Connotation vs. Denotation

Since today is the husband and my anniversary (I think; that whole date thing is kind of wiggy in my messy mind.), I thought I would use today’s TKT to talk about marriage. Marriage the word, that is, not necessarily all the silly aspects of it like the fact that I use too much garlic when I cook for us and he leaves his socks by the couch or that we’re two of the happiest people in the world Continue reading →

English Infixes

I know it has been a while since I’ve done a TKT, but I’m avoiding paper-grading at the moment, so I figured now would be a great time to pull another TKT out of the woodwork. Today’s topic is about English infixes. You may remember that TKT #4 was about French pejorative suffixes, but that in order to explain that, I went through a fairly lengthly lesson on morphemes and Continue reading →

French Pejorative Suffixes

Well, since the thesis is holding most of my attention this week, I thought it would be an appropriate TKT topic to discuss what my thesis is all about. I could just post the entire thing up here (I have it in PDF format, after all), but who wants to read through 119 pages of esoteric French linguistics research? Hell, I wrote it and don’t want to read through all that right now! So Continue reading →

Thee, thine, thou and thy

To start the lesson on the pronouns thee, thine, etc., first I’ll explain pronouns really quick so you’re familiar with the different kinds. A pronoun occupies the same position as nouns and noun phrases. So “sister” can be replaced by “her” and “my beautiful antique vase” can be replaced by “it,” for example. The different kinds are as follows: Continue reading →

Well, I hadn’t expected to have to do anything for Sycamore Advantage this morning, but two students showed up (one freshman, one transfer) for the Sycamore Advantage transfer day. Susan (who isn’t feeling well) took the freshman and I took the transfer student. Heather’s out, so the closet is pretty quiet now and now’s a good time to work on TKT #2: lay vs. lie. Continue reading →

Thirsty for Knowledge Thursday #1: Shall

I decided that I wanted to have a day where I do a regular post, kind of like Lushbaugh’s Fish Friday and how the big sis always posts her weight loss (and sporadic, unfortunate gain) on the same day of the week. Since I had so much fun posting about phrasal verbs on Katie’s page yesterday, I thought that maybe I could make linguistic randomness a regular part of my own site. Continue reading →