But I won’t even begin with that frustration. And pages in books present a challenge, too (Nook Books are cheaper, anyway).Īnd then there’s the iPhone keyboard or whatever you call those little squares with letters on the screen of my phone. Turning pages while playing the organ is simply impossible.
This morning it was getting hold of the “pull here to open” tab on the half-and-half bottle to cream my coffee. Buttoning the top button on a dress shirt, for example. They begin to balk at doing small jobs that they have done all your life. The subject at hand (pun, I suppose, intended as you will see below) is what happens to your fingers as you senesce. There’s a funny thing about getting old(er). My subject is “a funny thing” although it is obscured and delayed so you would hardly know it by my use of the expletive. What is the subject in my sentence about a funny thing? I told students that they did not need to vent their frustration at the writing process by swearing at me.
That is, they are profane substitutes for telling your reader what you’re talking about.
What many people (most people, even college graduates) don’t know is that “There is” and “It is” and their various tenses are “expletives.” They hold the place of a real subject in a sentence. An expletive, I would explain, is “an interjectory word or expression, frequently profane an exclamatory oath.” Anyone old enough to remember 1975 knows why I always used Richard Nixon as my opening example for a lesson about writing expletives. Just one for today, at any rate.įor 35 years of teaching college writing, whenever a student began a sentence with “there,” I patiently asked them if they knew about Richard Nixon. A new-fangled cream bottle dressed in environmentally dangerous plastic, nearly impossible to tear into.