by Barry, Dave
I realize that I may sound as if I’m pushing the hackneyed old stereotype that women talk way more than men. So let me clarify something: That is exactly what I am doing. Because the stereotype is true. It is a scientific fact that women talk more than men. This was proven in a study done by researchers at the University of Maryland and reported on the Internet, a leading source of information. If I understand this study correctly—and I think we can all agree that this is highly unlikely—it concerned a protein called FOXP2, which is associated with vocalization, and which is found, among other places, in the brains of baby rats. In their study, the researchers found that if you separate mother rats from their babies, they will bite you.
No, seriously, the researchers found that the baby rats whose brains contained higher levels of FOXP2 emitted more distress cries and, as a result, the mother rats retrieved these babies first. I was surprised by this. Not the protein part; the part about the mother rats retrieving their babies. I don’t think of rats as being maternal. I think of them as being vermin. I assumed that if you separated a mother rat from her babies, she would just shrug* and resume scurrying around and spreading the bubonic plague. But no: She’s a mom! She retrieves her babies! Aw.
Then she eats them.
No, I don’t know what she does with them and I frankly don’t care because—follow me closely here—they are rats. But the scientific point is that the baby rats with more FOXP2 protein in their brains vocalized more than the ones with less. And here’s the thing: It turns out that FOXP2 is also found in the brains of humans, and female humans have more of it. So there is your scientific reason why women talk more. We still don’t know what causes women to wear shoes that hurt, or fill their homes with reeking decorative candles that provide no more illumination than a lukewarm bagel, or watch The View, or put small weird-shaped pillows on beds that already have pillows, but we assume some kind of mutant brain proteins are also causing these behaviors.
Anyway, I think both men and women can benefit from the Maryland study—men by understanding that women have a biological tendency to vocalize, and women by understanding that it would not kill them to every once in a while just shut up.
Kidding! I am kidding!
But I do think you women can learn something important from this study, which is this: The next time you become frustrated with your husband or boyfriend because you don’t think he’s sharing his innermost thoughts and feelings with you, remember: Talking is not as easy for him as it is for you. Men are more suited to taking action, such as opening a beer, or opening a second beer.
You should also consider the fact that men, compared to women, don’t have all that many innermost thoughts and feelings, and the ones we do have we are not necessarily proud of. Consider the situation of a man and a woman on a first date. I guarantee you they are not thinking the same kinds of things:
What the woman is thinking: He’s physically attractive enough, but what about his personality? Is he intelligent? Does he have a good sense of humor? Does he have good manners? Is he self-centered or is he sincerely interested in me? Is he involved in any other relationships? Is he in good physical shape? Does he drink too much? Use drugs? Is he trustworthy? Does he have a good job? Would he be a good provider? What kind of family does he come from? What are his interests? What about his values? Are our backgrounds similar enough that we would be compatible? Does he want to have children? What kind of parent would he be? Am I talking too much about myself?
What the man is thinking: She has a vagina!
Trust me, that’s pretty much all he is thinking. Men have that particular thought a lot. And they think it in a totally positive way. But it’s not something they can share. So when you ask us what we’re thinking and we answer, “Nothing,” take it as a compliment. We’re probably thinking about you! Or at least your vagina. Or somebody’s vagina. Or the situation at offensive tackle.
The point is, whatever we’re thinking, you don’t really want to know, OK? This doesn’t mean you can’t have meaningful conversations with us. It just means you’ll have to provide the topics and most of the actual words. But that’s OK! We don’t mind listening! Really.
As long as we can see the TV.
We’re becoming a nation of illiterates. Ask any group of businesspeople who read a lot of job applications to name their biggest single complaint, and chances are they’ll tell you they’ve gained weight since college, even though back then they ate pizza and drank beer all the time.
But if you clarify that you are asking them about the job applications, chances are they’ll tell you that young people today have terrible writing skills. They don’t know the rules of grammar or punctuation, they can’t spell, they use tiny, unreadable fonts that look like bacteria and they’re always texting each other pictures of their private parts, which is not directly related to their writing skills but, dammit, what is wrong with these kids?
Who is to blame for this illiteracy? I think that we in the older generation—the parents who raised these young people—have to look in the mirror and, painful as it is, face the culprit: a combination of factors, including the Internet, reality television, “hip-hop,” global climate change and Starbucks.
But whatever the cause, it’s a big problem because writing is a crucial life skill. If you’re a recent college graduate and you send a poorly written résumé to potential employers, they’re going to throw it straight into the trash. Whereas if your résumé is well written and error free, the odds are very good that they’re still going to throw it into the trash, because the job market sucks. But they throw the well-written résumés away a little later. That’s the group you young people want to strive for.
“But,” I hear you whining in unison, “isn’t grammar hard and boring?”
No, English grammar is not “hard and boring.” That is a myth. All you have to do is learn a few simple, logical rules. Once you’ve mastered those, all you have to do is learn nineteen trillion totally illogical exceptions to the rules because otherwise you will sound like an idiot. So reflecting back on the opening sentence of this paragraph, we see that English grammar is, in fact, hard and boring. We’d better get started!
Step one is to learn:
THE PARTS OF SPEECH
The parts of speech are sometimes called the building blocks of grammar, because most of them are rectangular. The main parts of speech are:
Nouns
A noun is a person, place or thing. For example, consider this sentence:
As far as actors, Leonardo DiCaprio is no Marlon Brando.
In this example, “Leonardo DiCaprio” is a noun because he is a person whereas “Marlon Brando” is not because he died in 2004.
Exception: Zombies, despite being technically dead, can be nouns when used grammatically in lymphatic phrases, such as:
Help! Zombies is eating my spleen!
Pronouns
Pronouns are words that stand in for nouns when for some reason you don’t want to come right out and say the name of the noun:
You better not let you know whom get a load of that hickey.
I’m not saying who dropped the air biscuit during the State of the Union speech, but his initials are Joe Biden.
After seven straight hours on the back of Darnell’s Harley, Marge was feeling a little funky down there.
Verbs
Verbs are words that describe actions.
What is all that ruckus?
You are darned tooting.
Don’t make me come over there and open up a can of whupass on your ass.
Dang it!
When Vernell found the duck sauce on his Barcalounger, he like to threw a conniption fit.
I would describe those actions as very unusual.
Exception: If no actual action takes place, the sentence does not need a verb, as in these examples:
Francine watched the entire 2010 sea
son of Cake Boss.
The pitcher threw a no-hitter.
The president met with congressional leaders to discuss ways to improve the economy.
Adjectives
Adjectives are words that tell you something about a noun:
For a person of his stature, Leonardo DiCaprio has quite a large head.
In the 1991 movie Critters 3, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a young man who locks his mean stepfather in a room with space creatures that eat him.
The letters in “Leonardo DiCaprio” can be rearranged to spell “A ripe raccoon dildo.”
Adverbs
Adverbs are words that end in “ly,” such as personally, frankly, manly and ugly. They are used to form parts of sentences, as follows:
Four people died from wings-related injuries inflicted during a family function at Chuck E. Cheese.
Bernice put a doily over the hamster doots.
Holy moly, there’s mice in this lasagna.
Prepositions
Prepositions are words such as in, of, to, from, around, about, aforementioned and yonder. They introduce prepositional phrases, which are used mainly to write song lyrics:
I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.
I got passion in my pants and I ain’t afraid to show it.
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby, don’t you know that I’m loving you.
She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes. / She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes. / She’ll be coming ’round the mountain, she’ll be coming ’round the mountain, / She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes.
Round round get around / I get around / Yeah / Get around round round I get around.
Since you put me down there’s been owls pukin’ in my bed.
Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?
Very Important Rule: You must never, ever end a sentence with a preposition. Why? Because Hitler ended sentences with prepositions, that’s why. So if it appears that your sentence is about to end with one, you need to change it:
Wrong
Right
Where is that odor coming from?
Where is that odor coming from, God damn it?
Australia is known as “The Land Down Under.”
Australia is known as “The Land Down Underneath.”
What up?
What up, home dog?
Come on over.
Come on over, God damn it.
Articles
The articles in English are a, an, the and sometimes why. Grammatically, articles are used to form permutative interjections, as in these examples:
Like I give a rat’s ass.
What an idiot.
Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
Why, God damn it?
OK, now that we have mastered the “building blocks,” let’s see how they go together in the next section, titled:
FORMULATING A CORRECT GRAMMATICAL SENTENCE
Every sentence contains two main parts:
The subject, which is the subject of the sentence, and
The predicate, which is the other main part of the sentence.
Consider this example:
Lester wondered how come lately whenever he called Francine to find out where she was, she always claimed she was in “yoga class,” even though, number one, she did not own a yoga mat that Lester knew of, number two, he was not aware of any yoga classes in the greater Waco area that met at 2:30 a.m., not to mention which, number three, one time when he called, her a man in the background yelled, “Francine, hang up the damn phone and take off the rest of your clothes,” although Lester was leery of making a fuss about this in light of the recent situation wherein, the morning after he allegedly attended a Monster Truck rally with his brother Wesley, Francine happened to be rooting around under the front seat of his car and found a brassiere that was not remotely her size.
At first glance this sentence appears to be very complex, but when we break it down into its basic components, we suddenly see how our grammatical “building blocks” work together:
Subject
Predicate
Lester
wondered how come lately whenever he called Francine to find out where she was, she always claimed she was in “yoga class,” even though, number one, she did not own a yoga mat that Lester knew of, number two, he was not aware of any yoga classes in the greater Waco area that met at 2:30 a.m., not to mention which, number three, one time when he called her, a man in the background yelled, “Francine, hang up the damn phone and take off the rest of your clothes,” although Lester was leery of making a fuss about this in light of the recent situation wherein, the morning after he allegedly attended a Monster Truck rally with his brother Wesley, Francine happened to be rooting around under the front seat of his car and found a brassiere that was not remotely her size.
When writing sentences, you should always follow this basic format, which has been the “backbone” of English grammar dating back to the ancient Greeks.
The Kinds of Sentences
There are four kinds of sentences:
Declarative: Call me Ishmael.
Interrogative: Call me, Ishmael?
Imperative: Call me Ishmael or I will punch your face in.
Text: ish r u awake? (Picture of private parts.)
Common Sentence Mistakes to Avoid “Run-on” Sentences
These are sentences that keep on going past the point where you should have ended them:
I don’t think you look fat in those pants any more than usual.
Upon graduating from college with honors I was hired as a sales associate by a major brokerage firm and quickly rose to the position of district manager before a time-traveling flamingo ordered me to kill my supervisor.
Sentence Fragments
Sentence fragments occur when you leave out an important grammatical element that is necessary to fully understand the sentence:
Wrong
Right
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not kill unless thou hast an expensive legal defense team.
We show your flight departing on time.
We show your flight departing on time, but we are lying.
I’m afraid the biopsy shows you have cancer.
I’m afraid the biopsy shows you have cancer. Ha-ha, April fool! You should see the look on your face! But seriously, all kidding aside, it turns out you have leprosy.
Answers to Common Grammatical Questions
Q. What is the difference between “your” and “you’re”?
A. Many people are confused by this because the two words are so much alike, and these people have the intelligence of corn meal. Grammatically, the difference is that “your” is used in expressions of remunerative culpability:
As the bridegroom your responsible irregardless of whomever physically shot them urinals.
Whereas “you’re” is used in connubial imprecations:
You cheating bastard, I hope Jasmine cuts you’re pecker off.
Q. When do I use “infer” and when do I use “imply”?
A. These two words are often used interchangeably, but, in fact, they have entirely different meanings, as we see in these examples:
Duane inferred that Clark was packing Nutella in his Speedo.
Duane implied that Clark was packing Nutella in his Speedo.
&nb
sp; Q. What is the correct use of “decimated”?
A. It is correctly used in arthropodic phrases, such as:
Tina was totally decimated when she sobered up and realized there was nine legs on her forehead spider tattoo.
Q. What about “affect” and “effect”?
A. You should never use either of these words.
Q. What is the proper use of the expression “moot point”?
A. Its proper use is to defeat your opponent in an argument, as follows:
You: Abraham Lincoln was our first Jewish president.
Your Opponent: Lincoln wasn’t Jewish.
You: That’s a moot point.
Your Opponent: Very well then, I concede.
Q. When should I use “it’s” and when should I use “its”?
A. This depends on whether you plan to use an apostrophe somewhere else. Under international grammar rules, there can only be one apostrophe per sentence, as we see in these examples:
The dog licked it’s personal region.
Its not my fault those mango’s exploded.
A good way to remember the apostrophe rule is to memorize this simple poem:
To get it right with ease
Simply count the apostrophes
If more than one is there
Something something beware
Q. Is there any way to tell the difference between “they’re,” “their” and “there”?
A. Not at this time.