congrats on your darting victory! May your yearly output of 180s increase to at least six this year.
As for your first paragraph, let’s see… let’s see…
A great night of darts yesterday.
This looks fine. Trivia: it’s a fragment, not a sentence, but it’s natural English, and there are times when natural English shouldn’t be messed with. You write your blog in a folksy-raconteur kind of tone, and I take that into consideration when I’m examining your prose.
I threw a coveted 180 (highest possible score), which by my reckoning, makes four this year already.
Three possible corrections here:
(1) Add a comma after “which” because the phrase “by my reckoning” is what we call a parenthetical, i.e., it’s an aside that can be lifted out of the sentence without disturbing the sentence’s basic meaning. You need to do this because, if you don’t, you’re interrupting the space between the subject and the verb of your clause with a comma. The clause begins with the subject “which”; the verb is “makes.” Only a parenthetical, with its pair of commas, is an exception to the “no comma between subject and predicate” rule.
(2) Or rewrite your sentence this way (note the new comma placement): “I threw a coveted 180 (highest possible score) which, by my reckoning, makes four this year already.”
We’re still legitimately interposing a parenthetical between “which” and “makes,” but we’ve eliminated the comma before “which” as a way to keep from overpopulating the sentence with commas. I can’t vouch for the grammatical legitimacy of this move, but lots of good writers do it, and it seems to be a stylistic trend that’s taking over the language. Generally, before a relative (and non-restrictive) clause starting with “which,” you should put a comma before “which.” Consider this situation a rare exception.
(3) As I’ve written many times over on my blog, the Brits hate commas, these days, way more than we Yanks do, so if you want to sound British, just eliminate the commas surrounding the parenthetical, like so: “I threw a coveted 180 (highest possible score), which by my reckoning makes four this year already.” I wouldn’t recommend this style, but that’s because I’m only a Yank. Brits would give this a pass.
That’s usually my annual output.
Looks good.
Even rarer and more unusual than a 180; we made it through the entire tournament without losing a single leg (a match is best of three, we never lost once).
I’m not sure what’s going on here, but you don’t need a semicolon. Remember that a semicolon separates two independent clauses. In the above sentence, the words before the semicolon (“Even rarer and more unusual than a 180”) don’t constitute a clause. A clause is a group of words with a subject and a verb—so where’s the subject? Where’s the verb? To me, this looks more like an introductory phrase, so a comma is sufficient.
Where you do need a semicolon is in the parenthetical: “a match is best of three, we never lost once.” As written, this is a comma splice, i.e., you used a comma where you needed a semicolon. Those are two independent clauses. As I’ve mentioned before, if you still can’t figure out what counts as a clause, and whether that clause is dependent or independent, then you’re fucked when it comes to properly placing commas. Reread Part One of my comma series; it thoroughly explains clauses.
A special night indeed!
A comma before “indeed” would be nice, but as with the “too” issue, this may be more a stylistic choice than a violation of a strict rule. The fact is that, with both sides of the pond doing their damnedest to murder commas wherever they find them, leaving the comma out in this context won’t be a problem in a couple decades. Hopefully, by then, I’ll be dead.
Yours,
Hans Landa
“This looks fine. Trivia: it’s a fragment, not a sentence, but it’s natural English…”
Ha! I was thinking that writing in sentence fragments would eliminate my problems with commas.
“I threw a coveted 180 (highest possible score), which by my reckoning, makes four this year already.
Three possible corrections here”
Yeah, that’s the sentence I struggled with the most. I was going for the parenthetical you mention but needed that other comma. Oh well, I gave it a shot…
Indeed, is there ever a case of, you know, using too many commas, hypothetically speaking, of course, in a sentence just to be in the “better safe, than sorry, camp? Yeah, I’m just fucking with you, Hans. 🙂