Saturday, August 20, 2016

Bettina, I hope there is something in Knitlass’ comment on your comment yesterday, to give your son something to think about. There are plenty of ways forward other than university and all that debt, and I very much hope he will find one of them soon.  As for Archie, he sounded perfectly cheerful when he phoned on Thursday with the news that he would be going to Lancaster. He’ll be fine.

His whole family, including dog, has now set forth on the drive across Europe to Edinburgh. Today, Ravenna, which for Helen, the mosaicist, will be like Shetland to me.

And as for knitting, I got the stitches picked up and the gusset decreases worked, on the second Vampire sock. Time to begin thinking about the next pair.

And I moved a bit forward with the Uncia. I am currently mired in another instruction to “repeat rows XX-YY a further 7 times”. And there’s another such passage before I reach the sunny uplands of the charts. I love the way it’s looking, fanning out indeed like a Gothic column as it expands to support the lacy ceiling of the cathedral.

Non-knit

Here’s the threatened grammar lesson. It’s from the article about the Trumps in the current New Yorker. The author identifies herself as Harvard, so I’m not picking on someone smaller than myself.

“…his younger sister, Esther Schulder, whom he believed was cooperating with Christie.”

That’s wrong. “Whom” should be “who”. You don’t need rules. Just unpick the sentence – “he believed (“she”? or “her”?) was cooperating…” Obviously, “she”. So “who”, when you put it back together.

Extraordinarily, there’s another example of the same construction later in the same sentence. “…he set a trap for her husband…whom he resented for having had an affair at the office.” “Whom” is right, that time. “He resented him (not “he”) for having had an affair…”

Now you know how to do it.

I still have The Hunting of the Snark open on the table here, and discover, when they have landed and are preparing for the actual hunt:

But the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed
                No interest in the concern.

Though the Barrister tried to appeal to its pride,
                And vainly proceeded to cite
A number of cases, in which making laces
                Had been proved an infringement of right.

5 comments:

  1. Lesson learned! I'm surprised that copy editors at the NY-er missed that. I haven't read the article yet, so I am letting myself off the hook. I looked at some illustrations for the Snark, and the Beaver has a lace-making pillow.

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  2. Thank you for the grammar lesson. Now if someone could teach me the usage of lay and lie, I would be set. Since they share words in the past tense I can never keep them straight.

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  3. thanks for the comments - and I know that there'll be something for my son - eventually.... it's a pity that teenagers have to make difficult choices at a point in their lives, where they have to find themselves first of all!
    and thanks for the grammar tip - I find on-hand explanations so much easier to remember than the "dry" stuff they put into grammar books:)

    about the Uncia - I think I'll better keep at it instead of switching all the time. if I knit a bit every day I can remember the chart symbols; if I interrupt my knitting I find that I have to start looking some of them up again.... the arches are slowly unfolding and I love the looks of it already. I adore the different "fancy" cables Lucy Hague uses - they give me ideas for my own patterns, which started when I knitted her Morvarch shawl... happy knitting!

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  4. Anonymous6:03 PM

    I'm glad to know Archie wasn't disappointed. Maybe he was really fearing a much-worse outcome and was relieved to have done so well?

    Safe travels to the Helens.

    Beverly in NJ

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  5. Thank you for the grammar lesson. I'm surprised the NYer got it wrong. Their copyeditors are famously persnickety.

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