dunno - His First Novel

Jon is 15 and life is hard. Money is tight and Jon is trapped in a hopeless miserable existence.

Then by chance, he meets someone who helps him to see things differently.

Despite girls, bullies, teachers, policemen, his mother and her violent boyfriend, Jon wants to survive. Once he finds Jimmy and Paul, he begins to take control of his life. He becomes an apprentice adult.

dunno

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dunno
Charles Kimpton Publishers. Sep 2004. £6.
ISBN 0954761405.

English Text Book

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Introduction

Pig's Head1988. My last day in one school - a class of sixteen year-olds smuggled a pig’s head into my classroom . We had been studying William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; a group of boys on a tropical island kill a pig and set up its head as a totem. I was so very proud of them; it is not easy to get hold of a pig’s head in Dagenham, let alone smuggle it into school.

When I joined the school I told a class of fourteen year-olds that I was going to work them so hard they would hate me but a year on they started Year Eleven having passed the equivalent of GCSE - a year early. Now there was no doubt; they had brains and could expect to succeed. From this group came the school’s first student to gain an Oxbridge place and, eventually, a Cambridge PhD.

Now, I want to help people who feel let down by their English, people who perhaps want to get a job, or a better job, or students who have told that they should work on their English.

In my mid-twenties, I decided to change careers. A good education meant that I had a lot of choices and I realized that teaching is the most important job in the world. Ironically, it was my English teacher who was one of the least effective and English literature was the one exam I failed. Now I was qualified to teach it.

There is an important lesson in this; failure at school, failure with your first attempt at exams, is something that can be overcome. There are courses to help:

You will need to learn to help yourself and this can make a tremendous difference; one sixth-former whom I introduced to Latin needed only some help and encouragement from me. She learnt to study independently and passed her GCSE after only one year.

How will you help yourself?

    With determination You must really, really want to do this.

    With persistence You must be prepared to keep going even when it’s tough.

    With stubbornness You must be able to ignore people who laugh at you, who put you down.

Chemistry, history and modern languages are all important subjects, but English and maths are different. English is our means of communicating, showing and sharing our understanding of everything. Our skill in using it is an important part of the way other people judge us.

Listen to a deaf person speak and you will be aware that they cannot speak as easily as the rest of us; they cannot check the sounds that they make with the sounds the rest of us make. Babies hear words thousands and thousands of times, and understand them, long before they try to make the sounds themselves. Spoken English has to be learnt by listening first. In much the same way, written English is learnt by reading it and by examining it and thinking about it, by understanding it better.

Ford Prefect A long time ago, when I was nineteen, I had an old Ford Prefect. I did not care for it as I should have done and I discovered that car engines run very badly without oil. From a scrap yard I bought a replacement engine, but, before I installed it, I dismantled it, just to see how it worked.

Twelve hours later hundreds of bits stared at me from a workbench. I could see the state of the piston rings, which I replaced to reduce oil consumption and improve the compression; I could feel the wear on the cylinders and check for looseness of the bearings. I could see the burn marks on the exhaust valves, which I reground so that they would last much longer, and I could de-coke the engine, removing hard deposits of unburnt fuel to improve the engine’s performance.

Twenty-four hours later, I had reassembled the whole thing and fitted the engine into the car. I pulled the starter and, first time of asking, the engine sprang into life: one of my proudest moments. Now I understood how it worked and it was working better than ever.

This is what we are going to do with English.

However, studying you own language is different from studying anything else; unlike the engineer who has left a machine in pieces and walked down to the pub, we take our language with us and so we have to make a considerable effort when we want to stand aside from it and examine how it works.

Now you have an idea of how I am going to set about this business and you need a list of the topics that are coming your way. Here you can choose to tackle whichever sections matter to you or simply work your way through in the order in which I have written them. The first sections deal with the mechanics of English, how it works. Later sections deal with skills and the way we use the language.

If we are successful then you will be a competent user of written English. You will find yourself able to communicate effectively, able to digest and handle written information for all manner of purposes, social, political, commercial, academic, professional or personal.




Contents


Chapter One - Words and the jobs they do - parts of speech

Words are the basic units of language with which we communicate. Sometimes a word is enough on its own: “Stop.” Someone is telling you what to do. There might be a crash or simply an appearance before the local magistrates if you don’t, but stop you must. Just one word.

Sometimes a lot more words are used in a sentence. Count the words in each sentence in the first paragraph, eleven, nine, seven, twenty, and three. No, the last three words in the paragraph do not form a sentence but I have made them look like one. I will explain later, but for now it’s important to realise that sentences can be very short, or very long. One of the language’s longest sentences is to be found in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s just over a page long – about four hundred words! I will return to sentences, and phrases later. Now we must go back to basics, to words.

Words are sounds, or groups of sounds that enable us to mean things and to convey them to other people. Articulate or human speech – think of a bird’s eye view of an articulated lorry swerving sharply one way then another – articulate speech, the stretching and twisting of our mouth parts - seems to have enabled our predecessors to change and vary the basic sounds made by animals. Try making simple animal sounds. You will find that most animal sound is represented by the five letters which we call vowels, a,e,i,o,u. A good one to try is the mooing of a cow. (The best way to imitate the sound of a cow mooing is to open your mouth but let the sound come down your nose – most cows leave out the m.)

Then try reading this paragraph aloud, very slowly, very clearly and very carefully, like a television newsreader, or like someone who is trying to make a deaf person understand. Now you are using, very carefully, the sounds represented by the remaining twenty-one letters of the alphabet which represent the ways that we shape our mouths when we speak. These letters we call consonants – with the sound. They tell us how to shape our mouths as we make the sounds of our language. Try looking at your mouth in a mirror and watch closely, as you say “Tit,” “Bumble” then “Lilly.” Essentially, these twenty-six letters, our alphabet, enable us to write down the sounds of speech, to make a visual record of what we say.

As you read this you are actually using a sophisticated system for converting visual signs into speech which your brain picks up so quickly that you do not have time to speak them out loud, but which you understand as clearly as if you were listening to someone speaking much more slowly. Time yourself reading a page of this book silently, to yourself. You’ll probably take about a minute, possibly less. Then try reading it aloud. To do this you will take about three minutes, a speed of about one hundred words per minute.

When Angela Ripon read the news on BBC television she had to be slowed down once her reading speed reached 120 words per minute. Up to that speed viewers could take in what she was telling them. When you read silently, you are taking in words three times as quickly, something we have only been able to do in English for about six hundred years although we have been writing in English for about fifteen hundred years. So, what you are doing now is incredibly clever - your brain can think much faster than your mouth can speak, and you can now begin to appreciate even more the importance of the written language; it enables us to take in information incredibly rapidly. Now we are back to your concern to use the written language as well as you can, and the basics. Words.

Nouns

Words join together in phrases or sentences to form language and carry meaning. Some words, like “pencil” have an obvious meaning – we can point to things like pencils and say the word and we have conveyed the idea even to someone who does not speak English. Similarly we can point to a pig and teach the name for it, but how then would we teach someone the word “animal”? If the foreigner points at the pig and says, “animal” we cannot shake our heads and tell him that he is wrong. That would be confusing for him; it’s not his fault that he doesn’t realize that we want him to use the word for this particular animal. So, how are we going to teach both words so that our pupil learns to use both of them properly? Remember, the key thing is to set things up so that he cannot get things wrong. This is where you are now trying to stand outside your language, thinking about it in a different way, learning how it works.

Finding answers to this sort of question is something that teachers enjoy, a challenge to the brain. If I was teaching on a farm or in a zoo it would be easy to show that many of the creatures there could be called animals but only particular animals, those with long snouts, big ears and curly tails, and called Percy, could be called pigs. One answer would be to use pictures, in a book, on a sketch pad or on a white board. You can probably think up ideas of your own and that way you will be getting outside your language.

Just to be technical for a moment, animal here is a general word used to bring together several particular words such as goat and sheep. At another level, animal can be used as a particular word, along with bird and reptile, while we are using creature as a general word. Just as goats, pigs and sheep are all animals so animals, reptiles and birds are all creatures. General words hold together groups of particular words.

Brain hurting yet? Just think of all these animals running about in a classroom full of children. Not much teaching would get done. For that we need simple pictures of the animals and the names of the animals, labels, written underneath.

What I’m trying to show you here is the range of jobs that words can do on their own before they start to operate with other words. So far we have dealt only with some nouns, all of them common nouns. There are also proper nouns, collective nouns and abstract nouns.

Nouns are all names of things. I want you to imagine being at school, at the age of about twelve. A slightly mad young teacher has handed each of you some old-fashioned card luggage labels, the sort that has a hole at one end so that you can tie it to something. The teacher has been talking about nouns and naming or labelling things and asks you to write as many of the names of things in the room as you can, each on a separate label. When you have finished you are going to fasten the labels to the things to which they apply. The teacher has extra string, sellotape and blue-tack to help you with this.

So, decide now, which nouns are you going to fix as labels on things that are in the room?

This is where we find out whether you were trouble at school. The teacher walks around the class, looking at your choice of nouns. If you have written words like door, or desk or even student, that’s fine and you can fasten your labels onto something or someone straight away.

However, if you have prepared labels for certain body parts located between the shoulders and the crutch, then you will be made to wait to one side with your labels. Later, your teacher will tell you to give up the label to someone else in the class who will then label your private bits, rather than someone else’s, and you will have learnt that you are going to take notice of this teacher.

Someone has written friend on his label, but no one wants to be his friend so the teacher gets the boy to give the label to one of the girls who finds another girl to stand still long enough for her to tie the label to her wrist, long enough to be her friend.

Someone has written class. The teacher pauses for a moment, then reaches for the string and snips off a long, long piece. He gives it to the student who hands one end to another student who is standing at the edge of the room. While the others watch he walks around all of them, letting out the string as he goes. Back to the first student, he takes both ends of the string and pulls them as tightly as he can, Could this be you, the class joker? His victims wriggle and try to push each other onto the floor but they are tied together in a group, a class, and the joker is absolutely right with his label.

It could have been one of the nerds, or perhaps one of the clever buggers wanting to catch out this new teacher, but it’s one of the girls this time. Her word is bored. She stands in front of the teacher all wriggle and pout and hands on her hips. “Sort this out then, clever clogs.” You can imagine her saying the words, but she doesn’t. The teacher takes her label and picks up a pencil. He changes the word – boredom. “That do?” he asks and the girl nods.

“Charlie!” Charlie is one of nature’s artists – his cartoons appear in the school magazine, and other places when no one’s watching. “Charlie – can you help us out mate?” You remember teachers, always friendly when they want a favour.

The teacher explains something to Charlie who gets to work on the large whiteboard. Soon there is another class of students in front of you, all of them slumped on their desks, ignoring a match-stick figure of a teacher who is talking on and on in front of them. None of them is taking any notice; one is patting his mouth in an obvious gesture to the teacher who ignores him. Your teacher hands back the girl’s altered label and she sticks it on the white board. Even a foreigner coming into the classroom would realise what was what. The word is like the label on a painting or a photograph and we know that it tells us about the idea that the picture or photograph suggests, not about the things that are in the picture. It depends on our understanding of what we can see, of knowing that bored people put their heads down and yawn. It’s an abstract idea, pulled away from the actual things that we can see.

Then the teacher tells the class to pick up one more blank label each and write their own name on it. When they have done this he collects them up, shuffles them and walks around the room, sticking them onto windows, walls and doors, turned so the names cannot be seen. Now the each student has to find his or her label and there is chaos for several moments. Eventually everyone has the right one. Some of them cling to their labels as if they are their personal property and refuse to show the others and the class realises that there is only one place for each label.

“Each of you,” says the teacher, “has your own piece of property.” They are puzzled – so the school is giving away luggage labels - but they listen as he explains what proper nouns do – they name particular individuals, they label a particular sort of uniqueness.

What has the teacher taught the class? What have you learned from this?

There are four kinds of nouns.

Common nouns refer to ordinary things such as mushrooms, stars and names.

Collective nouns refer to groups of things: herds of cows, packs of wolves.

Abstract nouns refer to our understandings of things: boredom, friendship, justice and pain.

Proper nouns are like property; they belong to particular people, John Smith, or to particular places, New York for example.

Exercise One (All the exercises in this book are optional – I can hardly keep you behind if you don’t bother.) Ask yourself how well you think you have followed things so far. If you complete this exercise you should feel confident and that will help you move along more quickly. You will find the answers here. When you check your answers the important thing to do is to ensure that you understand any errors you have made.
i. Identify the nouns in these sentences and decide which type each one represents.
      a. Aeroplanes are expensive.
      b. Aeroplanes are expensive items.
      c. Fleets of aeroplanes are very expensive.
      d. British Airways’ shares are cheap.
      e. British Airways have been praised for their efficiency.
ii. Still unsure? Test and teach yourself. Make your own list of nouns, decide in which category each one belongs then check with a dictionary.
iii. Now try something a little more demanding.
      a. All cows eat grass.
      b. Teachers of music use this sentence as a mnemonic (pronounced newmonic) to help their pupils remember the notes on lines of written music.
      c. Players in a band have to respond to melody, harmony and rhythm if they are to succeed. If they do this well the result can be great enjoyment; if not there is cacophony.

[You should have found a total of 18, counting one of them twice.]


By now I hope that you are getting the hang of my way of explaining things. We need to move on. We still have to examine seven more kinds of words – parts of speech, to be technical.

Adjectives

You remember the pencils in the introduction, the green pencils and the red pencils. The words red and green are used to describe the pencils. I am very fussy about this, old-fashioned even, so pay attention. The words red and green do not describe the pencils, or anything else come to that; these are adjectives, used by human beings to describe things. In English, and other languages; only humans can describe things. [This is not the case in geometry.] If you get this wrong in future I will shout at you. Adjectives provide additional information about things – one of the pencils was red and another was green. Adjectives are said to qualify nouns, to tell us more about them; an intelligent horse, a kosher camel – no of course I haven’t checked – an incredible teacher.

A little complication now - there are always complications with our language - this and that, these and those.

In class I would point to one student and say something like, This boy at the front of the class and that boy at the back of the class may go home early. There would follow an argument about just which boys I meant for they would all want to go home early. The words this and that simply enable me to demonstrate exactly which boys are to go home early, just as red and green enabled me to indicate particular pencils. These and those are the plural forms of this and that: they are demonstrative adjectives. And a further complication; these four words can also function as pronouns which we will come to shortly.

Adverbs

We are going to remove one word from the sentence that follows.

Mr Blair resigned cheerfully.

Now look again.

Mr Blair resigned.

Doubtless you could find replacements: hastily, sneakily, craftily, honourably.

These adverbs could be used to qualify the verb resigned. (Remember qualify?) If you want to qualify the noun, Blair – what kind of noun? - that’s right, a proper noun - you could qualify Blair with an adjective so that we would read, Cheerful/hasty/sneaky/crafty/honourable Mr Blair resigned. To concentrate on the man we use adjectives. To concentrate on the way he does things we use adverbs. The adverb, cheerfully, adds to what the verb tells us, that he resigned. Now we know how he resigned, cheerfully.

Obviously the sort of people we are and the way we do things are linked, but we can choose to shift the emphasis from person to action. We could go further; Crafty Mr Blair resigned cheerfully, but one of Peter Brookes’ cartoons in The Times, following the Nantwich by-election in the spring of 2008, probably catches this much better – it shows New Labour as The Titanic, trying to re-launch itself from the ocean floor while Tony Blair, in the guise of a fish, swims away, grinning all the while.


There is one other function that adverbs have, to modify adjectives and other adverbs. I have italicised the adverbs in the next two sentences.

“This shirt is clearly red,” my wife tells me; she thinks I am colour blind.

I put down the shirt very slowly and ask myself why I have agreed to go shopping with her.

The shirt is not simply red, it is obviously red, or should be to anyone who is not blind or stupid and is clearly unsuitable, as my wife has tried to point out. (Here all three adverbs, simply, obviously and clearly are modifying the adjectives, red, and unsuitable.)

Very and slowly are both adverbs. Slowly qualifies the verb put down; it tells us how I put down the shirt. Very is an unusual adverb – it is only used to modify adjectives and other adverbs. If functions as an intensifier; here it tells us how slowly indeed I put down the shirt, which I really liked. Ordinary adverbs also work like this, as modifiers. For example fairly in:

Surely the shirt is not totally unsuitable for the colour will fade fairly quickly as I work out in the garden whenever I can.

Well done; adverbs finished for the moment.

Verbs

Do you remember “Stop”? When I ask kids how many words you need to form a sentence the answers can be great fun. I rarely get the correct response, “One, one verb.” We can’t stop now but we do need at least to slow down while we deal with this very important kind of word, the verb. This is the word that tells us what is happening or has happened, or will happen. There is of course an exception here; the verb to be tells us something about the state of the world, rather than about an action.

You are about to be thrown in at the deep end. There is no other way, but then you are capable, determined and learning fast. Tell me, can you try indentifying the verbs in the previous paragraph that begins, “Do you remember....? There are sixteen of them.

Here is the same paragraph with the verbs underlined.

Do (you) remember “Stop”? When I ask kids how many words you need to form a sentence the answers can be great fun. I rarely get the correct response, “One, one verb.” We can’t stop now but we do need at least to slow down while we deal with this very important kind of word, the verb. This is the word that tells us what is happening or has happened, or will happen. There is of course an exception here; the verb to be tells us something about the state of the world, rather than about an action.

There are three difficulties which should have revealed themselves by now. The first concerns the grammatical sense of “action.” This does not simply mean some physical event that we can see or hear. It can also refer to a mental action, when we think about something. The words, we do need at least to slow down from the last paragraph, show that I had thought about something, the speed with which I was presenting ideas to you. That was why I decided to slow down. My mind had been active. In grammar, the idea of an action is much wider and includes events that would not be thought of as action in the ordinary, common sense sort of way.

The second difficulty involves the “verbs” that follow the word to. To form and to slow. [Worry about down later.] These are very straightforward. They are the names of verbs, of actions. We call them infinitives and they are incomplete verbs, incomplete because there is no indication whether the action has already taken place, is taking place or will take place, and there is no indication of who or what it was that did the action. They are best regarded as the names of the verbs which are incomplete. [The word infinite is related to the French word fin which means end – originally Latin, finis.]

You knew this book would be good value for money, didn’t you – French and Latin thrown in free and German to follow soon!

Some of the verbs are single words, stop, ask, need, get, deals, is, tells. These are actions that happen and are no trouble to us. What happened? He or they or we stopped, asked, needed (something) or whatever.

The third puzzle I left for you comprises the verbs that are formed with more than one word, that appear in a phrase: do (you) remember, can be, can’t stop, do need, is happening, has happened, will happen. Here there is more than just the simple action. Do is a verb in its own right – we do things. Combined with the word that tells us who or what is doing the action, in this case you, they form a question. Another example, Can he swim? uses a different verb, the verb to be able – I can etc. In the case of has happened, the additional verb is the verb to have which marks a past tense – something that has taken place already. These extra verbs are used as auxiliary verbs. (Auxillium – Latin for help or assistance). Auxiliary verbs, combines with an ordinary verb, form compound verbs e.g. was working, is trying and will succeed. Like you.

There is a further puzzle – the way I keep putting words in brackets, like (you) in the paragraph above – or underlining them or putting them in italics. I can hear some of you muttering that it would be better if I simply just got on with it, but I did warn you that this would not be an easy course. What is more important is that it’s my way of using the language at the same time that I am trying to analyse it - remember. (If my wife ever reads this she will call it multi-tasking.)

Exercise Two Here are a few sentences with compound verbs; identify the auxiliaries then ask yourself about the information or understanding that the word brings to the sentence.
      William was smiling.
      They don’t smile here.
      He couldn’t wait.
      She might have waited.
      Can it be?
You will find the answers here. If you enjoy this sort of thing, look for more compound verbs in newspapers, magazines and books. If you don’t, make sure that you understand this before you continue, even if that means re-reading the section on verbs again or reading about verbs elsewhere. Sometimes another way of explaining something will do the trick.

And just to finish

Nothing happened is a sentence and, like all sentences, it depends on having a verb. In this case the verb is happened, which tells us what happened, grammatically – nothing. Nothing, other than the making of this statement, has occurred or taken place.

This, I hope, is as difficult as things are going to get.

In the meantime, as you have been working so hard, you can have a ten-minute break, long enough to get down to the bike sheds for a fag while I get ready for the next bit. But not until you can tell me how many auxiliaries are used with the first verb in this paragraph. OK. That was a bit hard. There are two; have indicates that the action took place in the past and been, with working, rather than work, alone, tells us that the action was continuous, that it went on for some time.

By the time you come back, some of you will have been smoking, even though it’s against the rules, and we can sort out this very last verb.

Right, off you go. Ten minutes.

And ten minutes later, one of you, probably the one with the box of matches still rattling in your pocket, will tell us that the verb will have been smoking is the future past continuous tense. Yes, that’s quite right: future – will, past – have, continuous –been and the ing at the end of smoking.

We can say these things and we can write them down. With a bit of practice we can do so without thinking or worrying about it. We are getting there.

At the back of the book you can find this information about words set out in a systematic way. In this chapter I am simply trying to show the different kinds of words that we use. The trouble is that words get mixed up with each other very quickly and, if we are not careful, we lose control of the damned things and we say things that we did not mean to say. This can be embarrassing or just plain annoying but it happens and we would like it to happen less often and that may well be why we are doing this course.

My aunt’s neighbour once placed a small-ad in their local paper.

      Wanted Home for cross collie. Walks on lead. Clean. Easy to feed.

A day or two later my aunt phoned her neighbour and said that she was from the RSPCA. Why, she demanded to know, why was the collie cross?

There remain: pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, intensifiers and things that sound like words. As we shall see in the next chapter, where there will be a sort of fancy dress parade for words, all these different kinds of words have their jobs to do. For the moment I am simply going to identify them as quickly and as easily as possible.

Pronouns

Mummy took away Billy’s ice cream. He cried. One day she would die.

He and she are pronouns. They stand for nouns. (pro Latin - for or on behalf of) Without pronouns speech would be very laborious.

Mummy took away Billy’s ice cream. Billy cried. One day Mummy would die. The thought cheered up Billy no end and Billy hoped that Mummy would get rich first so Billy would have all Mummy’s money when eventually Mummy kicked the bucket.

One of the reasons that this sounds like baby talk is that children learn more slowly about pronouns and continue to use ordinary nouns, especially proper nouns, until they have done so. Even with pronouns where we would normally find them this little piece still sounds a bit creepy – Roald Dahl comes to mind – but it is now an adult voice, even if it has put some troubling ideas into a young man’s head.

Mummy took away Billy’s ice cream. He cried. One day she would die. The thought cheered him up no end and he hoped that she would get rich first so he would have all her money when eventually she kicked the bucket.

That’s it really. I, me, my and mine are words that we all use in reference to ourselves when we do things, when things are done to us, when we refer to something that belongs to us.

I like ice cream. Give me one and I will probably let you finish early. Yes, that’s my ice cream, not yours. Yes and all those are mine too.

Exercise Three. Besides the three italicised pronouns in the last sentence above, there are four others. Can you identify them? Remember they all stand for something or someone. (You will find the answers here.)

Earlier we met the four demonstrative adjectives, this, that, these and those. We talked about this boy and that boy. Now look at another way of using these words.

      That’s the one I’d like.

Automatically, we look for someone to point at something, to indicate which bunch of flowers, or picture or ice cream that has been chosen. These four words function as pronouns, standing in for a noun, and enabling us to demonstrate which particular one we are talking about. This ice cream is delicious; this is rubbish.

This ice cream is delicious. [Demonstrative adjective] This is rubbish. [Demonstrative pronoun]

Then how about:

      Who won the prize? The woman who cooked the best pizza.

When we ask the question, Who won the prize? We need a word that stands in for someone we don’t know. The word who does just that. Here it functions as an interrogative pronoun. Other words can function in this way: whom, whose, which and what. e.g.

      Whose watch is this? (Tracey’s)

      Whom do you prefer? (Kerry) Many people just say, Who do you prefer?

      What do you want? (An ice cream)

      Which one? (The vanilla please)


This is where I was going to throw relative pronouns at you but we can save them for the next chapter. That’s it then; enough about pronouns for the moment.

Prepositions

Well, start by thinking about position. What position are you in? Sitting probably, but on something, a chair, a settee, perhaps a table or a bed, or standing perhaps, in a bookshop or at a bus stop. There may be someone sitting next to you, or beside you and the lamp above you may be a good one, but not as good as the one which is throwing light through the doorway, over there where your friend is leaning against the wall waiting for you to go down to the pub.

You would not have been in the chair, but you might have been in the bed and possibly spread along the settee. You might even have been under the table. Let’s start now by applying the Inson technique to this last sentence and remove one word, under.

You might even have been the table.

This sentence makes sense, but only grammatically. We know of course that you could never really be a table, so for the sentence to make practical sense another word is needed, a word such as above. This word, or others like it, under, next to, (a phrase that functions as a preposition) by, opposite, would all make sense. They are prepositions which tell us about the position of things, on the table, behind the door and so on. These prepositions link two nouns or pronouns; we saw him on the bike.

Other prepositions tell us about movement.

The lamp which was throwing light through the doorway. (It could have been past the doorway.)

Instead of location, this type of preposition tells us about movement, about direction: along, up, down, towards. These prepositions link verbs, in this case was throwing, with nouns or pronouns, in this case, the doorway.

(An aside here for you clever buggers who like to ask awkward questions. No, the preposition through does not link light and the doorway. “Right,” you say, “Tell us just what job the word light does do here?” For a moment I pause, not because I haven’t got the answer right up my sleeve, but because I am a kind teacher and, just for a second or two, I will allow you to think that you have caught me out.)

But you haven’t. The word light tells me what the lamp was throwing. Light is the object of the verb was throwing and the lamp is the subject of the verb, and this should be enough to shut you up until we encounter these terms again in a later chapter.

Now the rest of you can pay attention again so that we can finish prepositions.

What is the difference between falling in the shower and falling into the shower? Could the shower door remain closed in both cases? How would you get Charlie, the class cartoonist, to draw each scenario? In is a preposition of location while into is a preposition of direction or movement so falling in the shower is possible without the door being opened whereas the door would have to be open if someone was going to fall into the shower, for the movement, the fall, would have to begin outside the shower. I am assuming here that there is some sort of roof or top to the shower. If this is beginning to sound like something from a detective novel it might just be that words and the ways that we use them can be a very important matter.

“May it please Your Honour.” Counsel for the defence was not having an easy day. He let his hands rest on (preposition of location) the table in front of him and turned his gaze towards (preposition of movement) the defendant.

“The evidence put before you shows quite conclusively that the door of the shower had jammed and that the deceased’s fall took place inside (preposition of location) the shower. I put it to Your Honour that the accused could not have pushed the deceased into (preposition of movement) the shower even had he wanted to.”

I could go on. But I won’t. It’s nearly time for an adjournment.

I once dreamt about ice cream.

What did my dream concern? It was about ice cream. About links the verb, dreamt with the noun ice cream. This is clearly nothing to do with position or movement but with something more abstract, about ideas and understanding, rather like abstract nouns.

That’s it. Now I will adjourn to the garden while you complete the following....

Exercise Four. Try identifying all the prepositions in this paragraph, which you have already met, and decide which type they are - you will find the answer here.

Prepositions, well, start by thinking about position. What position are you in? Sitting probably, but on something, a chair, a settee, perhaps a table or a bed, or standing perhaps, in a bookshop or at a bus stop. There may be someone sitting next to you, or beside you and the lamp above you may be a good one, but not as good as the one which is throwing light through the doorway, over there where your friend is leaning against the wall waiting for you to go down to the pub.

And now that we have seen off prepositions I can join you again from the garden, where it has started to rain. Next we have:

Conjunctions

Try reading this next paragraph aloud.

I dreamt once that ice cream tasted of fried tomatoes. This had a devastating effect on me. For months afterwards I was unable to eat the stuff. Eventually I had to force myself to buy an ice cream to break the dream. Then I returned enthusiastically to Rossi’s ice cream parlour. Rossi’s had been my favourite maker of ice cream for years.

We can improve things:

I dreamt once that ice cream tasted of fried tomatoes and this had a devastating effect on me. For months afterwards I was unable to eat the stuff so, eventually, I had to force myself to buy an ice cream to break the dream. Then I returned enthusiastically to Rossi’s ice cream parlour because Rossi’s had been my favourite for years and I no longer dreaded eating ice cream.

Three words, and, so and because make this passage easier to read. The first two sentences are simple statements of fact and we can absorb them more quickly once they are linked and we do not have to pause after the first sentence. So links two sentences in which the action in the second sentence follows from the (grammatical) action in the first. In the third pair, because links the action in the first part of the sentence with the reason for that action, which we find in the second part of the sentence; because Rossi’s had been my favourite ice cream parlour I had returned there.

In this example, separate sentences, which stand alone at first, are combined.

Just remember that and is also used to join the last two items in a list. As we read, it signals the end of the list and we are ready to stop. Read the rest of this sentence aloud; so far we have tackled nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions.

Conjunctions done - enjoy the weekend.

Articles

We have touched already on the business of articles in the introduction so all we have to do now is make sure that we have dealt with all four of them: a, an, some and the. Articles precede nouns to indicate whether particular things are being referred to or not. I am afraid that you are due in court again.

A court official holds up a large, old-fashioned feather duster.

“Is this,” asks the judge, “is this the feather duster you kept at home and which the prosecution claim was used by you to attack the prime minister?”

You are relieved for it is simply a feather duster and not your old feather duster which had a green handle, not a red one, and you explain that the feather duster which you kept under the stairs at your home was destroyed at a fancy dress party weeks before the alleged attack. Wonderful – you’re not guilty. They can’t touch you. As the judge dismisses the case some police officers enter the court. That’s all right – they’re just coppers. Then you notice that among them are the officers whom you attacked with a banana the night you were arrested in Downing Street.

The, the definite article which refers to particular things, the feather duster with the red or green handle, or the particular police officers whom you did not want to meet again.

The indefinite articles: a indicates here to any feather duster which is not yours and some to any police officers who were not attacked by you when you were armed with a banana in Downing Street.

[An is simply used instead of a when the word that follows begins with one of the five vowels. Try saying a orange. The word comes from the Spanish, naranja, so perhaps we should say, a norange. You can imagine somebody in the market: “Lovely noranges. Four for a quid!”]

For you it was important to convince the court that the feather duster shown in evidence was not the feather duster which lived under your stairs. As you leave the court you will probably take care to avoid any police officers, especially the officers whom you met in Downing Street that night.

Case dismissed.

Finally – exclamations, interjections, things that sound like words and anything else that occurs to me before we get to the end of this chapter. But first there follows a

GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING – This section contains words and expressions that we often hear and see but which some of us dislike.

They are part of the language even if we only notice them, uncontrolled, in public places. It is a fact that some people express themselves excessively in language which other people find coarse or foul, but these are words and the way they are used needs to be understood as part of an examination of our language.

To do this we need to refer to these words, even if we do not use them. Think of them clinically, like a disease if you like, that we need to study however unpleasant it may be.

      “Oh shit!”

You have just stepped backwards into the wet concrete that you have just laid and staggered all over it. The footprints that you have left behind laugh at you and so do your mates. Or, you have just realised that you have left the keys inside the car which you locked before you shut the rear door. Sometimes it is different, quicker.

      “Shit!”

An own goal in extra time, or the slipping of a sharp knife in the kitchen.

Links between words and meanings are not always fixed, and a dictionary will tell of shit’s basic meaning - excrement. (Poo in baby vocabulary or turds if you don’t want to sound posh) The word shit is more often met in speech, where there is greater flexibility rather than in writing, and where it is rarely used to stand for excrement.

      “Look at all that shit.”

Here the word is obviously a noun, standing for something, but what? A pile of manure, a place full of rubbish or anything or anyone that we don’t like? Then try:

      “That was a shit goal.”

A sports fan suffers disappointment and uses the word as a sort of adjective, but it tells us little about the goal, whether it was easy, or impressive. All we know is that for some reason that is not clear to us, the speaker was not impressed with this goal.

      “Oh shit! They missed.”

Here the word is nothing to do with them or what they missed; it’s simply a reaction to the fact that they missed.

Like indeed, damn, really, or God, the word has a meaning, something to which it refers. Later I will return to the origin and influence of words such as these. But for the moment it is sufficient to recognise that here they are simply used as a reaction to something and we call them exclamations, words that are called out. [Latin: ex = out and clamo = I call. Our modern clamour = a lot of calling out.]

Interjections are sounds that are thrown in between “real” words. Imagine that you are in very serious trouble. You are very young and very keen not to be caught out. This could so easily have been two of us at school, playing firemen in the boys’ toilet which had no roof, at the age of five. Soon we found ourselves outside the headmistress’s office while she spoke to an angry woman who had been showered as she walked along the pavement outside. You struggle to explain and there is a loud, Hmmmm, from one of the adults and you realise that you are simply digging yourself in deeper.

Er, a good one for really awkward questions and direct accusations, Oooh, for a large bill and a really well-timed coughing fit can of course bring a difficult conversation to a complete halt.

Oh bollocks! Just look at the time. We’ve reached the end of this chapter. You will have to wait a bit longer before we look at the origin of this, my wife’s favourite swear word.

©2009 Peter Inson

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Readers' Comments

Anand Nair - 23 Aug 2009

I remember those teachers who gave up on students, and that you were not one of them. I've read a few pages and am enjoying the dialogue. I can see I must come back to it. Regards and well done! Anand