Davidson, who had just played a game of soccer for the VUW Football Club, endured a long walk home to Thorndon in his muddy game clothes while random people in the street yelled at him “Hard day at the office, eh son?”, or some variation thereof, in an attempt to be original and funny.
“I’ll admit, the first two times it was a little funny,” Davidson explained to Salient. “Then it got weird and kind of—YES, HA HA, VERY FUNNY—sorry, it got kind of annoying.”

This is not the first time that a situation has caused observers to all make the same humorous remark. In 2008, Wellingtonian Andrew Bremner walked through the Central Business District with his then-3-year-old daughter Sally with a scratch on his face, while people told him not to “let them win the fights while they’re so young, or [he’s] screwed,” and, just last year, “WALK OF SHAAAAME!!!” comments increased by 27%.

Davidson explained that the attempts of observational humour didn’t usually happen, because that morning he had OH, RIGHT, LIKE [HE HADN’T] HEARD THAT ONE BEFORE slept in and didn’t bring a change of clothes to the game.

“Eventually I just started preempting people… If they looked like they were about to ask about my rough day at the office, I would go, ‘I’VE JUST HAD A ROUGH DAY AT THE OFFICE MATE, YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT!’ That was fun, but it got quite old quite fast.

“I can understand why this thing happens. It’s just everyone sees me in my muddy soccer clothes in town, which is odd, and then tries to say something funny about it. Only that everyone comes up with the same thing. I guess deep down, we’re all essentially the same boring person.”
When queried as to whether or not he had a hard day at the office, Davidson told Salient to go fuck a stick.

I’m not sure I’m ready. Did my bathroom scales lie to me, and is my suitcase actually too heavy? Maybe. Do I have enough money? Maybe. Did I say goodbye to everyone? Not quite. Do I have my passport? …Maybe. Do I have a return ticket? No. Are the Australian Customs officials going to confiscate my Marmite? Most likely. I’m being picked up in an hour.

The last day is the most hectic. I woke up well before my alarm, awake with nerves and probably caffeine (from meeting friends for coffee to say goodbye the night before). Before being picked up at 11 and taken to uni I needed to finish packing, move the last of my stuff out of my room, vacuum and say goodbye to my flatmates. Helpfully, builders decided to arrive at 9.25am to tear the roof off. Clouds threatened to rain through the new hole that used to be the roof. I’m probably leaving just in time.

The day was filled with meeting friends for coffee, buying things last-minute, meeting friends for coffee, exchanging money into other currency, meeting friends for coffee, saying goodbye, and pure caffeine. I did my last stint of work at Salient, and Sarah and Ju went crazy with Peak Salient as usual. Molly joined in too, making three of them. I’m probably leaving just in time.

In two weeks I’ll be in Germany, which is a good place to go to. I’m reminded of The Simpsons Movie, in which the family goes to Alaska. “Welcome to Alaska,” the toll-booth man says. “Here’s a thousand dollars.” For me, going on a certain scholarship to teach English in a secondary school, it is much the same, only euros instead of dollars, so, even better.

Last time I went to Germany

But that’s getting a bit ahead of myself. I’ve got two weeks in Australia first. Warm, sunny Australia. Oh, and the Whitsundays. I’m going there too.

A recent study conducted by a Psychology Masters student has found a strong link between eating glue as a child and running for the VUWASS executive while at university.

The study, conducted by Stephanie Quinn, aimed to find links between individuals’ childhood experiences and their later career goals. The subjects interviewed for the study were asked about activities and experiences they remembered from their childhood, and then about their career aspirations.

“It was a complete fluke that I found the link,” says Quinn. “The question [of eating glue] was a bit of a joke. When I was writing the proposal, there happened to be a bottle of kids’ glue on my desk. You know the ones—the little triangular-shaped bottles that say ‘Do Not Ingest’, and the bright caps you had to cut into to open it.

“I remembered that one of my teachers at school blew her stationery budget on glue because a kid, Josh Cosgrave, was constantly eating it—he also ran for VUWASS, by the way—so I wrote it as a joke example question of what I would be asking in the interviews.”

When Quinn put the call out for participants, VUWASS President Maximillian Harding volunteered himself and the executive to partake.

“I like to encourage the executive to actively partake an interest in the studies of the students of Victoria University,” says Harding. “Doing things together also makes the executive more adhesive as a whole.”

The results, released early last week, found that of the 593 participants, ten recounted having eaten glue as a child. Of the ten, nine are current executive members of VUWASS. The tenth has since resigned from his position.

“I can’t really explain the correlation,” says Quinn. “All I can say, however, is that the kids you saw eating glue at school… they’re the ones who run for VUWASS.”

The 2010 VUWASS stationery budget has $312.50 allocated to glue.

Well cry me a fucking river. When I finally moved into a flat in second year, my sole income was from a StudyLink allowance of $150 per week. Rent was $100. This left $50 for food and power. Putting aside a bit of money each week for the inevitable power bill, this would leave me with roughly $3.50 to spend on food each day. And I had a 9am class on one day of the week.

Problem solved.

If you think you’ve got problems, then this should put things into perspective. Hungry, cold and skinny perspective. It sounds impossible, even to me. But I did this for a good part of the year. I survived, and even did well at uni.

Me at uni.

Think of this as your worst-case scenario. You have to cut back on everything. You will have to make some extreme lifestyle changes. As a student, this will bring you down to three main areas of expenditure, which will be your absolute necessities just to keep you breathing while studying.

Parmesan, Gruyère and Havarti.

1. Food and drink

My diet during this time consisted mainly of two-minute noodles (pre the discovery of Mi Goreng, so this makes my story infinitely more tragic than yours), eggs, bread and cheese. Cheese is expensive, but strangely delicious. It was probably the one good thing I had going in my life, and it’s versatile.

a) What to eat
 i) Buying food
You will need to spend your $3.50 wisely. Buy versatile foods in bulk so they’re cheaper and will last you a while, such as rice, potatoes and pasta. Use these to bulk up your meals, even more than you otherwise might, so that they last longer. Take leftovers to uni the next day. Remember that flavour is a luxury. You will need to budget, find the discounts and specials, spend only what you absolutely need and make sure you don’t waste your food.

 ii) Cooking food
Think about communal cooking: Has your flatmate got a can of tomatoes? With your bread you’ve got the basis for tomatoes on toast. Bonus points for saving power too.

b) What to drink
Water. It’s free.

c) Alternative sources of food
 i) Free stuff
When things are desperate, you should always be on the lookout for free shit, and know where you can get it regularly. Go to VUWSA in Kelburn on a Wednesday or Friday morning and get some free bread, and check out their Food Bank while you’re there. The free bread once kept my entire flat fed for a week.

Ant, Mark and Bella.

Remember that every little bit counts. Don’t be afraid to scrounge off your richer friends, and wear plastic bags instead of shoes for maximum pity.

 ii) Relatives and friends
If you have relatives in town you should try to organise a regular home-cooked dinner or meal with them. You’ll get at least one decent and hopefully nutritious meal out of it each week, and they’ll be happy helping you out when you need it most, and can’t find language.

 iii) Live off the land
Growing your own veges will result in a lot more street cred, nutrition and inflated self-worth than playing Farmville. It also makes you statistically less likely to be murdered in a library.

Other than growing your own food, getting back to your hunter and gatherer roots is another option. Know your natural environment and what foods it may provide.

Nutrition!

If things are so desperate that you have cut back to the bare basics, then you will need to make sure you are getting enough of the right nutrition in your diet. Food plays a more important role in your general mood—and entire life—than you may realise. Without the right nutrition you will be in a bad mood, unable to concentrate, and have low energy levels. With poor nutrition you will also be more susceptible to sickness, which will just plain suck.

Especially as a student, you will need lots of Omega 3. This is a fatty acid commonly found in fish that is needed by the brain to promote neuronal growth. Basically it makes you smarter and more likely to remember things. Eat fish before and during important study periods to make the most out of them, or if you don’t eat fish, think of other ways to please her get Omega 3 tablets on special from a pharmacy.

2. Shelter

Note: An important factor in keeping your shelter costs down is cooperation from your co-dwellers.

a) Keeping your power bill down
My flat was so cold I had to put a jacket on when I went inside. Keeping in the same room as your flatmates helps heaps. If you can all cook, eat, socialise and study in the kitchen, then you can get it warm easily during the cooking and then keep it warm, rather than all going off to use separate heaters.

When things got really cold, we would warm our hands inside the fridge. Instead of a hot-water bottle or electric blanket, take a hot shower before bed. This, along with a sheet, duvet and three blankets, keeps me warm during the night. As a bonus I wake up with awesome hair.

Another tactic I used when things got cold was to just be at university as much as I could, because it was so damned cold at home I would wake up and breathe out, and my breath would freeze and hit me in the face. It’s really warm at uni. Staying there later has a few other benefits—you get in some more study, and the university pays the power bill.

I hear finding a spoon also helps.

b) Keeping other flat costs down
You will need to cut down on luxury items. This will be expensive showering items, the good toilet paper, makeup, etc. Stuff you don’t actually need. If you need things repaired or bought that your landlord isn’t responsible for, do it yourself if you can. I built a letterbox for my flat. It was shit and we also blew it up once, but it was free and better than the brick.

3. Transport

Do you really need to catch the bus? In my opinion, if you’re fit you should be able to walk for at least an hour to get to uni. Your legs are the cheaper and more reliable option anyway. Or, if you can get the funds together, a bike is a good investment. Me? I skate on my skateboard to uni now, instead of using my legs like a sucker.

If you do need costly transport to get to and from home, then consider crashing at a friend’s place close to uni occasionally. Each night will save you two trips. Get someone from one of your classes and turn it into a study session. You can also steal their spoons to warm you later.

Conclusion

Don’t be afraid to ask for any sort of help in these areas. Think about who may be able to help you. Read Zoe Reid’s column in Salient, ‘Yo Mama Shoulda Told You This’—it’s brimming with useful advice, especially on things that will save you money. If you get into financial trouble, ask for help. Talk to your parents and friends. These fellows may also be able to help:

VUWSA
StudyLink
Student Services

Fail that, get a haircut and get a fucking job.

Recently, however, there has been a new breed of spam infiltrating the Salient website. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem to be the kind of computer-generated spam that randomly targets with irrelevant links even the most credulous of dethroned Nigerian princes would want to click. No, this is no automated spam. This is manual spam.

As Salient‘s Online Editor, it’s my job to watch people argue on the internet, and make sure no hurtful things are said, and, least importantly, to mark the spam that gets through the filter. I first noticed the spam in question on a book review. The author of the comment, ‘r4 ds card’, sang praises of the book, which, being called The Most Beautiful Man in the World, it probably didn’t deserve. As you do with comments on the website, it had a link, this one taking you to a United Kingdom website. Although I didn’t like the look of the name or website, on the surface the comment seemed relevant. So I left it.

It wasn’t until more recently that I realised what was happening. Two comments in particular, both left on two travel blog posts, had some suspicious similarities: the similar jumble of letters as a name, the comment that was slightly relevant to the topic and highly agreeable—helped out by some pretty pictures—and a link to a German website. Which was weird.

This logically led me to assume that somebody was reading articles on the Salient website, getting the basic gist of an article, then leaving a comment with a link to their website which sells obscure cartridge types for the Nintendo DS. Assuming the spammer must be German, I then left a comment for them in German, telling them how pointless their venture was. Having had my say on the internet, I then rested, knowing that the spammer would see the error in his or her ways.

But the comments continued.

It was then that I took serious notice of the comments, and realised how hilarious they are. The spammer just seems to be making shit up, not even really caring if the comment really makes sense. One of the first comments appeared on a games review for Mass Effect 2:

“This one is the best multi player game of this year.Its very well designed over the previous game.They have added new campaigns,explosive new guns and deadly new me-lee weapons.This game has a lot of content to keep me interested for long time.”

To anyone who is unfamiliar with the game or not a grammar nazi, this comment wouldn’t really make you think twice. However, Lewis assures me that Mass Effect 2 has no multiplayer and no melee weapons.

Sometimes it’s like the spammer isn’t even trying at all, like in this comment left on an Editorial:

“The article posted over here is written in very nice way and it is sharing very nice and interesting information. I enjoyed reading this article and I am sure that other people will also like it.”

Taking a closer look at these comments, I found they gave links to Chinese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, British, and even Kiwi versions of the same website, which says it is based in Jersey in the Channel Islands. I also used some high-tech tools at my disposal to track down the IP addresses, which seem to originate from different computers in Mumbai and Kaul in India.

Now the thing that gets me about all these comments is that if you’re going to advertise your product, basic advertising theory or common sense or whatever will tell you that you need to advertise to your target audience. I know what Salient‘s target audience is: poor students who need crosswords, comics and faces to deface. The website gets some good traffic, as Google tells us, a good portion of it coming from Alaska (hi!). This demographic, in my opinion, doesn’t quite fit completely with that of a website dedicated to selling an obscure something for a small handheld gaming device.

It’s not just why the website has been targeted that confuses me, it’s the method as well. Having some poor fellow write spam is bad enough, but making them read and also write something almost relevant and sickeningly uncontroversially agreeable and incorrect about it on top of that is too much. And how do we get to their product? Through the link you can leave on your name when commenting, which nobody looks at, on a comment that will be removed by me anyway.

So, Spammer. I know you’ll probably skim read this for keywords that you can put into a sentence and say you like, so I’ll tell you here what the deal is:

You can go on spamming this website, and I will continue to find the comments, laugh heartily at them, maybe even show my friends for extra amusement, like the time you said you read Jessy Edwards’ book (she doesn’t have one, by the way), before removing the comment.

or:

You can realise that your struggle is pointless, and maybe go spam another website, like this one or this one or this one. I’m sure their readers all like playing with small things.

What do you say?

If you ask a classical musician/aficionado about German music, they might tell you about greats such as Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart—German music has a very prestigious history. But if you ask the next guy you see wearing jandals and surfer shorts about German music, and—provided he isn’t also carrying a sousaphone—he will probably say: “There’s this band Rammstein*, I think they’re German eh bro?” Yeah they’re German. I’m sensing this is probably about the peak of this review’s intelligence right here, so I’m just going to add that I heard they once did a show wearing nothing but giant diapers, and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus.

Rammstein. This industrial metal band doesn’t really fit in with the list of aforementioned German musicians that non-Germans have heard of. Nevertheless I was quite excited when Jackson handed me their new CD, Liebe Ist Für Alle Da (Love Is There For Everyone). The excitement turned out to be not so great, however, when I quickly realised that I had for some reason mistaken it for Metallica. But it’s still cool, because they’re German, and I speak German, you know?

I’m not so familiar with their older stuff, but I’ve noticed a lot of people know their song ‘Du hast’. “Du,” they usually tell me, “Du hast. Du hast mich…” I then interrupt them with an explanation on how the German verbs to have and to hate both conjugate to the same word in the second person singular, and how the song exploits this.

I’ve never quite managed to finish my explanation.

Truth be told, I started listening to Rammstein when I started learning German. I got Reise, Reise first and Rosenrot sometime later. When I could actually understand German I came back to them and was a bit shocked—and impressed—at some of the lyrics that had been floating in my head without meaning so long ago.

In Reise, Reise there is a song inspired by an infamous cannibalism case in Germany (‘Mein Teil’—’My Part’), and an awesome and quite chilling modernisation of Goethe’s dark romanticism poem Der Erlenkönig (‘Dalai Lama’). Rosenrot has a song about a boy who plays with fire and gets brutally burned (‘Hilf Mir’—’Help Me’), and another song about a mob eagerly encouraging a man to kill himself by jumping off a high bridge (‘Spring’—’Jump’). Their songs aren’t without substance, something I actually admire about them.

Rammstein branches out linguistically every now and then, offering songs in English, Russian and Spanish, and often mixing it with German. Because of complicated metaphor I’m about to use, now is a good time to mention that the word on the street is that Rammstein isn’t as popular in Germany as they probably are outside of it.

So I think on this new album, the song ‘Pussy’ is quite representative of Rammstein as a whole. It has the shock value, language mixing, and perhaps also represents their relative unpopularity in Germany:

You’ve got a Pussy I have a Dick ah
So what’s the problem let’s do it quick
So take me now before it’s too late
Life’s too short so I can’t wait
So take me now oh don’t you see
I can’t get laid in Germany
Too short too tall doesn’t matter one size fits all
Zu groß zu klein der Schlagbaum sollte oben sein (Too big too small, the toll bar should be on top)
Schönes Fräulein Lust auf mehr (Pretty lady hungry for more)
Blitzkrieg mit dem Fleischgewehr (Blitzkrieg with the meat gun)

It’s not all sex and death though. Well, it is mostly, but I’ve always found a few gems in each album. ‘Dalai Lama’ still sends shivers down my spine, and ‘Benzin’ makes me want to burn things. From a few listens, opener ‘Rammlied’ (‘Ramm-song’) and the album’s namesake ‘Liebe Ist Für Alle Da’ (‘Love Is There For Everyone’) stand out quite a bit, but I think special mention should go to the closer ‘Roter Sand’ (‘Red Sand’), a brilliantly sung ballad about a dying man, shot by a rival for his lover:

Eine Liebe ein Versprechen (One love, one promise)
Sagt ich komm zurück zu dir (Said I’d come back to you)
Nun ich muss es leider brechen (Now I must sadly break it)
Seine Kugel steckt in mir (His bullet is stuck in me)

Eine Liebe zwei Pistolen (One love, two pistols)
Eine zielt mir ins Gesicht (One aimed at my face)
Er sagt ich hätte dich gestohlen (He says I stole you)
Dass du mich liebst weiß er nicht (He doesn’t know that you love me)

Roter Sand und zwei Patronen (Red sand and two rounds)
Eine stirbt im Pulverkuss (One dies in gunpowder’s kiss)
Die zweite soll ihr Ziel nicht schonen (The second shall not spare its target)
Steckt jetzt tief in meiner Brust (Now stuck deep in my breast)

Ultimately, if you don’t speak German, then you probably won’t get as much out of this album, but I’m all for the broadening of cultural horizons. For a rock band they sound really good though, and have definitely maintained a distinctive sound across their albums. So if you don’t mind that the only song you’ll understand much of is a song about pussy, or you’re a budding fan, then I’d recommend you give this album a listen.

Now I’ll leave you with some food for thought from their song ‘Haifisch’ (‘Shark’).

Und der Haifisch der hat Tränen (And the shark, it has tears)
Und die laufen vom Gesicht (And they flow from its face)
Doch der Haifisch lebt im Wasser (But the shark lives in water)
So die Tränen sieht man nicht (So you don’t see the tears)

In der Tiefe ist es einsam (In the deep it’s lonely)
Und so manche Zähre fließt (And so some tears flow)
Und so kommt es dass das Wasser (And so it is that the water)
In den Meeren salzig ist (In the seas is salty)

*He’ll probably pronounce it ram-steen.

So readership. I have failed. I have tried to teach you about the grammerz, but it didn’t work. I was too… fuck, what’s the word? Drunk. No. I am now, but tooooo… anyway. Ambitious! That’s the one. You can’t have good grammerz. It doesn’t work like that. NOBODY CAN HAVE GOOD GRAMMAR. NOT PERFECT GRAMMAR ANYWAY. JUST REALLy good grammar, but not perfect. That’s what I’ve learned.

But you, readership—you shouldn’t start a sentence with ‘but’, you should use ‘however’—do you want to know a secret? The secret to good grammar? Here it is: Just use Microsoft Word. That’s right. Put it all in Microsoft Word, all of it, and put the grammar check on. Use its suggestions. Seriously. That’s the best grammar you’re going to get. That little paperclip dude, that Microsoft Word paperclip dude, he’s the master of grammar. He’s your best friend when it comes to grammar. Listen to him. Cos he’s the master. And he’s a FUCKING PAPERCLIP! He is wise beyond his twelve years.

What else should you know? Hmmmmmmmm… you neeed… you want….. to have….. fuck, just someone, someone who can understand grammar for you and check it and stuff. Someone who understands the intricacies of language, the ebbs and flows, its structure. Someone who knows about subject–verb agreement, apostrophes, verb forms, commas, semicolons, spelling, obscure words, hyphens, transitive, intransitive, reflexive, adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, American English spelling, British/New Zealand English spelling, double spacing, consistency, etc, etc.

It’s really not that hard.

But fuck, readership, seriously, you don’t neeed good grammar. Just understanding. You just want people to understand you, don’t you? You just need a friend. Someone who knows what you’re about. Knows that you didn’t mean to, didn’t know not to put that apostrophe there. Someone who maybe even ignores it. But that person, readership, who does see it and tries to correct it, that person is a Grammar Nazi. That person is me.

That’s right. I’ve tried. To teach everyone about grammar, that was my purpose. I don’t think it worked. People still don’t know shit about it, don’t care. I’ve failed, failed miserably. An entire year’s worth of writing half-arsed columns on grammar, and I’ve failed, it’s all gone to nothing. What a wasted year. Yeah, that’s right, write for Salient. Pffft.

I’ve just received feedback from the people who judged the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) Awards this year, in which I somehow placed third in best column. Not that I care, but a certain judge said:

“These essays about grammar and the English language were charmless[...]”

Take that, self-esteem! Stupid judge. I know who you are. When you come to my awesome publishing company in ten years’ time, wanting me to publish your book or whatever it is these publishing people do, then the tables will be turned—I’m going to call your writing “charmless”. I’m also going to correct your grammar, just to rub it in. Kick you while you’re down. Rub salt into the wound. Add insult to injury.

I also got a special mention under the comments for Salient (italicised not because it’s our style, but in a sarcastic sort of way) winning best publication:

“Some articles make no sense, especially ones that have long quotes from teh internets (or whatever) in lieu of actual writing. I wouldn’t bother reading them. The guide to Internet grammar (or at least, in two of the issues submitted) is a good example of this. It’s a bit like a radio show that ironically specialises in playing really terrible music. Few people would enjoy it, even if the commentary were hilarious, because they would have to endure sifting through so much shit to get tiny flecks of gold.”

He/she could have just said “teh grammerz was shit”, but instead went for not one, but two long-winded comparisons to said shitness. I wrote everything, I never used quotes from “teh internets”. Way to try to be cool. And the comparison to the VBC was just below the belt. At least this person used the subjunctive correctly, intentional or not.

So, readership, I’m a failure. Just one big fail. “…endure sifting through so much shit to get tiny flecks of gold.” That’s going in my CV.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get a failed assignment re-marked, James protested in the nude in front of his lecture theatre and was subsequently removed from campus and arrested.

Salient was contacted by James shortly after his release. He said he was dismayed about his low grade, saying it had a negative effect on his other work, and he was unable to focus properly.

“It’s not like I didn’t hand in the assignment—which is what people are usually failed for—I did everything the assignment required. And they don’t like my choice of using a low exposure, calling it ‘indecent’. [...] I thought, I’ll give them indecent exposure.”

Digital Photographics lecturer Dr Francis Livingston stood by his decision. “From my perspective, if a student doesn’t complete an assignment to a satisfactory standard, then they won’t receive a high grade,” he said.

“Letting these people through doesn’t paint a pretty picture of our school, especially in the current economic climate—we need to stay sharp. We need to develop better photographers.”

James’ classmates expressed sympathy towards him, but condemned his reaction, calling it “a bit extreme.”

“He should have known better,” said a classmate who asked to remain anonymous. “I saw his assignment in its final stages, and yeah, it was obviously pretty shit. Then—I just didn’t see it coming—he just zooms in to the lecture theatre and just flashes everybody.”

Another one of James’ classmates, Quyen Song, simply remarked “I so horrified.”

However, James was optimistic about his future in photography. “It’s all a bit unfortunate and depressing, but still—life goes on.”

James’ failed Digital Photographics assignment can be seen at rayjamesnudepicsxxx.info.

It’s not easy being a Grammar Nazi. The world is a very hostile place. A wise man called Richard Duppa once said (you’ve probably never even heard of him—I haven’t either): “In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.” This is especially true when it comes to grammar. You might have been taught grammar in school—most likely not—but that’s a lot different from actually understanding it. And we’re still given free licence to go out and fuck around with it. It’s like giving a two-year-old a pack of crayons and expecting him or her to create the Monet Christmas.

And from our perspective—that of the Grammar Nazi, the art critic—we have to put up with the shit from a two-year-old’s foray with a pack of crayons instead of getting to see the Monet Christmas. It’s very stressful. Just about any instance of writing will have something wrong with it somewhere. We’re even inclined to correct people’s speech.

Waiter delivers meal. “Enjoy!” he says.

“’Enjoy’ is a transitive verb, dick.”

So, since this is the last week of writing my column before I just get drunk and write whateverthefuck, I’ve decided to list a few things that have helped me alleviate the pain of being a Grammar Nazi. Tools that I use every day in my pursuit of good grammar. Tools that you can use to help you too.

Red Pen

This is the most basic tool a Grammar Nazi needs; it completes him. It is the dictaphone to the journalist, the Swiss army knife to the Swiss armyman, the box of matches to the aspiring pyromaniac, Bert to Ernie. Red pens are used to correct bad grammar wherever you may find it—from the newspaper to other people’s homework, from bathroom walls to computer screens. With a red pen handy at all times, the uncontrollable urge to correct bad grammar is easily satisfied.

Dictionary

Dictionaries are extremely useful, whether online or in printed form—both have their advantages. Online dictionaries are useful for their speed, but printed ones (especially larger ones) are advantageous because they can be used to hit people. I mainly use dictionaries to check the spellingness of some words, and whether some words are actually words and not just made up ones.

Grammar Book of some description

Much like the dictionary, but for checking grammar and shaming those who don’t understand basic things like subject–verb agreement (stuff.co.nz *cough cough*). Also good for hitting people once you’ve worn out your dictionary.

Grammar Stickers for Grammar Sticklers

Among all of the amazing stuff you can get on the internet, somewhere you should be able to find stickers that just have punctuation on them—apostrophes, full stops, commas and such. These allow you to quickly correct larger mistakes on the go, and without resorting to more permanent corrections if you’re a bit of a wuss. I really need to get some of these.

YouTube Comment Snob

As we all know, YouTube comments are the breeding grounds for the rank disgusting sickly diseased corrupting decomposing decaying gross violation of language. It’s basically where bad grammar comes from. The YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox Add-On that filters out these terrible comments based on some customisable parameters, such as number of spelling mistakes, incorrect/excessive capitalisation and puctuation, and profanity. So basically it will prevent you from seeing just about any comments on YouTube, making watching ‘I’m on a Boat’ a safer and more enjoyable experience.

With these tools your life should be just a little bit more grammatically correct. It is a well-known fact that bad grammar is the leading cause of language-related illnesses and deaths, so these things could even save your life. Or they could be used to kill you, if you don’t learn how to use the subjunctive correctly, or like your exclamation points a little too much. Beware, the Grammar Nazi is ever watchful, alert to every mistake.

Time for a drink.

Why have a style guide?

For consistency. Consistency is very important. Imagine reading a magazine that used a different font, font size and layout for each page—it would be very difficult and annoying. Of course, those things are for the editor and designer to take care of, but it comes right down to the writing as well. How punctuation is used, spelling, when to use double quotes or single quotes, italics, capitalisation… These things all come together to give the magazine a sense of style. Think of it as brand recognition.

General

All writing should be done in New Zealand English and follow the rules of the English language. Do not use text abbreviations or l337 speek, as people find it annoying and hard to read. Use proper capitalisation and punctuation, and don’t be lazy.
If you want to use it or make mistakes intentionally (playing around with language and such), then it needs to serve a purpose in the writing (such as for comedic effect) and I need to be aware of it—so you need to make a note of it or it needs to be obvious, otherwise I might think it’s a mistake and fix it. I don’t mind people playing around with language. Also, I won’t understand your obscure pop culture references.

When referring to Salient, use italics. This also applies to other student rags, newspapers, magazines, etc.

Email/web addresses in italics.

    Write to us at letters@salient.org.nz, or leave a comment on our site at salient.org.nz.

When quoting someone or something, use double quotes. Single quotes are for song titles, quotes within quotes or so-called ‘words’. If you’re placing emphasis on something, you can use italics.

Numbers zero to ten are written, 11 and up are numerals. When referring to issue numbers, measurements or mathematical stuff, use numerals.

Numbers going up to 9999 to be written without a comma to separate the thousands, 10,000 onwards to have the comma(s).

Use em dashes for asides—like this—rather than hyphens – like this. Em dashes are slightly longer than normal dashes, and we’ll be using them without spaces on either end. On PCs you should be able to get em dashes using alt+0151, and on Macs with apple+shift+hyphen.
You don’t necessarily have to use em dashes, as they will be replaced during the sub-editing process as necessary.

If referring to an acronym in your piece, you need to introduce it by writing it out in full, followed by the acronym in brackets. After this you can just use the acronym. For example:

    The National Institute for Weather and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) announced that… Researchers from
    NIWA have been working on…

If the acronym is a familiar one, then it shouldn’t have to be explained, such as USA, UK, the UN, VUWSA.

Titles such as Mrs, Mr, and Dr will not be written with a full stop.

Capitalisation

Words that should be capitalised are organisations, people or place names, days of the week, months. The personal pronoun I.

Words that are tricky are words such as mum and dad. If you are referring to them in name and not relationship, then capitalise:

    “But my mum wouldn’t do that.”
    “But Mum wouldn’t do that.”
    “But Carol wouldn’t do that.”

A similar thing applies to titles. If using the full title, capitalise, otherwise don’t. For example:

    “VUWSA President Max Hardy has been arrested following… After his release, the president fled to… Victoria
    University stated that… the second VUWSA president to be trespassed from the university…”

Words that shouldn’t be capitalised are the (Kelburn) quad, and just about anything else not covered by this list.

Punctuation

Exclamation and question marks—will be used only when necessary. You might be able to get away with using two exclamation or question marks, or one of each, but no more.

Quotes—punctuation must be included inside the quotes if it is part of the original quote. If you are quoting just words or snippets, then punctuation goes outside of the quotes:

    John described his friend as “annoying” and “a bit of a dick”.
    “Seriously, how do I get rid of him?” he said.

Brackets—are used for adding bits of information that aren’t entirely necessary to the sentence. It should be possible to edit out brackets and anything in them and still have grammatically correct sentences. Therefore punctuation that is part of the sentence should go outside of the brackets. Only punctuate inside the brackets if it is required—i.e., if you are using more than one sentence or need an exclamation or question mark.

Colons—used to introduce extra information, and to start off a list or example:

    “Things I need from the gardening store: hatchet, rubber hosing, plastic rubbish bags, flashlight, manual
    landscaping implement, calcium oxide.”
    “That’s what I’m going to do: internment.”

Semicolons—can be used between closely related clauses, in place of some conjunctions, and to separate items in lists, usually when commas would be unclear:

    “I come here for the peace; I like digging in the woods at night.”
    “You can’t arrest me; I haven’t done anything wrong.” (The semicolon implies the word because.)
    “The hatchet is for cutting things into small pieces; the rubber hosing is to drain fluids; the rubbish bags are
    for putting rubbish in, for safe disposal; the flashlight is to see in the dark; the shovel is for digging graves;
    and the calcium oxide is for hiding the stench of a decaying body in an open grave.” (Using semicolons in such
    an extended list is necessary, as commas don’t separate the items clearly enough.)

Ellipses—there are three periods in an ellipsis. If you are ending a piece with an ellipsis, then use four periods (extra one for the full stop). In quotes, an ellipsis is used for pauses in speech, or with square brackets when editing text out:

    Original: “I’m going, um… outside to the bushes in the park to stalk.”
    Edited: “I’m going, um… outside [...] to stalk.”

Line breaks—it is important to spread out your writing each paragraph or so. This ensures that it doesn’t look like a wall of text, which is just daunting to read.

*If the plural is formed without an s, then the apostrophe goes before the s.

Hyphens

Hyphens are used to connect or separate words, either for style purposes or to clarify meaning. Most commonly (apart from in emoticons) they are used in what is called a compound modifier, where it is used to connect descriptive words together when one modifies the other and not the noun, making the meaning clear. Take some sort of awesome vegetable that eats people, for example. You’d describe it like this:

“A man-eating celery is causing havoc in the library.”

Note the placement of the hyphen between man and eating. This is because here the word man describes the word eating (and not celery), and only together they describe the noun celery. If we remove the hyphen, the meaning of the sentence changes drastically:

    “A man eating celery is causing havoc in the library.”

Without the hyphen, it now says that a man who is eating celery is causing havoc in the library.

Basically you need to decide if the words belong together, and use a hyphen if they do:

    “Dr Dre-dissin’ gangsta fools and their zombie-like moaning.”

Just like in the previous example, the hyphen is placed in between Dr Dre and dissin’, as Dr Dre describes what the fools are dissin’. Note that gangsta is hyphen-free, because it is being used as an adjective that isn’t being modified by anything else—i.e., the fools are gangstas as well as Dr Dre-dissin’. If we removed the first hyphen, it would mean that Dr Dre is dissin’ the gangsta fools. Also note the hyphen between zombie and like, as like is being added as a suffix to modify zombie into an adjective.

However, if the adjective is preceded by an adverb, no hyphen is necessary, as adverbs can’t modify nouns—they describe the how, when, where and why, modifying verbs and adjectives—so it is clear that it modifies the adjective and not the noun. Adverbs commonly end in -ly.

Words you should know about

a lot—is two words.

amongst—Among and amongst are completely interchangeable, but we’ll only be using among, mainly for consistency’s sake.

complement—To go well with something.

compliment—To praise something.

Courtenay Place—Note the spelling. Not Courtney Place.

definitely—spell ‘definite’, then just add ‘-ly’.

e.g.—For example. i.e.—That is. e.g. shows one or a few examples out of many, whereas i.e. refers to something specific. Also note the placement of full stops.

fewer—I can say I have fewer dollars, but not less dollars. I can say I have less money, but not fewer money. This is because dollars can be counted (in a grammatical sense) but money cannot—you can say 12 dollars but not 12 money. The same thing goes for many dollars and much money.

it’s—can either mean it is or it has. If you can’t replace it with one of these, then you should probably use its.

its—a possessive pronoun. If you can change ‘it’ to a man or a woman, then you should also be able to replace the its to one of the other possessive pronouns, his or her:

    What’s that over there?
    It’s a cadaver. The zombie lost its brains.
    It’s a cadaver. The zombie lost her brains.

let’s—Short for let us. Different to “George lets the dog go.”

no one—Two words, no hyphen.

okay—not ok or OK.

per cent—is two words. Percentage is one.

practice/practise—practice is a noun and practise is a verb. Advice is a noun and advise is a verb—these two words have the same endings but they sound different when spoken. Compare this with practice and practise to get the right one.

there—where something is. Ask where?

their—belongs to them. Ask whose?

they’re—they are. Ask who are?

whilst—Same thing as among/amongst. We’ll be using while.

whom—This form is slowly being phased out of the English language, so you can get by with just who. If you want to sound smart and use whom then just make sure you get it right (I’ll be double checking anyway). Who is used for the subject of a sentence, and whom is used for the object. This basically means that who does the verb, and whom is what the verb is acted upon. See the Sentence structure section below for a better explanation.

who’s—means who is or who has, similar to it’s.

whose—belonging to someone.

your—belonging to you.

you’re—you are.

Sentence structure

A basic sentence structure goes subject – verb – object.

Subject—The subject of a sentence is the thing doing the verb.
Verb—What the subject is doing. Together, the subject and verb can act upon an object.
Object—What the subject and verb are acting upon in a sentence.

In the sentence “Juliette gets all the boys”, the subject is Juliette (the one doing the verb), the verb is gets (the action the subject Juliette is doing), and the object is all the boys (what the subject and verb act upon—what Juliette gets). This may not seem important at first, but a few words change depending on their function.

The conjugation of the verb depends on the subject:

Pronouns (I/you/he/she/it/we/they) are used to replace nouns and names. They are different when acting as the object of a sentence:

The who/whom example acts in the same way:

    Who gets all the boys? (She gets all the boys)
    Juliette gets whom?/Whom does Juliette get? (Juliette gets them)
    Who gets whom? (She gets them)

Reviews in general

Name of artwork, exhibition, TV programme, book, movie, theatre production, etc, should be in italics. Company names, episodes, chapters, scenes, etc, are not.
If a movie, book or play is named after a character, for example, Don Carlos in Don Carlos, then you should not italicise the name when you are referring to the character.

Music reviews

Band names in normal text (Muse).
Album names in italics (Showbiz).
Song names in single quotes (‘Sunburn’).

    My favourite track from The Prodigy is ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, from The Fat of the Land.

Annoying things people do

Double spacing—this is when somebody puts two spaces where there should only be one (after full stops or in between words), and there should always only be one. According to Wikipedia the practice of putting two spaces after a full stop comes from the olden days of monospaced typesetting (having characters of equal width), where the “increased spacing between sentences facilitates readability”. With the introduction of proportional fonts in publishing, this has changed.
In my opinion, the gaps you see between these words are all of equal space, and if you happen to put two spaces somewhere then it creates uneven-looking text.

R.I.P—If you are using an acronym with full stops, then you must also place a full stop after the last letter, even if it is in the middle of a sentence.

:-)—Textual expressions are usually saved for less formal means of communication, such as text messages and some emails.

could of/should of/would of—could, should and would are auxiliary verbs (or ‘helping’ verbs), which require a verb for them to work properly. Of is a preposition and not a verb, so the proper written form is could have, should have and would have, or at least shortened to could’ve, should’ve and would’ve. People get this confused because the ‘ve sounds like of when spoken.

try and do something—This is usually incorrect. If you try and do something, it doesn’t make sense most of the time. “I’m gonna try and use grammar properly.” Using the conjunction and instead of to separates the sentence into two bits: “I’m gonna try” and “(I’m gonna) use grammar properly”. However, try is a transitive verb, and it requires either a verb in the infinitive (indicating purpose—what you’re trying to do) or an object.
“Come and do something” is probably the cause for this common error. You can come and you can do something. You can also come to do something.

Get lost looser!—Lose is a verb. Loose is an adjective. You can have a tooth loose, but once you lose it, it’s gone.

Beowulf lead the men into battle—lead can be a verb or a metal. The past tense form of the verb is led, and is pronounced the same as the metal. You could either say “Beowulf leads the men into battle” (present tense) or “Beowulf led the men into battle” (past tense). Confused? The present tense form of the verb to read changes pronunciation in the past tense just like to lead, but the spelling remains the same. I read about it.

She’s going to insure that doesn’t happen—Insurance is related to the verb to insure. The verb to ensure means to secure or to guarantee.

    You should ensure that you insure your car on time.

women joggers, three males—Male and female are preferably used as adjectives, and men and women are used as nouns. Three women who are also joggers can be described as female joggers, but not women joggers.

Before you submit your piece

There are a few things you should do before submitting a final copy.
1. Use a spell check to make sure there are no spelling mistakes.
2. Read the piece again. Look for:
    a) Any revisions you might need or want to make.
    b) Factual errors.
    c) More spelling mistakes. If you’ve accidentally used or spelled the wrong word, the spell check won’t find it.
    d) Grammatical mistakes. Follow the style guide, and make sure everything makes sense.
3. Make sure the file is in a format we can use, and any pictures are separate files.

If you have any questions about grammar or need anything explained, email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Read this! It’s ‘important’!

As you’ve learned in teh grammerz over the last few weeks, the English language* is pretty shit. Seriously, it’s all over the place, just vomiting everywhere. Every English grammar rule has so many exceptions that it’s just completely random and makes no sense. Even I, a self-proclaimed Grammar Nazi, Grammar Nerd and Master of Language, have not completely mastered the English language, despite it being my native tongue.

I’ve tried to write this damned column to advise you about English, give you knowledge* for you to practice it correctly. But we still screw it up. We’re all still dependant on something, something inherently flawed in the language—the assumption that English should be written the way it sounds. That writing should be as easy as speaking. Well, it’s not.

Yeah, I make mistakes. In fact, I made two* in the last paragraph—two mistakes that, thanks to the simultaneousness* of the presentation of the written word, I can safely say were intentional. And did you see them? Did you pick them up as you were casually reading this? I think not. Does it matter, then, that I made these mistakes? Did they distract from the clarity or unclarity** of my statements?

I think not. It shouldn’t matter. But we still strive for perfection, for unity, consistency. And we get farther* away every day. I’ve given up. I’ve written all I care to write about the English language. And what am I left with? This column to write, and some obscure shit nobody picks up on, save for a few. They’re probably not going to tell you about it. We’re through the looking glass.

So. Mistake number one. Practise/Practice. These two words are pronounced the same way, but serve different functions. I might have written about this before, but to be honest, I can’t be bothered asking Jackson to send me the www.lmgtfy.com link. Here’s the explanation anyway. Practise is a verb, and practice is a noun. The same goes for license and licence. You know the difference between nouns and verbs, right? Right? Right.

Instead of going into the whole noun/verb thing again, here’s a useful trick (that Rory taught me) that will let you know whether you should use the -ise or the -ice form. I’m going to advise you of some good advice. The useful thing about comparing these spellings is that advise and advice have the same corresponding suffixes, but the pronunciation between the two words is different. Advise is the verb and advice is the noun. You should be able to compare how these two words are used to figure out their function, relating it to the practise/practice example.

Mistake number two. Dependent/Dependant. Once again, these two words are pronounced the same, but have just one letter different. And they serve different functions. FML. FYL. Fortunately, 99 percent of the time you’ll only use dependent, as in to be dependent on something. The -ant form is used for describing people who are dependent on something—dependants, such as beneficiary dependants.

Here’s another one. Compliment/Complement. Until recent times I wasn’t even aware of these two different spellings. The verb compliment means to praise something or someone, whereas complement means to go well with something. If you compliment the waiter, he might recommend a wine that will complement your meal.

The most important thing about these minor differences is that if you get it wrong, nobody will care. Your spell check probably won’t even pick them up. So why bother? Spell it how you like, and maybe one day English spelling will one day actually make sense.

In conclusion, fuck English. Fuck English grammar. Fuck English writing. Scheiß auf Englisch. Lass uns alle Deutsch sprechen.

* What the fuck kind of word is that? Just look at it.
** Not an actual word.

The egg has a point. What’s in a name? What is the meaning behind words? We all know how to use words—hopefully—but what set of unwritten rules limits written definition? Who defines the meaning of a word? Hopefully not Humpty Dumpty, we all know how that turned out.

Language is a funny thing. Social interaction in the form of sounds, scribbles or gestures, making words which communicate meaning, a meaning shared among large groups of people, spread over lands, cultures and counties, countries and continents. Language is infinite in its potential—with it one can express ideas, truths and untruths; one can request information, ask if they want fries with that; and command people to do things, cook me some eggs bitch.

We use language every day. There’s no avoiding it. There’s no doubt that it’s something most people take for granted. Without written language we would not be able to send emails, write letters or books, or record thoughts, ideas and events—history would succumb to our failing memories. Without a spoken language, communication would be impossible. No conversations. No socialising. No society. No thought.

“Verbing weirds language.” —Calvin (Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection)

Language is surprisingly difficult to explain. Using language to describe language seems quite ironic, paradoxical even. Laurie Bauer, Professor of Linguistics here at Victoria University, feels that the broad scope of language makes it hard to define.

“Providing a definition is really difficult,” he says. “Some of the features that distinguish language from other communication systems are very technical, like recursion. Recursion means that you can have a construction of a particular type within a construction of the same type. So in ‘I think language is hard to define’ we have a sentence— ‘language is hard to define’—within a sentence—‘I think language is hard to define’.

“This is central in human language and either very rare or non-existent in other communication systems. But that does not mean that it defines language, just that it is one of the characteristics of human language.”

Language is complex, but what do we need it for? What is the purpose of language?

“The [definition] that is most often given is to communicate information. That may not be the most common use of language. Others include to act as a substitute for grooming in the other great apes; to ease social interaction; and perhaps most cynically, though note that chimpanzees have great difficulty in doing this, to lie.”

“What do words mean? Well, you should know that! You shouldn’t need me to tell you. But a lot of people don’t even know this kind of thing, that a word is do mean.” —Guy Armstrong

In order to discover the meaning behind language and words, it may be important to take a look at where it came from. The emergence of language in primitive humans is not an easy thing to document, as you can imagine, as any form of language that may have existed—spoken or gestural—leaves no trace whatsoever.

Language didn’t just appear overnight either. It is believed that its origins were simple gestures, such as are seen with apes, but that there was a shift to vocalised language because of its advantages. Then, not only would early humans have had to develop the anatomical means to speak, but neurological changes in the brain to support language.

The first word may have been something that sounded like “wuuurgh”, meaning in our more complex modern speech, “Oh shiz, there’s a big-ass tiger coming our way!” Every time caveman Frederick Worthington II, Esq. saw said tiger coming his way (which was often, as he was always seen carrying around a slab of the finest quality mammoth meat) he would shout out a terrified “Wuuurgh!” His fellow cavemen and cavewomen quickly associated this sound with the occurrence of big-ass hungry tiger, thus giving the sound meaning, a meaning they could replicate if they needed to. The first word was born!

From such speculation we can see that the meaning behind this word was defined by both the individual and his peers. If he had not said the word in a certain situation, or his peers had not interpreted it, such a sound would be meaningless. Meaning for words and language, then, is a consequence of society. It is also follows that language has developed and evolved over time, as has society—the two change hand-in-hand, and continue to do so even today.

“The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.” —Christian Nestell Bovee

Dr Dianne Bardsley, lexicographer and Director of the New Zealand Dictionary Centre, documents words that appear in New Zealand English, and words that have a meaning specific to New Zealand English. “Words come to New Zealand English from Maori, so, we borrow terms,” she says. “We also borrow terms from British English, and we change the meaning of them, give them a new sense. So terms like ‘paddock’, for example, and ‘creek’, are not used in the same way they are back in Britain, but we’ve given them a specific use here in New Zealand.”

She agrees that language changes with society. A social situation, and society in a wider sense, does affect language in some way.

“Words are like chameleons, they just change their colouring and they change their nature depending on who is using them. And you know, most language is dependant on—and the kind of language you use—is dependant on the participants, who’s using them, the purpose of the language, whether it is to amuse or to entertain, to instruct, and the situation itself… I mean, if you’re on a yacht, and you’re all busy working together, you’re using quite a different language than if you’re playing chess, or if you’re just down at the pub.”

She mentions six domains of word generation in New Zealand, for example the rural sector, politics and sport. Words appear in these circles and become a part of the language through frequent use, although, mostly inside those circles. On the national scale, Maori language and culture has had a huge influence on New Zealand English.

“[It] really affects us and brings in a lot of new terms. What we’re doing now is compounding New Zealand English terms in Maori, so you’ve got ‘Kaumatua Flat’ and ‘golden koha’, and you’ve got this blending and compounding of these two different languages, which is interesting.”

One interesting area of word generation, she noted, was crime. “And our criminals… I mean, all criminals, whatever language they speak and whatever culture they’re involved in, they have to have a code which means that they’re excluding anybody else. Particularly with drug dealers, and people in prison, they have a language all of their own.

“They have a code that excludes prison wardens and the police and anybody else. They even use, for money, for example, different words for each note, for each value. So a ten dollar note is a ‘shepherd’s pie’, because Kate Sheppard’s on it. And a twenty dollar note is a ‘lettuce’ because it’s green, and a hundred dollar note is ‘tomato’ because it’s deep red, and a cash of cannabis is a ‘bank card’, because you put it in a hole in the wall, and out comes some money. A lot of it is very very clever, very witty, but it’s totally code.”

This form of language, these words, however, are not likely to come into general usage. What happens in the clique, stays in the clique. “Academic linguists know about them, and the prisoners know about them.”

“He who is ignorant of other languages is ignorant of his own.” —Goethe

When it comes to understanding language, especially your own, learning a foreign language is the best way to do it. So say I, and the experts on language I talked to. Derek Wallace, senior lecturer in linguistics and director of Victoria’s writing programme(and one such expert), outlined what advantages language learning can have.

“Learning a foreign language has at least four benefits,” he says. “A pragmatic benefit of being able to communicate with other people better in specific situations; an epistemic benefit of assisting you to reflect on your own language and therefore understand its structure better; a philosophical benefit of helping you to get a clearer insight into how people of other cultural backgrounds might view the world differently; and a political benefit of showing willingness to engage with other people on their own terms, rather than add to the chauvinism of English.”

With all of these benefits, does learning another language, speaking it, have the power to change a person’s behaviour? Are we defined by the language we speak?

“I would agree that someone might be a different person, or at least act differently when speaking another language, or at least when they are really competent in that other language.

“This would be consistent with the idea generally that people are context-sensitive, which gives rise to expressions like ‘He is a different person when he is at home than when he is at work’.” This is something we can all relate to. It’s not necessarily a conscious behavioural change either.

Perhaps you swear more around your school friends than when with your parents or somebody you don’t know well. Maybe you speak in a high-pitched voice to your cat, but not to your lecturer. The behavioural change is the most noticeable if the two situations come together and clash.

“Two languages in one head? No one can live at that speed!”

“But the Dutch speak four languages and smoke marijuana.” —Eddie Izzard

Linguistics PhD student Anna Piasecki disagreed that speaking in another language would change a person’s social behaviour. “You may argue that you are different people when living in different countries, adapting to the world surrounding you really, but your basic social behaviour or characteristics will somehow remain the same.”

Anna’s studies and experience, however, have shown that learning another language has a significant effect on the way the brain processes language.

“If one realises that already monolinguals are capable of selecting or identifying a word within a third of a second from a lexicon of 50,000 words or more, bilinguals could hypothetically be expected to make many mistakes and process speech generally a lot slower. If you are reasonably fluent in your second language, a proficient bilingual must have tens of thousands of additional word forms for use in the second language—and the number of extra words from yet other languages in a multilingual must be immense.

“So, basically during speaking, reading or other, thousands of extra words are available for being selected for recognition or articulation. Yet, the cost associated to the ability of processing more than one language has been observed to be relatively mild. For example, it has been observed that bilinguals made English—first language—lexical decisions on words (i.e. is this a word in English? – yes/no) that were only about 125 milliseconds slower than those of monolinguals, but just as accurate!”

Your actual thoughts are also affected greatly by the language in your social environment. Your thoughts will adapt to the new environment, Anna says, depending on how you interact and identify with it.

“From my experience the language you have been using most extensively is the one that you’ll be generally thinking in. This may slowly shift, however, the longer and more extensively you are surrounded by your other language. To illustrate, when I came to New Zealand my thoughts were greatly affected by German. About six months in or so, lacking major exposure to German, my thoughts shifted to English. Some time later, once I moved in with two Polish friends of mine, some of my thoughts shifted to be in Polish. Currently, I guess I have a mixture of three, with English being the strongest one, followed by Polish and then German, which I use the least at the moment.”

But how broad is language’s influence on the human mind? What other possible effects could thinking in a different language have? If you thought in a language that had a more logical structure, would your thoughts themselves reflect this and become more logical?

“Not necessarily, and if so then only at the beginning stages of learning a second language. I guess there is some sort of logic to every language, and even if there is not, once you become a highly proficient speaker of a second language processes become more automatised—you don’t think about what is logical or what is not, you just automatically use the correct forms and structures.”

“This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” —Winston Churchill

And where is language going? Grammar nerds such as myself don’t think that language has such a bright future. No, it is a dark future we see. Everywhere we look we see signs of the English language’s deterioration—people misplacing apostrophes everywhere, youngsters not using any punctuation, the abbreviation ‘lol’—we’re not happy with where this is going, or what it is doing to our language. We collectively cringe with each ‘offence’ made against our language.

I was surprised, then, that none of the experts I talked to shared my sentiment. Professor Laurie Bauer explains:

“While we might try to argue that individual changes cause improvements or deterioration in the language system, when we look at them as a whole, they neither make a change for the better nor for the worse, it is simply change. We tend to give the changes that occur social values, but those social values change as language does. The social values often consider relatively recent changes as bad and longer-established ones as good, but that really has nothing to do with the linguistic structures involved, which are neutral.”

Indeed. Society changes with language, as we have seen. People don’t like change, myself included, but what can we do other than sit back and enjoy the ride? Derek Wallace offers a positive outlook to the future of language:

“I don’t go along with the idea that the English language has deteriorated recently. It functions in coordinating people’s actions and beliefs just as well—or badly—as it always has. In fact, through mass education, global entertainment and broadcasting, and expansion of the technological means of expression available to large numbers of people today, it may have become more varied and therefore richer than ever. Because of the centrality and pervasiveness of language, if it had deteriorated people would feel that their lives had become socially impoverished, and this doesn’t seem to be a widespread perception.”

A richer language only means that we have more linguistic freedom to express ourselves—and that’s hardly a bad thing. Dr Dianne Bardsley agreed with me about the grammar, but that it’s not the most important aspect of language:

“Punctuation is changing, people are not as formal as they used to be in grammar. It’s changing. But we can’t say that it’s a good thing or a bad thing. The basic principle for me is always if a person understands it, if your meaning is clear, then that language is probably acceptable. So I think clarity has got to be the underlying principle.”

Clarity, then, to get meaning across as best as possible. Is this not the purpose of language? To communicate ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as best as possible? To interact with our social environment? Language therefore, is what we make it to be, as Anna Piasecki puts it:

“What we currently use is what may become, or is established as, the norm. Each individual has his or her own language to some extent. And a bilingual even more so. Everybody adapts to their native language’s conventions for the most part, however, certainly including some unique features; and for multilinguals these will certainly come from the different languages they speak.

“Languages grow with us, we are the language.”

Some people tweet write like they speak. There’s nothing wrong with that, I always say. It gives character, personality, to the writing. Which is good. Some people also spell like they speak. There’s everything wrong with that. It’s not when words are misspelled that is most annoying—it’s when people write the wrong word because it sounds like what is spoken.

Exhibit A: “Could of, should of, would of.”

WRONG.

You should have realised that ‘could’, ‘should’ and ‘would’ are auxiliary verbs (or ‘helping’ verbs), which require a verb for them to work properly. You also should have realised that ‘of’ is a preposition and not a verb, and that the proper written form should at least be “could’ve, should’ve, would’ve.” Just because the “’ve” sounds like “of”, doesn’t mean that it is written that way. Man, I hate English sometimes.

Exhibit B: “Try and do something.”

WRONG!

When you attempt something, however mundane it may be in that mundane life of yours, you use the infinitive: try to do something. If you try and do something, it doesn’t make sense most of the time. Let’s see… “I’m gonna try and use grammar properly.” Using the conjunction ‘and’ instead of ‘to’ separates the sentence into two bits: “I’m gonna try” and “(I’m gonna) use grammar properly”. You’re going to try and use grammar properly? ‘Try’ is a transitive verb, and it requires either an object or a verb in the infinitive, indicating purpose. Not off to a good start with the grammar, are we?

“Come and do something” is probably the cause saying for this common error. You can come and you can do something. You can also come to do something.

Exhibit C: “Get lost looser!”

EVEN MORE WRONG!

‘Lose’ is a verb. ‘Loose’ is an adjective. Some of you losers can’t even tell the difference. Fail.

Exhibit D: “Beowulf lead the men into battle.”

WRONG AGAIN!

‘Lead’ can be a verb or a metal. The past tense form of the verb is ‘led’, and is pronounced the same as the metal. You could either say “Beowulf leads the men into battle” (present tense) or “Beowulf led the men into battle” (past tense). Confused? The present tense form of the verb ‘to read’ changes pronunciation in the past tense just like ‘to lead’, but the spelling remains the same. I read about it.

Exhibit E: “She’s going to insure that doesn’t happen.”

WRONG. JUST WRONG.
LEARN TO READ, FFS.

Insure. Ensure. You should ensure that you insure your car on time. ‘Insurance’ is related to the verb ‘to insure’. Remember this. The verb ‘to ensure’ means to secure or to guarantee. These are facts.

I see these mistakes all the time. Mostly written on bathroom walls, which could explain the bad grammar, but people should be familiar enough with their language’s written form to know not to make some of these obscure mistakes that most people probably wouldn’t even see or care about.

Ugh. All this complaining has got me down. I’m going to fix that—and fill out the rest of this column—with a bit of creativity. I’m introducing a new feature to my writing. Feel free to use it in your own academic work. I have invented… written awkward silence!
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You might not think it, but I love spam. My enjoyment of spam emails has grown immensely over the year, despite the grammatical horrors you can imagine they include. I imagine some sort of survival instinct has kicked in during my time as Salient‘s Chief Sub-Editor, to stop me from exploding every time I edit the music reviews. The vexing fit I got every time a certain music reviewer used an American spelling has now morphed into a nonplussed ‘meh’, and the exploding rage I got whenever someone put two spaces after a full stop is now a light-hearted chuckle.

Desensitised from all of the heinous crimes I see committed against the English language on a daily basis, I was able to look at my spam folder and be fascinated by what I found. Grammatically speaking, of course. The contents of my spam folder can be broken down into a few generic categories of spam. The first 20 percent is all from a Canadian Pharmacy trying to sell me drugs, but somehow I don’t think sending someone the same email 34 times in a single day is a good marketing tactic.

The second category is all about the viagra and penis enlargers, the sexual pleasure enhancers. They’ll try to tempt you to read the email in a few different ways, luring you in with subjects such as “I remember about you! :)“, “))) Mike’s drunk, I pictured him“, and “RE: Order status“. If this fails, there’s always a more direct subject in there too. They seem to all avoid the word ‘penis’, favouring other interesting alternatives: “Your lovestick won’t get tired” reads a subject, “Perfect hard gift for her” says another, and “Make your zipper knight the best in the whole town“.

Fail these, then a bit of randomness might intrigue you. “Масcовые раcсылки“? Not for me. “She went and opened the door” I took a look. “What does a frog want with you.” read the email. Alrighty. Here’s an interesting one: “With the Quangle Wangle Quee” says the subject. “In a beautiful pea-green boat;“.

Few of these actually manage to contain some sort of message, only a deviously hidden link that the few people who actually bother to look through the mountains of crap in their spam folder will never click on—unless of course they happen to feel compelled to do so upon finding it… Not likely. Anyway, one spam emailer out there decided to actually say something about his/her/their product in an email that appeared in my spam folder in April.

It began by asking me a very probing question: “Why Settle For Average?”
Why indeed? “Get Bigger, Harder, More Intense iErections [...]”
iErections..? I didn’t know Apple offered such a *huge* range of products. It then goes on to list some benefits, including but not limited to:
“Super-ChargedSexDrive“; “Harder and more frequent iErections“; and “Massive, earth-shattering0rgasms“.

A third category of spam emails is the completely random ones. All spam is random to some extent, using randomly generated names and email addresses and such, but some just seem to contain random collections of letters or words. “You are receiving this e-mail because you subscribed to Uip Featured Offers. Uadu respects your privacy.” writes one spam mail, “You are receiving this e-mail because you subscribed to Xqwy Featured Offers. Oziyq respects your privacy.” writes a suspiciously similar one. I imagine a cat walked on the keyboard every time they went to write their company name.

I like the random words ones even more:

Subject: hi there
“afterwards the women try mouth opened side use thrown wish strange let make trouble became home world air stopped countenance.”
I wonder if they’re trying out the infinite monkey theorem to sell me a penis enlarger?
“try reached Mrs around understood year show standing the indeed must taste force arms wanted according became,lady opposite strong noble the”
At least they didn’t end the sentence with a preposition.

The fourth and final category contains all of the non-generic spam, making up a very small percentage. It is here that you find the gems of spammers—the scammers. “Greetings from Dubai,” writes Mr. George Abraham in a lengthy email. “On November 6, 2000, an Iraqi Foreign Oil consultant/contractor  with the CHEVRON PETROLEUM CORPORATION, MR MOHAMMAD AL NASSER made a (Fixed deposit) for 36 calendar months, valued at US$17,500,000.00” he explains. ”I discovered from his contract employers, Chevron Petroleum Corporation that .Mr. Mohammad Al Nasser died as a result of torture in the hand of Saddam Hussein […]”

I got this email originating from an Italian email provider.

From: Barrister Yuko Ishazawa
Subject: 26 / 05 / 09
“I am Yuko Ishazawa,a legal practitioner based in London i have urgent business for you.”
Okay. What urgent business could this person possibly have with me? I decided not to ask. Instead, I replied as such:

From: Michael Langdon
Subject: Out of office autoreply: Re: 26 / 05 / 09
“MaxGentleMan is a powerful natural herbal PenisEn1argement pill that has given a new lease of life to those people who are suffering from ErectileDysfunction…”

He never got back to me.

Students last week were stopped in their tracks by a small group of protestors in the quad.

Armed with plastic rifles, the Free Palestine Group constructed a makeshift blockade from traffic cones across an accessway to the quad.

The group said they wanted to raise awareness of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in occupied territories.

“We want to promote Palestinian freedoms and rights to a homeland while highlighting the atrocities of the Israeli War,” one protester told Salient.

“Some Palestinians are held at checkpoints for hours, some are given arbitrary detention and some are even shot.”

Protestors asked students to produce identification as they passed through the blockade.

As questioning continued, some students became agitated with the demonstration.

The Free Palestine Group had previously set up a mock blockade at another location in the quad, before they were asked to leave by CampusCare.

The protestors briefly retreated to the Student Union Building, before moving back to the Quad, setting up the blockade on the main stairs leading down to the driveway.

By the time Salient arrived on the scene, the Free Palestine Group had been interrogating “suspected terrorists” at this location for almost twenty minutes.

There was a mixed response among the student body regarding the nature of the protest.

While many students smiled quizzically and presented ID cards, others simply jumped the blockade and continued walking.

“Most of the students are quite supportive,” a representative of the Free Palestine Group told Salient.

“A few are a bit irritated, but for the most part we’ve got a light-hearted response.”

Campus Care told the protesters to remove themselves from the area, after a complaint was lodged by a student.

Neither protestors nor Campus Care moved to vacate the stairwell.

Tensions peaked when Campus Care took possession of a traffic cone used to make the blockade.

“It’s every student’s free right to be able to travel in all areas of campus without disruption,” a representative of Campus Care told Salient at the protest.

“They are obstructing access, preventing students from being able to walk about and blocking a stairwell, which could lead to safety issues.”

Campus Care said that they felt the manner in which the Free Palestine Group had brought attention to their cause was inappropriate and disruptive.

Fighting a losing battle with Campus Care, the Free Palestine Group quietly gathered their traffic cones and moved off site.

A copy of Article13 of the International Declaration of Human Rights left behind at the protest was taken by Salient as a souvenir.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller, the great German poet and dramatist. In celebration of this occasion, the VUW German Club will be performing a selection of scenes from his greatest plays as part of their annual German Club Play.

Schiller is considered by many to be Germany’s most important and influential classical playwright. He has been praised widely by critics not only for his use of inventive dramatic devices, but for inventing new dramatic forms such as the melodrama and bourgeois tragedy. Schiller’s plays made him an acclaimed dramatist at a very young age, and his works only improved with his age and experience.

In a letter his friend, fellow German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schiller wrote:

“I am becoming increasingly convinced of the genuinely tragic quality of my subject; one special characteristic of it is that one sees the catastrophe from the very first scenes and that one is led ever more closely towards it while the action of the play seems to be moving away from it.” (18 June 1799)

Schiller died just six years later, at the age of 45, from tuberculosis. He finished just a few more “genuinely tragic” plays.

This year’s German Club Play is not an event to be missed, even if you don’t speak German! As with all of our plays, we are making this one to be accessible to an English-speaking audience. Although the scenes from the plays will be in the original German, the play will be narrated by Goethe in English, beginning with his return from Schiller’s funeral.

Beleaguered by a nosy reporter about his dead friend, Goethe begins telling the story of his life and his plays. As he talks, Schiller’s plays come to life. Some of the plays we will be performing include:

Die Räuber (The Robbers)—Schiller’s first play, about a conflict between aristocratic brothers Karl and Franz Moor. In an attempt to secure his dying father’s inheritance, Franz turns his brother Karl into a criminal. Karl, in turn, attempts a revolutionary anarchy in the Bohemian Forest, but must make a horrible decision upon his return home.

Don Karlos (Don Carlos)—King Philipp II of Spain is a lonely tyrant. He tries to find a friend with whom he can discuss his life and his problems, and offers a position at court to the Marquis of Posa. Posa, a friend of Philipp’s son Carlos, and an idealist, is brave enough to refuse this offer and to tell the king the truth: a courtier is not free to act for good, the king is too powerful. With burning passion, Posa appeals to the king: give up your absolute power! Give freedom to your subjects! The king is moved but does not understand Posa’s idealism.

Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart)—an historical drama in which Queen Mary I of Scots is imprisoned by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth of England. The two queens clash in a power struggle over Mary’s life and the throne of England, a conflict that puts everyone’s allegiances in question.

Die Jungfrau von Orléans (The Maid of Orleans)—Schiller’s version of the Joan of Arc story, with a twist.

Wilhelm Tell (William Tell)—Schiller’s drama about the famous Swiss marksman who must shoot an apple off his son’s head. The tyrannous Austrian bailiff Gessler has set his hat on a pole in the village square and demanded that everybody bow to the hat. Two soldiers are to arrest anybody who doesn’t obey. Tell, who is not aware of the edict, walks past with his son Walther.

From Goethe’s reminiscences we get to see a composite picture of the real Schiller—an outstanding playwright and ardent advocate of liberty and human rights. Friedrich von Schiller will be greatly missed but he lives on through his plays.

The play will be showing at the Memorial Theatre in the Student Union Building from 16–18 September, starting 7pm each night. $15/$10 Waged/Unwaged. Bookings on 04 463 5318

All right kiddies. No grammerz lesson today—instead Shirley and I are going to test your grammar. You probably weren’t expecting this, but you need to be prepared. Because bad grammar can strike anywhere, anytime. When you go to uni. When you take out your recycling. When you pay your rent. When you fucking sleep.

So here’s the deal. In order be prepared for life in the real world, you’re gonna do this test on grammar. First you need to read the questions and circle your answer for each. Or tick them, or write them down in your head or something, I don’t really care how you do it. You’re just going to fail anyway.

Then, once you’ve finished the quiz, check the answers on page 25 and calculate your score. With your score—maybe you want to write it down somewhere so you don’t forget—head back here and look below for Shirley’s in-depth analysis of your grammerz ability.

TEH GRAMMERZ TEST

NAME:

Q1. Talking about the zombie’s bed sheets, how many zombies am I referring to?
a) Only one.
b) A whole apocalypse of zombies.
c) Could be any number.

Q2. Which of the following is correct?
a) OMG, where’d its upper half go???
b) Oh fuck, where’d its upper half go?
c) Oh fuck, where’d it’s upper half go?

Q3. Shirley’s cat has cat herpes. Which word in this sentence is the verb?
a) herpes
b) has
c) The second cat.

Q4. The werewolves and vampires are having…
a) their party.
b) they’re party.
c) there party.

Q5. The correct answer is also the most awesome.
a) Why not!
b) Why not?!
c) Why not

Q6. Pingu is licensed to kill. This sentence uses…
a) New Zealand/British English spelling.
b) American English spelling.
c) spelling not specific to either.

Q7. Slowly sneaking Marmite (the cheeky cat) steals muffins filled with chocolatey goodness. Where should a hyphen go in this sentence?
a) Slowly-sneaking
b) cheeky-cat
c) …Nowhere?

Q8. Which of the following is a Latin expression?
a) R.I.P.
b) GmbH
c) BTW

Q9. Which of the following is in the perfect tense?
a) We would eat many pies for breakfast.
b) We have eaten many pies for breakfast.
c) We will have eaten many pies for breakfast.

Q10. I’m a dendrophiliac. I have sex with trees. [Awkward silence]. Which word in this sentence is a preposition?
a) dendrophiliac
b) with
c) Awkward

Click here for the answers.

Results

All correct: ’Tis Okay. [A]

Your cat equivalent: Twitching ear.

So, you think you’re super smart now, just because you managed to get them all right? Wong. Like the title suggests, ‘tis okay, nothing special. You are like a twitching ear that cats get when they sleep. Sometimes it’s really cool. But mostly it’s just lame.

9–8: Adequate. [B]

Your cat equivalent: Droopy whisker.

Let me get this straight, you were only one or two away from a perfect score? But you fucked up along the way? Shame. Your score indicates that you are like a droopy whisker. Why? I’d like to know too.

7–5: Average. [C]

Your cat equivalent: Flea-bitten tail.

A cat’s tail has an involuntary movement. That’s probably what happened in your brain as it told you to pick the wrong answers.

4–3: Sigh. [D]

Your cat equivalent: Herpes-infested eye.

Herpes is a pretty sad virus, but it’s an accurate reflection of your pretty sad result. And herpes doesn’t go away. Again, another reflection.

2–1: Fail. [E]

Your cat equivalent: Poo on a Butt-hole.

How the hell did you get into uni? You may as well have gotten nothing right, because your fate is similar to those who didn’t. You are the shit that lingers on the a-hole, not quite the butt-hole, but close enough. Smells just as bad too.

0: EPIC FAIL. [F]

Your cat equivalent: The Butt-hole

The title says it all. So does the butt-hole. Hang on, butt-holes don’t talk. You should probably take that advice (in terms of grammar, of course).

Negative score: TOTAL IDIOT EPIC FAIL EXTRAVAGANZA. [G]

Your cat equivalent: (Insert your name here).

Judging by your score, not only do you fail at quizzes but you fail at life. Well done.

Click here to go back to the test.

Let’s talk grammar. Present perfect, simple past, pluperfect, present, present continuous, future, future perfect. Indicative, subjunctive, imperative. Singular, plural, nominative, accusative, genitive, first person, second person, third person. Actually, let’s have a yarn about nouns, pronouns, articles, verbs, prepositions, adjectives and adverbs.

Now, I remember the topic of nouns, verbs, etc. being covered very briefly in English class at high school, but I thought that subject was pointless and didn’t pay much attention.

The only information I retained was that verbs (or was it nouns?) were ‘doing’ words. It was only when I came to university that I learned this stuff.

Nouns. Nouns are generally described as words that identify a specific object or concept, but they are usually identified by their grammatical function. A noun will fit into the sentence (grammatically) The ___ is good. Nouns are often defined using the definite article ‘the’ or indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘an’. Take note though that nouns aren’t always things you can point at—a tendency or the abstraction.

Once you can identify nouns, pronouns should be easy. Pronouns are words that go in place of nouns or people, making the language simpler and to avoid repeating the noun. You can use pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’, ‘we’, ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘mine’, ‘yours’, etc. instead of saying people’s names and to indicate possession, or ‘it’ instead of other nouns. Even complex noun phrases can be replaced with a pronoun, for example:

Michael Oliver popped the big red balloon with the orange spots and ran away laughing, leaving the little children to cry.

Since the big red balloon with the orange spots essentially refers to one object (hence a noun phrase), it can be replaced with a pronoun if it has already been defined:

Remember the big red balloon with the orange spots? Michael Oliver popped it and ran away laughing, leaving the little children to cry. Then wrote a news story about it.

Verbs can be a little tricky at times. Basically they are the words that describe anything that nouns (or pronouns) do. Actions, ‘doing’ words. I jump, he makes, she eats, it defenestrates, we can, they like. Verbs generally conjugate with the noun that is doing the action—that is, the form of the verb used needs to fit the subject of the sentence.

Verb forms can also change according to tense (future, past, subjunctive, imperative, etc.), making things even more complicated. However, English verb conjugation is relatively easy compared to languages like Spanish, which pretty much has a different verb form for each possible conjugation of tense and person.

Adjectives are words that describe things and generally come before nouns, although they can come after. You can fit in an adjective in the sentence The ___ boat is mine, using any word that can describe the boat (or any other noun)—things like colour, size, awesomeness or classification.

Some adjectives also have different forms, called the comparative and superlative forms. Comparative forms compare objects’ values using a -er suffix on the adjective. My submarine is wetter than your submarine. The superlative form indicates values in the extreme—the ‘most’ something can become. But Rarah’s submarine is the wettest. If a comparative -er form or superlative -est form cannot be made with the adjective, they are instead formed using more or most with the adjective, respectively.

Adverbs are words that describe verbs, just like adjectives describe nouns. They answer the how, when, where or why of a sentence. You will find that adverbs generally end with the suffix -ly, although some do not (e.g., often). You will eventually be tested on this. Hint hint.

And a preposition? It’s what you end sentences with.

The annexing now sees the German Club occupying two of the four European language libraries that are located on the sixth floor of the von Zedlitz Building at Kelburn Campus. German Club Leader Thomas Golding defended the invasion, saying that the Polish library was comparatively underused by the Polish studies students.

“We’re the biggest language club on campus, and the most social. And for some reason we got the smallest library, even though we have more books than any of the other language libraries, and we have more members using our library,” he said. “We thought, the Polish library almost never has anyone in it, their bookshelves are empty, they have a comfy couch… We’ll just make it part of our living space.”

The invasion took place early last Monday morning, and met with virtually no resistance from the three Polish Studies students who were not in the library at the time. The German Club is reported to have manoeuvred its members into the corridor to the west at 11:02am, then around the corner into the Polish library at 11.03am. As a result of the occupation, the sign on the door was changed from “Polish Library” to “Polish Library, German Annex”, and now sports a small German flag.

German Club plans for the rest of the trimester have also come under scrutiny. They have proposed so-called ‘Competency Camps’ for first-year students. “Basically we’d be doing the whole university a favour,” Golding said. “We’d round up all the first years into the camps and make them learn how to operate the automatic doors, and teach them, you know, general university pedestrianship.”

Language is a bizarre thing. Collections of noises, gestures or symbols that are interpreted by our brains to form meaning. Humans have used language to communicate for thousands of years, to communicate feelings, needs, concepts and events. Language developed to suit us, changing word by word, reinvented through its interpretation.

But language is far from perfect. It’s adequate, but not perfect.

The problem is how people use language to say things, which can sometimes cause problems. For example, a few years ago I was out in town, and I told a mutual acquaintance of mine that “Tui is a shit beer”. This angered her, and she felt compelled to defend her shit taste in beer. Fearing for my life (she was bigger and stronger than I), I recalled something I had learned in philosophy class.

Basically we had learned the simple adage: just because someone says something, doesn’t make it true. I can say “I am a dendrophiliac”, which may be true. You can also say, “I am a dendrophiliac”, but it may be false. The validity of the statement “I am a dendrophiliac” is dependant on the person saying it; to clarify the truth of the statement we would need to specify that point.

So when I said “Tui is a shit beer”, what I was doing was expressing my opinion, that “I (Michael) believe that Tui tastes bad” or “Tui tastes bad in my opinion”. This did not invalidate my mutual acquaintance’s opinion of the beer. I explained this to her, and was spared a beating. (Being a geek can actually save you from being beaten up.)

You see, everybody is different and experiences things differently. There is no way anybody can make a completely objective statement about anything, because ultimately, everything is interpreted through people. Our personal truths differ vastly. This becomes a problem when people use language to make outrageous claims to how things are, instead of clarifying that it is how they perceive things to be. Just look at the music reviews.

This is where E-Prime (English Prime) comes in. The purpose of E-Prime is to make language completely subjective, to remove the confusion between statements of fact and statements of opinion. The main way it does this is by removing the culprit—the verb ‘to be’.

The verb ‘to be’ is probably the most-used verb in the English language, so removing its forms (am, is, are, be, was, were, been and being, and their contractions) is no easy task. But the benefit of this is that language becomes clearer and more logical. ‘Outrageous’ statements of absolute truth are no longer possible.

“That shit is whack.”

In order to convert this statement into E-Prime, we first need to replace the verb, as ‘is’ is a form of ‘to be’ and is not allowed. Consider: Who is saying this/where is the information coming from? What is really happening?

“Felix says that the shit seems whack.”

Another feature of E-Prime is that it also removes the use of the passive voice, which emphasises the action rather than the who or what—this is because it not only usually requires the verb ‘to be’, but the subject of the sentence (the person/thing doing the action) can be left out entirely.

“John Key is Prime Minister of New Zealand.”

Comments/Questions:
Not forever.
How did he get there? Process of election.
When did he get elected?
Who elected him? (Really, who?)

The obvious replacement for the verb here would be to use ‘to elect’, which seems to logically create a passive sentence:

“John Key was elected Prime Minister of New Zealand in 2008.”

The important thing to recognise here is who or what is doing the electing, and then make that the subject of the sentence:

“New Zealand citizens elected John Key as Prime Minister in 2008.”

While it may seem highly unnecessary and impractical for everyday use, what E-Prime does do is ensure that language is subjective and logical, forming clear statements that are in context. Since language is a huge factor influencing how we think, it follows that using E-Prime will make one’s thoughts clearer and more logical.

So have a look into E-Prime, try it out a bit. Use it in your essays to form your ideas in a logical fashion. It helps with your grammerz.

Upon leaving the Salient office that Tuesday morning, News Editor and Sasquatch look-alike Michael Oliver left a document open on his computer, reading:

“Contents of this article to be filled by whoever sits in the News Editor’s chair following his departure.

By [name]

[contents]”

Later that day, Langdon wandered inadvertently over to Oliver’s computer to get a closer look at what Designer Rory Harnden was doing.

“I wuz jus’ wantin’ to see wut Rorsky wuz doin’, on fotoshup an’ stuff. It looked cool, an’ stuff. Then I saw that Sas… Emjayoh [Oliver] had maed me news biatch,” Langdon said.

“I wuz ready too cry. I jus’ wanted to have go home an’ drink my whiskey an’ sider. I’d had done me second—me fuckin’ second!—grammar colmun that weak. Juckson didont liek teh first wun cos he reckon’d I wuz to drunk wen I rote it, teh hipocrite. And then I had to0 rite sum more.”

Complaining to Editor Jackson Wood, Langdon was confronted with a barrage of insults and Zeppelin-related commentary. “He sed, ‘Fuck off! Look, I don’t want to hear your problems. I’m learning about Zeppelins. Did you know that Britain had an Imperial Airship Scheme to establish flight connections between Britain and its colonies?’

“I wuz jus’ liek, no Juckson, I didont no that, chur.”

After typing some insults at Oliver vaguely disguised as a news article, Langdon was free to leave. But the seventeen hours it took him to finish the 300-word story has left him angry and disillusioned.

“Fuck, last tiem I evar speek to him evar!!! Not that I speek too him neway.”

As a sub-editor and grammarian, one thing that really gets to me when correcting grammar is when people use more than one exclamation or question mark. It’s stupid. Really. And highly unnecessary. Especially when it comes to exclamation marks, which people tend to overuse. If you use more than is necessary, your perceived intelligence will decrease in proportion to the number of excess exclamation marks. Allow me to demonstrate.

No exclamation marks. Sweet. Looks okay. Intelligence = 120.

I’m smart! Fuck yeah! Intelligence = 120.

Going well!! Let’s start using two!! Intelligence = 100.

Oh noes!!! Im getting stupdier!!! Inteligents = 80.

omg!!!!!! wtf!!!!!! iqz < 50.

wup wup wup!!!!11!!11 omyr;;ohrnvr - 00.0000000

You see? Does the same apply to question marks?? Yes??? Erghh???? I think I've made my point. But if there's one thing I really hate, it’s when people substitute a ’1′ for an exclamation mark. Please don’t do this. Please don’t make me smack you.

However, there are problems that arise with the reduction of punctuation marks. What if something is both amazing and a question?! See what I mean?! How can one use both an exclamation mark and a question mark and not be perceived to be an iota under the average level of intelligence?

This is where the interrobang comes in. Interrobang—it’s not some sort of kinky torture sex or a grave-digging explosion. It’s both an exclamation mark and a question mark. Is that not the best obscure punctuation mark you’ve read about on this page today? Here’s what it looks like:

‽

Say what‽ So why don’t you use the interrobang, and make this world a better place. For you and for me. Just cut and paste.

Did I mention that you shouldn’t overuse exclamation marks?

Consider this:
Mr Golding has a gun computer and needs to send a message of death an email to his friend Mr Vasilios. He begins loading his gun typing the message. Pointing the gun Mr Vasilios’ head finishing his sentence, he can now finish him off add some punctuation.
Mr Golding removes the gun’s safety trigger firmly holds down the shift key and places his finger on the trigger ’1′ key, and…
BANG! TAP! Fires the bullet Types an exclamation mark.
With that, his message of death is complete sentence is punctuated. The deal is settled sentence is grammatically correct and he can escape the crime scene send the email.
But Mr Golding isn’t satisfied. He needs to feel the exhilaration of pulling the trigger pressing the button again, causing another bullet exclamation mark to rip the shit out of Mr Vasilios’ flesh and bone materialise on the screen.
BANG! TAP! Another one. BANG! TAP! And another. Mr Golding doesn’t stop there. After firing a few more bullets typing a few more exclamation marks he sighs and wipes his bloody sweaty brow.
Then he hears it. Sirens Michael Langdon’s cries of agony. Oh no! It’s the Grammar Police! Before he can react, a SWAT team Michael Langdon busts down the door, heavily armed with guns and bullet-proof vests a red grammar-correcting pen and a Collins English Dictionary. They have He has witnessed his horrific crime against the English language  and have has come to put him away for good teach him about grammar.
Mr Golding grins grimly, diving behind the desk to pull out a shotgun a black vivid from his pencil case, ready for a showdown to draw shit on the walls. He’ll never learn, and neither will the Grammar Police.

What will happen next‽

“Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

“They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over.”
-Max Payne

While researching for some essays over the last few years, I often came across French statements being used in some of the older books. This annoyed me; I did not like that it was assumed that the reader should know French. Pissing French everywhere pêle-mêle, it just seemed arrogant of the authors—how was I, a lowly student of German, supposed to understand it all? Putain de merde!

The thing is, early to mid last century, if you were educated, you probably could speak French. It was compulsory to learn in many schools. But times changed, and so did the approach to academic writings. It is advised that you use more recent research, but this isn’t always possible. But even if you can understand the French ramblings in your research of Early German Colonial Expressionist Poetry, there is yet another language you are expected to know at university.

Latin. Latin. This is the true language of academia, back from the days when everyone at university dressed like they were in a Harry Potter movie, with the big black gowns, massive hoods that were fuzzy on the inside if you had to sit further away from the fire because you weren’t too smart, and funny square hats that made it difficult to walk through doors.

Oh wait. We still do that. It’s called graduation.

Latin was the true language of education, thanks to the legacy left by the Roman Empire. If you spoke Latin in the Middle Ages it meant you were educated; if you speak it now it probably means you’re a nerd. Latin also used to be a more complete language than many other languages, i.e., it had more words, such as religious expressions—which probably accounts for the large percentage of Latin-based words in the Germanic languages, as well as the Latin-based Romance languages.

Some Latin terms have made it to modern English through academia, just like wearing dressing gowns and wearing funny hats has. You’ve probably used some today. You might have specified a morning or evening time with ante meridiem or post meridiem, added something to your Cirriculum Vitae, or played a game of jeep versus velociraptor.
Hopefully you’ll recognise Latin abbreviations that are now common to English, e.g., i.e., R.I.P., et al., etc., etc. But do you know what they mean, and how to use them? We’ll start with some easy ones.

etc. Short for et cetera, which is Latin for ‘and the others’ or ‘and the rest’. You use it when there is an obvious continuation in a series and can’t be arsed listing them all. For example, right now I’m drinking a mixture of whiskey, red wine, absinthe, milk, etc., and it tastes better than Tui.

e.g. and i.e. Exempli gratia (‘for example’) and id est (‘that is’, ‘for instance’). Make sure you don’t get these two mixed up. e.g. is used for listing examples, and i.e. is used for a clarification, i.e., something specific.

One thing I found Latin abbreviations useful for was referencing in my essays. Be­cause I’m lazy, I quite often referenced the same book multiple times. Instead of repeating the book’s details over and over in your footnotes, you can instead write ibid. after the first occur­rence. ibid. is short for ibidem, which means ‘in the same place’. When refer­encing multiple books by the same author, instead of re­peating the author’s name you can use ead. (eadem) for female authors or id. (idem) for male authors.

et al. is one of my favourite Latin abbre­viations that I’ll probably never use again. It’s similar to etc., only used for people and not things. It is short for et alii and means ‘and the others’, although I always think of it as ‘and friends’. It’s usually used when referencing a book with multiple authors—you’ll come across books that are collections of essays written on a particular topic. For example, Salient, by Rory Harnden et al.

Questions about grammerz? Or email me here.

Repetita juvant
Repeating things is good.
Repeating things is good.

Requiescat in pace (R.I.P.)
Francophilia.
1000 velociraptors.

P.S. There’s also post scriptum, which comes after the main body of text and signature.

There is a large group of people out there who present a great threat to grammar. These people constantly pollute the English language (and other languages) with ungrammatical sentences, inconsistent capitalisation and apostrophe placement, excessive use of exclamation marks, and little to no punctuation. If left unchecked and un-moderated, it could mean the downfall of language as we know it. That’s right—I’m talking about people on the internet.

Take this fellow for example:

Dr.DRe wat kan i say he iz da shit he iz ma fav rapper hiz lyrics r guud az fuck n he n snoop dogg wer guud rappin 2gether but N.W.A wuz da shit 2 he shouda neva left cuz dey wer a raw asss group!

Do you find this as hard to read and unsightly as I do? I think this makes a good example of how spelling and grammar are important to legibility. To illustrate this point, I’ve fixed it up:

On the subject of Dr. Dre, I think he is the shit. He is my favourite rapper; his lyrics are most excellent. He and Snoop Dogg were well good rapping together, however N.W.A was of the highest quality. He never should have left because they were a raw-as group.

So, which was easier to read? Hopefully it’s the latter. Although I’d like for everyone to write legibly, not everyone can type, or can be bothered typing (or texting) properly.

A popular hangout for these types is YouTube, as shown by the webcomic xkcd.com here and here. Looking at some of the things people comment on the videos, I found a few disturbing trends. People like to spread spam such as this:

Here are ten facts
1. Your reading my comment
2. Now your saying/thinking thats a stupid fact.
4. You didnt notice that i skipped 3.
5. Your checking it now.
6. Your smiling.
7. Your still reading my comment.
8. You know all you have read is true.
10. You didn’t notice that i skipped 9.
11. Your checking it now.
12. You didn’t notice there are only 10 facts
Copy and paste to 1 video, tomorrow will be your best day ever! no matter what

So by posting their (usually ungrammatical) comment on another X videos, you will a) not be killed by some ghost; b) your crush will kiss you; or c) you will have the awesomest day ever. Seriously? Where’s the logic in this? There’s nothing mystical about spreading spam on YouTube.

Another thing people like to do is repeat something funny or awesome that is said in the video, only incomprehensibly. I found a good example from this video:

spiderman will you stop narrorating plz what you were narrorating its kind of unessacery unessacery but how will ppl know what ive been up to all this time spiderman were not idiots just go and do your thing oh….well….alright then

I find this example quite ironic. It is essentially an unnecessary narration of something that is said in the video (because you’re obviously watching the video, right?), which is about unnecessary narration. Sigh.

Anyway, enough with the bad internet grammerz. Now I’m going to teach you something useful—some basic HyperText Markup Language (HTML) tags, which you’ll be able to use right here on the Salient website when you write your (hopefully legible) comments.

You can use HTML tags around your text to change its appearance, to make it bold or italics and such. Tags are marked by angle brackets < >, within which you place the code to edit your text, placing the HTML markers around the part of text you are modifying. You need both an opening tag and a closing one—the closing one is marked with a forward slash / inside the angle brackets.

For example, to write in the bold typeface, you can use one of these:
We are <b>men</b> and we are <b>manly</b>!
We are <strong>men</strong> and we are <strong>manly</strong>!

Although the tags are different, they do the same thing:
We are men and we are manly!

Other useful things you can do:
<i> for italics or <em> for emphasis (both do the same thing).
<u> to underline your text.
<s> for a strikethrough effect.
<center> will centre your text (note the American English spelling in the tag).
<font size=”4”>Text</font> will make your text bigger. You can change the number from 1 to 7. 2 is the default size.

You can also make a segment of text link to another webpage:
I want to link the Salient site <a href=”http://www.salient.org.nz/”>here</a>.

This will make the word ‘here’ link to the Salient website, or whatever website you want—just paste its address in between the quotation marks.

So, remember that you place the tags around the text you modify, and you have to close it with the forward dash. A useful feature of the Salient website is it shows a preview of your comment before it is posted, so you can see what it looks like with all the HTML modifications. Go ahead, try it out!

Questions about grammerz? Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Useful sites:
www.noslang.com (brbigtp)
www.codesupplier.com/htmlquickchart.htm

Useful sights:
A grammatically correct comment under this article.
That would mean someone read this! Yus!

In modern-day English usage, hyphens are mainly used in emoticons, forming the nose. However, rules concerning emoticons are vague at best, and many people omit the hyphen altogether, favouring brevity over physiologically-correct textual expressions. :-\

Seriously though, hyphens aren’t so easy to explain. They are used to connect or separate words, either for style purposes or to clarify meaning. Most commonly (apart from in emoticons) they are used in what is called a compound modifier, where it is used to connect descriptive words together when one modifies the other and not the noun, making the meaning clear. Take some sort of awesome vegetable that eats people, for example. You’d describe it like this:

“A man-eating celery is causing havoc in the library.”

Note the placement of the hyphen between ‘man’ and ‘eating’. This is because here the word ‘man’ describes the word ‘eating’ (and not ‘celery’), and only together they describe the noun ‘celery’. If we remove the hyphen, the meaning of the sentence changes drastically:

“A man eating celery is causing havoc in the library.”

Without the hyphen, it now says that a man who is eating celery is causing havoc in the library. Now that’s just weird. Why the fuck would he be eating celery? Who the fuck likes celery anyway? Especially when it’s not covered in peanut butter or hummus? Does he know he’s not allowed to eat in the library?

So as you can see, if you don’t use hyphens properly, it can just cause a whole lot of confusion. I know I’m confused (celery has fewer calories than it takes to eat! What’s up with that‽). We need another example. Basically you need to decide if the words belong together, and use a hyphen if they do:

“Dr Dre-dissin’ gangsta fools and their zombie-like moaning.”

Just like in the previous example, the hyphen is placed in between ‘Dr Dre’ and ‘dissin’, as ‘Dr Dre’ describes what the fools are dissin’. Note that ‘gangsta’ is hyphen-free (see what I did just there?), because it is being used as an adjective that isn’t being modified by anything else—i.e., the fools are gangstas as well as Dr Dre-dissin’. If we removed the first hyphen, it would mean that Dr Dre is dissin’ the gangsta fools. Also note the hyphen between ‘zombie’ and ‘like’, as ‘like’ is being added as a suffix to modify ‘zombie’ into an adjective.

However, if the adjective is preceded by an adverb, no hyphen is necessary, as adverbs can’t modify nouns—they describe the how, when, where and why, modifying verbs and adjectives—so it is clear that it modifies the adjective and not the noun. Adverbs commonly end in -ly.

There is also something called a suspended hyphen, which is when you leave the hyphen hanging so you can add another bit of info to modify the noun. For example:

“Early fourteenth- and fifteenth-century rappers mainly addressed the darker issues of their time, such as the Black Death and the Spanish Inquisition. However, due to their target audience of gangstas being completely non-existent until the late twentieth century, these rappers had very little effect on the development of medieval society.”

This is basically to save you the time of saying/writing ‘century’ twice, and if you do it properly then I’ll give you a high five.

Hyphens are a tricky thing to explain. You have to pay attention to the meaning of descriptive words, and decide whether they belong together and need a hyphen. Note also that a hyphen is different to a dash, like this thing here—dashes are longer and are used for different purposes.

The Holy Salient Style Guide preaches that we use em dashes to break up sentences and for asides—like this right here—because it looks sexy (Punctuation, 3:12). There is also the shorter en dash, which is commonly used with ranges, meaning ‘to’. Here’s one final example with a hyphen, en dash and em dash:

“This half-arsed column took me 4–5 days to finish—fuck this, I quit. Again.”

- hyphen |– en dash | — em dash

Get out your rulers.

Questions about grammerz? Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Have any of you ever heard this and thought: What the fuck was Juliet talking about? Why can’t she, and the rest of Shakespeare’s cronies, speak like normal?
Well, if you have ever studied Shakespeare—and I haven’t—then you would know that in his time (around the 16th Century), English was a little different than it is today, known as Early Modern English. In fact, some of its features were quite similar to modern-day German, which is one of the reasons it interests me.

For starters, what’s with this “wherefore art thou” crap? Back in the day, there were two ways of speaking to somebody—formally with ye/you or informally with thou/thee, just like there is in many other modern-day languages. The situations you would use the different forms for speaking differ between the languages and cultures. In German, for example, you would speak informally to your friends and people of similar social status (e.g., other students if you are a student, people of a similar age, your family), and formally to someone when there is a significant gap between your statuses (e.g., your boss or teacher, an older person, an official, the king or queen, etc).

The difference between the formal and informal tones is what pronoun you use to address the person or persons, and the conjugation of the verb.

Exhibit G:

Verbs in the formal tone conjugated much the same as they do now, whereas with the informal tone the (regular) verbs take the suffix -(e)st. The conjugation of verbs in the second person singular were also different, taking the -(e)th suffix.

For example:

*It probably would have sounded odd to insult someone in a formal tone.

So what does this mean?

It means that Juliet is saying something like “Romeo, Romeo, what are you for Romeo?”
Wherefore is an archaic term that means something like ‘what for’ or ‘for what purpose’. Other such words include whither (where to) and whence (where from).
Juliet’s line makes a bit more sense now, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

It also means that, somewhere in the development of the English language, we’ve stopped talking informally altogether. When I think of modern English being spoken entirely in the formal tone, and if it had the implied social gaps that you get with German… It just seems bizarre. Of course, with modern English there is no such implied social gap, and we can still talk to our mateys. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either—many Germans feel their age when youngsters start addressing them in the formal tone.

Interestingly enough, some remnants of Early Modern English have survived until today. The whole whom thing is being ignored at large by modern English speakers (If you pretend its not there, maybe it’ll go away?)(see exhibit G). And you’ve probably heard your grandmother say something like “Believe you me” or “Mind you”, which are actually Early Modern English formal imperatives (commands). With modern English, to tell someone to do something, you would say:
“Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Grab the shovel, we need to bury him before anyone sees!”
In Early Modern English, you would follow the verb with the formal pronoun to form the imperative:
“Oh bugger. What a bunch of cockered earth-vexing clotpoles! Grab ye the entrenching tool, we must make haste and inter him with nary an onlooker!”

Questions about grammerz? Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Acknowledgements
Shakespeare.
The guy who delivered the Red Bull.

Disacknowledgements
A certain Nexus Editor whose presence in the office last Monday was not very conducive to work.
Rory and his Boney M.

The Reader is about the protagonist, Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), coming to terms with his past. We watch his 15-year-old self (played by David Kross) as he starts having an affair with the much older Hanna (Kate Winslet). Despite the intimacy of their relationship, the affair doesn’t last, and Hanna leaves Michael for mysterious reasons, leaving him emotionally scarred for the rest of his life. Begin the emo phase.

Having read the book many times, I of course got picky about all the little things the movie missed out, or what I think it got wrong. A lot of it can be attributed to the changes that were necessary for the adaptation, such as the extra framework that has been created to encompass the original story. This taken into account, I think that it is an excellent movie that has done the book justice. Although I think the movie missed the point a bit, but I won’t get into that.

Like the book, the movie also has moments that are very powerful and effective, moments that will shock and amaze you. While I feel that these moments aren’t as great in the movie as they are in the book, the movie still has some just as effective. The scene where Michael visits a Concentration Camp is especially moving.

The acting was great… most of the time. I cringed a few times when young Michael smiled to himself (pre-emo phase), and a scene with Hanna crying. This was just in the first part of the movie though, which did have a lot of awkwardness. But Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her role, so what do I know?

I don’t know what else to say about this movie. It is unlike any other movie I have ever seen.

Directed by Stephen Daldry
Written by David Hare (based on the book by Bernhard Schlink)
With Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Jeanette Hain, David Kross

bibliophiliac noun Person who is so aroused by books that they have to get it off in the library, either alone or with others. Most commonly found in the darkness of the first floor, by the Religion and Psychology sections.

blogospherical adjective On the blogosphere, i.e., the internet. Matt: “Did you see that blogospherical kitteh gif?”Sarah: “Please speak like a normal person.”

come down the mountain (on somebody) verb To bring to justice via student journalism. Usually happens to nubdom.MJO: “Fucking nubs ruining everything. Let’s come down the mountain on ‘em.”

cosgrove verb To act inappropriately, usually involving one’s beloved penis. See graphalli artist.

course unrelated costs noun Goods or services required to maintain one’s social life and appearance (in order to study to the best of one’s ability). E.g., beer, new shoes, an iPod, or a lawyer to defend yourself in court against VUWSAN.Morgan: “Where’d you get your sweet leather jacket, eh?”Andrew: “Claimed it on course unrelated costs, bro.”

double spacing noun When two spaces are used after a full stop or otherwise; ultimate sin.Elle: “Were you being sarcastic about the double spacing?”Mikey: “I’m always serious when it comes to double spacing.”

firstyearism noun or firstyearist adjective Prejudice or hate expressed towards first years because of their inability to adhere to university life and lack of common sense when it comes to the unwritten pedestrian traffic rules on campus. Being second year or higher automatically qualifies a student to be firstyearist.

grammerz noun grammerz, am teh thing wot keeped lanugage gud 4 speek gud yous needs grammerz lol

graphalli artist noun Lowlifes (e.g., first years) who draw drastically enlarged versions of their own penises on bathroom walls or similar.

Guy Armstrong noun Division by zero.

herstor noun Typical Kiwi bloke who likes rugby, hogging the remote and drinking with the boys. Modern day warriors.

herstory noun Hangout or place of training for herstors.

jizz verb To express one’s excitement or arousal. Usually occurs in one’s pants. Rory: “Hey, I just scanned in toilet paper to use as a background for your editorial.”JJW: “Holy shit, I just jizzed in my pants… Where’d you put that toilet paper?”

kia ora interjection A usually positive recognition of something. MJO: “Kia ora nubdom, kia ora.”

kioskbooker noun Person who uses the printing kiosks in the library to spend excessive time on Facebook, when someone most likely urgently needs to use it to print off their essay to hand it in on time.

nubdom noun A magical kingdom or state of mind where people are blissfully unaware of their own shortcomings or inexperience, i.e., innate nubbishness. See VUWSAN.

Obamaramabananallama noun The llama used in the Obama Campaign to distribute bananas. Also something fun to say really fast, while at the same time propagandising Obama’s presidency.

pseudonym noun Fake name used to hide one’s identity when writing into Salient, in order to avert the shame of doing so.

Salientron noun The primary supercomputer used at Salient. Rumoured to know everything, and fluent in over two operating systems, including Windows 3.1.

Soviet Uni noun In Soviet Uni, we make YOU think.

terminal verbosity noun The maximum speed at which one can speak. Sarita: “Oh. My. God. You wouldn’t believe what I just saw, therewasthisdogthatbitthisguyandthenhegotrabiesand…[incomprehensible]”Mikey: “She’s reaching terminal verbosity!”

The Week That Wasn’t noun Section in Salient containing fictional news events as satire. Not to be confused with the actual news.

unemployment noun What awaits you upon completion of your BA. Also collective noun. An unemployment of graduates.

VUWSAN acronym (Pronounced voo-san) Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association of Nubs. Also known as VUWSA, but only to members of the executive.
JJW: “What’s the latest at VUWSAN?”
JF: “…You mean VUWSA?”
JJW: “Nope.”

President Barack Obama – Address to Joint Session of Congress, Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Well, Mr President, I must say, if you come to my country, I’m gonna have to make sure I have my Springfield red grammar pen handy. Technically there’s nothing wrong with this excerpt—apart from the hideous double spacing (*shudder*), which I will never ever forgive him for—but I’m going to correct it anyway just for fun, and to teach you about the differences between New Zealand English and American English.

And yes, they are different. It’s important to be aware of this and to fight the infidel oppressors of our New Zealand English. Microsoft Word, aka Satan Word, is constantly trying to impose American English on us all by telling us that we misspelled ‘bastardise’ because it can’t be arsed checking what country it’s in—just waltzes on in and acts like it owns the place.

The differences are all in the spelling. American English bastardizes the English language with their favored spelling alternatives, whereas New Zealand English, which mainly follows the rules of British English, bastardises in a more gentler fashion favoured by the eyes. In Barack’s excerpt—if he were a Kiwi—he should have written “industrialised” with ‘s’ instead of ‘z’. And he shouldn’t have done all that double spacing—it’s so archaic! He should know better, really.

Cheers for the example, Baz. Like the word industrialise, any words that can end with the suffix -ise/-ize should be written in the -ise form in New Zealand English. Such words include colonise, industrialise, bastardise, capitalise, valmorphanise, caramelise, and the word I just made up, lundyise. This is also valid for the relevant forms of these verbs—i.e., bastardises (third person singular), bastardised (past participle), and bastardising (present participle).

The other major difference is the -our/-or difference. The superfluous u was rejected in American English spelling by Noah Webster, of Webster dictionary fame. He also proposed many other reforms to American English, such as metre into meter, but not all were officially recognised. So be sure you spell words such as odour, colour, favour, flavour, glamour, saviour, endeavour and fervour with the u.

These two differences are the main ones you should be aware of. There are various other vagaries out there, however. When used as a noun, a licence is spelled with ‘c‘ in British English, but spelled license in American English. But when used as a verb (to license) it is spelled with ‘s’. This applies to all of the forms derived from the verb, i.e., licensed (past participle/adjective), licensing (present participle). Defence is also spelled with ‘c’, but the verb form is different (to defend).

Here are some other words I found that differ between American and British English:

Questions about grammar? Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Approved YouTubing

Glenn Beck presents the Obama National Anthem. (Барак Обама, наш спаситель)
Armstrong & Miller – WWII RAF Sketch. (That’s like massively disrespecting of your trousers)

Disapproved YouTubing

How is babby formed (how girl get pragnent)
The real speech of George W Bush. (We must offer every child in America three nuclear missiles)

My mamma always said, “The lexicon utility is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” You are dealing with something that knows more words than you do. And you might not even procure some of the words that it provides you. Which could fuck up your granma, and can even change the significance of your prison term. Do you perceive what I portray? It also seems to give you lots of words starting with ‘p’, so if you pronunciate properly, then it will probably produce plenty of spit.

So basically, if you eat too many chocolates, you’re gonna spew all over the page, and it’ll be just nasty. You should mainly use the lexicon utility if you want to use a word you can’t remember, or if you’re trying to avoid the repetition of certain words. For an example I’ll use an excerpt from an essay by some guy called Scotty Harris, which I stole from a gend101 assignment box:

The velociraptor was the most awesomest lethal killer ever. It could reach speeds of 300kph (kills per hour) and was so lethal that it is known to have killed off numerous species, including the dinosaurs, Haast’s eagle, the dodo, the Mayans, and are even thought to been the killer of the lethal killer ‘Samurais’, including Antonie Dixon.

In this example, the words ‘lethal’ and ‘killer/killed’ are repeated a lot, which makes it sound gosh darned shit. So think: How can you improve your sentence?

I should point out here that a lot of people don’t check their own work after they have finished writing it. This is something you really need to do—you should read the whole thing through at least once very carefully to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes or missed anything out. It might even be a good idea to read it aloud to make sure it sounds okay. This will help you pick up on repetition (like in the above example) so you can fix it (even if the sentence is awesome anyway).

Once you have identified what is wrong with your sentence, think about how you can improve it. Can you use a better word or words? Can you say it differently? If you are having trouble finding a new word, maybe then you should use the lexicon utility. In the above example, the last part of the sentence (after ‘Mayans’) is the most awkward—the grammar is wrong, and sounds especially bad because of the repetition of the word ‘killer’.

For starters, let’s fix the grammar. Reading it slowly and carefully, I picked up on two errors. The first one was ‘…thought to been the killer of…’. This should either say ‘thought to have been the killer of’ or ‘…thought to be the killer of…’. Both are correct, but I think I’ll go with the former. The second mistake was a little harder to spot—Scotty Harris wrote ‘…are even thought to…’. It looks okay, but looking at the verb’s subject we find that he is talking about the velociraptor—it. If we put the subject and verb next to each other, we get ‘It [...] are even thought to have been…’. ‘It are’ is not grammatically correct—we need the subject and verb to match, so to fix it we replace ‘are’ with ‘is’.

Finally, I am going to get rid of the last ‘killer’ to fix the repetition, and use the lexicon utility on lethal to see what else Mr Harris could have written.

‘and is even thought to have been the killer of the deadly ‘Samurais’, including Antonie Dixon.’

Result!

Questions about grammar? Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Approved Reading:
Art of Grammar by Dionysius Thrax.
Freud, so you can analyse stuff.

Disapproved Reading:
2009 VUWSA Wall Planner.
stuff.co.nz.

The main theme of this book is Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. The protagonist, Michael Berg, narrates the events from his later life, as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him. This gives the narration years of profound experience and foresight, which shows especially when he discusses issues such as human nature, love, guilt and accountability.

The Reader is set into three distinct parts. In the first part, Michael describes how he had an affair with 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz when he was just 15, and details their relationship until its end, when Hanna mysteriously disappears. In the second part, Michael is now studying law when he encounters Hanna again, and he begins to learn the truth about her. After this I don’t want to spoil anything, it’s too good.

I heard that when the movie was released, it received much criticism for its Nazi- and Holocaust-related content. I think these people should have done their research into Germany’s history and culture. An entire generation of Germans—Schlink’s generation—had to face what their parents and loved ones may or may not have done in the Second World War. Which is what this book—this story—is all about.

“What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt.”

This book is incredibly deep. Before reading it for this review I had already read it twice and written an essay on it, yet I still found new things hidden between the lines, and am still amazed by its profoundness. A highly recommended read.

I said in issue two that the contraction it’s ALWAYS means it is. Well, I was wrong—a very big oversight on my part. Most of the time it’s is short for it is, however it can also be a contraction of it has. It’s been a long time—it has been a long time. I should also mention that this also applies to she’s and he’s. This is usually found in sentences formed in the perfect tense—formed by conjugating the verb ‘to have’, then adding the active verb’s past participle:

He’s gone to uni to p0wn some nubs. (Where ‘gone’ is the past participle.)

The perfect tense is used to indicate something that has happened in the past. Another way to talk about things in the past is with the imperfect tense, which instead just uses the preterite of the active verb (He went to uni to p0wn some nubs – stuff that happened). But I digress. I might possibly explain more about the various tenses some other time. Maybe.

Back to the apostrophe—I’m now going to explain some more common mistakes that people make when it comes to using it. One such mistake is the their/there/they’re and your/you’re mixups. They all sound pretty much the same, so how are we supposed to distinguish between them when writing?

They’re blowing their shit up over there.

They (a bunch of people, animals, robots, etc) are blowing their shit (the shit belonging to the bunch of people, animals, robots, etc) up over there (you’d probably point somewhere).

To help clarify which word you should use, it may be helpful to ask: Who (are)? Whose? Where?

I’ve made a table to demonstrate:

Another tricky thing that the apostrophe does is appearing in constructions involving time and money, such as five months’ rent or a week’s time. (Note the placement of the apostrophe after plural and non-plural words!) Unfortunately, like most rules concerning English grammar, there are exceptions. For example, I slept with your mother three months ago. She is now three months pregnant. Note that in this case there is no apostrophe. The difference between these examples, and whether you use an apostrophe or not, can be seen if we rearrange the sentences to use of instead of an apostrophe, like this:

Five months of rent.

A week of time.

However, we would not say three months of pregnant. The way I see this is that the word pregnant is a state of being—three months of being pregnant. (Your mother would talk about herself in this way using I am: I am three months pregnant.) Therefore we do not use an apostrophe.

One other common mistake people make is using apostrophes when forming the plural of a noun. Most commonly, people form plurals with an apostrophe when the word ends in a vowel or is an acronym. This is wrong—a plural word by itself should never have an apostrophe—you only add the apostrophe when it possesses something (See teh grammerz in Salient issue two for more details). Here is another table to demonstrate:

Questions about grammar? Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Approved Reading
Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.
A book of some description.

Disapproved Reading
A report into the effects of Voluntary Student Unionism In Australia by Joel Cosgrove.

“The humorous involves a saving of emotional energy, since what might have been an emotion provoking situation turns out to be something we should treat non-seriously. The energy building up for the serious emotional reaction can then be released.“(2).

In Collective Groan Heard Whenever Mature Student Raises Hand (3), the author Michael Oliver derives his main source of humour through the parody and exaggeration of stereotypes. According to Wikipedia:

“A stereotype is a preconceived idea that attributes certain characteristics (in general) to all the members of class or set. The term is often used with a negative connotation when referring to an oversimplified, exaggerated, or demeaning assumption that a particular individual possesses the characteristics associated with the class due to his or her membership in it.“(4)

For his article, the stereotype Oliver uses to derive humour from is the stereotype of ‘mature students’, as found in the culture of university students. The stereotype of mature students is used to describe older students of higher education, whose age and experience are seen to be an impairment to their learning, and even destructive to the learning of their younger fellow students—although studies into this have shown otherwise(5).
This stereotyping is clearly negative, therefore any feelings directed towards such stereotypes or stereotyping would be suppressed by societal norms. In order to derive humour from these associations through the desired ‘tension release’ effect, Oliver has had to do two things: Firstly, establish the writing as a work of fiction; and secondly, to invent a stereotyped character and situation that is extreme or even absurd.
As the writing is in the form of a news story, and is even located in the magazine in the news section, the piece has been placed in a news sub-section titled “In the Week that Wasn’t“. This sub-section is a regular occurence in the magazine, and is a play on “The Week that Was“, which is a commonly-used title for weekly news articles in modern journalism. The inclusion of the negation “not” in the sub-section’s title (as “wasn’t” is a contraction of “was not”) clearly indicates that the piece is a work of fiction, and also establishes it as a parody on news articles and whatever else may appear in the article, i.e, university culture. This satisfies the first requirement for the desired humourous effect.
The second requirement is then satisfied by Oliver in the article itself. He has written a story in which his mature student stereotype, Janet Sampson, disrupts a LAWS 121 class. Sampson frequently displays behaviour which can be seen as possessing extreme characteristics of both the stereotype of a mature student as well as that of an older person. Already the absurdity of the situation is seen in the second paragraph, when Oliver writes “…Sampson, 54, would not shut the fuck up about anything not connected to the subject being taught.” Her extreme (albeit fictional) behaviour indicative of a mature student stereotype is further indicated roughly halfway through the article, when it is said:

“Ten minutes into the 90-minute lecture, she had already asked 13.5 questions. [...] Seven related to the lecturer’s children, the motivation for each name, and whether or not they “ate their din dins.” ”

In addition, not only the behaviour of Oliver’s mature student stereotype indicates the article’s humour; it is also indicated by the behaviour of all other parties mentioned in the story: the students, Salient, and even the lecturer.
The students’ behaviour is characterised by extreme hatred and frustration towards Sampson. They say things such as “I’m gonna fuck you up, grandma”, and “DIE! JUST FUCKING DIE! HOLY GOD IN HEAVEN ROLL OVER AND DIE!”; Sampson is oblivious that these comments are directed at her until told by Salient.
Salient’s presence in the story is made when, for “…perhaps the only time [Salient] will dabble in anything remotely investigative, [we sent] along a volunteer to sit a row behind Mrs. Sampson…” Both the notion that such a story would be worth investigating, and the fact that it is said that it is a rare occurence of investigation, is clearly absurd, as Salient‘s weekly news reporting is both serious and investigative, as of almost any news reporting in any journalistic medium.
This extreme behaviour, combined with the extreme stereotyping and the indication that the writing is indeed fiction, lets the reader know that the situation is not serious, and is acceptable and okay to laugh at. The humour is therefore derived, according to Freud’s model, through released emotions the reader might feel in empathy or sympathy for the characters and events in the story, such as frustration or anger. All of this is combined to form an excellent humourous article that is both a parody of journalism and university culture.

References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour_in_Freud
2. http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/humor.htm
3. Collective Groan Heard Whenever Mature Student Raises Hand by Michael Oliver. Salient issue 2, 2009. Pg 15.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype
5. Mature students in higher education: Academic performance and intellectual ability by John T. E. Richardson (http://www.springerlink.com/content/u7581m370x330418/)

Why exactly would you want to learn this boring stuff anyway? Well you’re at university, and academic writings are expected to be legible. Also, to keep people like me happy. Every time I find a misplaced apostrophe or some DAMNED double spacing, a part of me dies. The only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that I can correct bad grammar, and the faint hope that I may be able to make a difference. I’m kind of like Jack Bauer, if he had a red pen instead of a gun, and enjoyed correcting graffiti on bathroom walls instead of saving the world from the latest terrorist attack. Salient production night is my 24. We’re called grammar sticklers, I think. And the more you continue to use terrible grammar, the more likely someone from one of many online groups dedicated to upholding the laws of grammar will take a photo of your mistakes and post it online for everyone to laugh at. Be warned…

You might think that you don’t know grammar or don’t need to, but the truth is, if you’ve made it this far (in life and into this article), you already know lots. Grammar is what enables you to derive meaning from words, which everybody learns when they’re just a baby. A single word might indicate an object, action or idea, but when we pile words into a sentence, how is it that our brains derive a greater meaning from it?

Apart from actually recognising a word by how it sounds or looks, the meaning that comes from a collection of words—a sentence—is all thanks to grammar. We can’t just throw a random collection of words together and always expect to get meaning out of it. The meaning is discovered through grammar—having the words in the right order (syntax) and the right form. This is what we learn growing up (or even if you learn a foreign language).

The problem many people have with grammar nowadays is when it comes to writing—our infant brains have only picked up on what sounds right. But when it comes to the written word, there are many grammatical rules that come in addition to our subconscious understanding of language. Rules like spelling and punctuation. But let me teach you why syntax is important.

Let’s say you want to form a very basic sentence: Two kittens torture a nasty pirate.

‘Two’ and ‘kittens’ belong together, in that order, to show that there are two kittens. This forms the first position of this sentence, or the subject.Following the subject is the verb, the ‘doing’ word. Verbs are usually actions, and follow the subject to show that it is the subject doing the verb.

Finally we have ‘a nasty pirate’ in the third position of the sentence, or the object. The object of a sentence is the recipient of the verb—the nasty pirate is the one being tortured, not the two kittens.

Subject, verb, object.

This order is very important to get the correct meaning from the sentence. If we change the order of the words, the meaning is either altered or lost.

Nasty torture two a pirate kittens.

Think about this:
How does the verb change if there is only one kitten? How many ways could you turn the sentence into a question? Let’s say you want to use the adverb ‘slowly’ to describe the verb. Where are the two places in the sentence you could put it?

It pays to question language and to play around with it. Think: Why does the apostrophe go there? How could I say this differently? What happens if I change this part of the sentence? Why does that happen?

You’ll be amazed at what you learn by asking simple questions like these.

Well, if grammar is something that amazes you.

Questions about grammar?
Email me at mikey@salient.org.nz.

Approved reading:
Books, books, always books!
Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss.

Disapproved reading:
The ramblings of a prepubescent emo blogger.
Text message speak.
Music reviews.

In Dexter by Design, Dexter returns from his honeymoon in Paris to find Miami being terrorised by a sadistic killer who displays his victims in horrifying ways. Dexter’s sister, Sergeant Deborah Morgan, investigates the murders, using Dexter’s ‘killer instinct’ to find him. However, when things get personal, Dexter must find the killer before the killer finds him.

Dexter narrates the books with his characteristic wit—being a cold-hearted killer and unable to feel human emotions (so he says), Dexter’s detachment from human interactions gives him a unique perspective on things to… well, take the piss.

“I walked over to where Debs was interviewing an hysterical Hispanic woman who was crying into her hands and shaking her head at the same time, which struck me as a very difficult thing to do, like rubbing your belly and patting your head. But she was doing it quite well, and for some reason Deborah was not impressed with the woman’s wonderful coordination.”

The other defining characteristic of Dexter is the suspense. In order to avoid unwanted attention to his favourite hobby, Dexter has had to fabricate a whole life around him to fit into society. But not all are convinced, and Dexter must do his best to avert suspicions and avoid being discovered as the serial killer he is (while at the same time tracking down Miami’s latest killer, dealing with his overbearing wife and her two psychopathic children, Deborah’s hangups about his hobby, and satisfying his own playful urge to kill).

Dexter by Design is a great and easy read. I managed to plough through about half of it without realising I’d actually read much. I also had the occasional laugh-out-loud moment startling those around me. It was a great improvement on the third book in the series, Dexter in the Dark, which was far too supernatural and didn’t fit with the Dexter story. The first and second books are also good.

Watchmen is set in an alternate history of 1980’s United States, an America that has had a ‘masked superhero’ trend since the early 20th Century. With the introduction of the Keene act by ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon, who has also weaseled his way into a third presidential term, these superheroes have become outlawed. The film begins with the murder of superhero The Comedian, and follows the masked vigilante Rorschach as he investigates why his former comrade was killed.

When I read the comic, throughout Rorschach’s investigation I began to get the feeling that something huge, intense and terrifying was coming (just like in Grover’s There’s a monster at the end of this book)—a feeling I didn’t get watching the movie. I imagine this is not the result of actually knowing what was coming (although the ending was different), but because of the inevitable sacrifices that were made in order to bring the story to the big screen.

Despite this ‘dumbing down’ for mainstream cinema, Watchmen is still worth seeing. Worth it for the well-developed human characters and storyline; worth it for the great 1980’s soundtrack (including a personal favourite by Nena); worth it for its beautiful look and feel; worth it for its well executed fight scenes; but most importantly, worth it to see Rorschach kick some serious butt. This little guy is the man, single-handedly taking on an entire SWAT team and cracking great one-liners that had the audience cheering.

I know this movie probably isn’t for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. If you want to see an epic movie of 2 hours and 43 minutes, go see this movie. If you want the full Watchmen experience (and it is an experience), go read the graphic novel.

Directed by Zack Snyder.
Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on the graphic novel by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore.

One zombie’s student loan. Two zombies’ student loans. One person’s brain being eaten. Two people’s brains being eaten.

So basically, if you can rearrange the sentence to use of instead of an apostrophe (the man’s zombie-dog—the zombie-dog of the man) and there isn’t an s on the end, then you need an apostrophe and then an s. If there is an s on the end (the students’ rotting flesh—the rotting flesh of the students), then you just put the apostrophe after the s that is already there (Also—James’ dismembered foot). This is all pretty straightforward.

It all gets confusing with the unfortunate contraction it’s, which ALWAYS means it is. This is commonly confused with the possessive adjective its, because of the apostrophe which is usually used for possession. But its is possessive in itself and does not require an apostrophe—just like the other possessive adjectives my, your, his, her, our and their.

So how do you know if you should use it’s or its? If you can change the its/it’s in question to it is and your sentence makes perfect sense (sorry, I should say, that bit of your sentence makes sense), then you need the apostrophe. Alternatively, if you can make whatever it is masculine or feminine and replace the its/it’s with the possessive adjective his or her, then you don’t need the apostrophe:

There’s the reanimated human corpse; that’s its cellphone.
There’s the reanimated human corpse; that’s his/her cellphone.

Questions? Send me an email at mikey@salient.org.nz.
Braaaaaaaaaiiins.

Suggested reading:
Books in general (about zombies).
Wikipedia.
Some sort of book on grammar. Find one yourself.

Arrivals and Toiletries
When you first arrive in a new country, a few major differences from the last place you hung about in immediately strike you in the face. Firstly, it was raining heavily, and had been ever since we arrived in the Netherlands. Secondly, the place was crawling with bicycles – thousands were parked to the rails alongside the canals, while people riding bicycles dominated the streets, some even with umbrellas. The third obvious difference was the language – Dutch is quite similar to German, and sounds quite peculiar to German speakers (and, to a lesser extent, English speakers). On a building I saw written ‘Open Dag’ (Open Day), and upon leaving the bus we were confronted with a sign that said ‘Urinoir’ (Urinal), accompanied by a picture of a man peeing and an arrow. Following the arrow I found the fourth peculiarity – the public urinals. In the street are little open booths with a wall on the inside for men to pee on – covered around the important bits naturally, but one is still able to carry on a conversation over the top.

Since Alison already knew a bit of Amsterdam she acted as our guide, happily leading us through the Red Light District, and gleefully explaining that if we took photos of the hookers we’d get beaten up. We found our way – past a sign on the street pointing to “A’dam West” – to Bob’s Youth Hostel. We paid for our accommodation and went to put our stuff in the room. We (the eight of us minus Alison) were sharing with eight British girls, there for the weekend to celebrate one of their birthdays.

At lunch time, we walked into town to grab a bite to eat. Down an alleyway we found a good restaurant/bar type place complete with pancakes on the menu. Meals in Amsterdam are generally quite expensive, but this place wasn’t too bad. And it had a cat. After lunch we wandered a bit more through the rain, saw a small windmill mounted above a shop, then settled into a bar for some nice cold Amstel beer. Beer can also be quite expensive in Amsterdam, especially compared to Germany, where it is cheaper than coke. Just about everyone in Amsterdam’s retail industry speaks English – they have to really – and are quite likely not from Amsterdam. The bar was decorated with posters and stuff in English too, one saying “We interrupt this marriage to bring you a football season”. Heading off to the loo I found yet another peculiarity, this one typical of Europe in general – the “shelf” toilet. These toilets have a shelf in the bowl above the water, which, well… yeah. It’s not always pretty.

Plodding Along Soggy Pavements
Pretty soon it was time to go to the Anne Frank house, and we wandered out into the drizzle. The Anne Frank house is naturally quite a popular attraction, and if you’re planning on visiting it sometime then be prepared to stand out in the rain By Michael Langdon 29 for a bit. The DAAD however had booked us in for the tour, so we didn’t have to wait that long. It was good being inside the house where it all happened back in the day, but I would have found it more interesting if I knew a bit more about it, having only seen the cheesy black and white film and not read the book. At the end of the tour is a nice café and a book store, containing copies of Anne’s diary in just about every language you’re likely to speak.

After that of course we went back into town. It was getting dark already and the streets colourfully lit up with all of the advertising. Our first stop was the popular tourist bar The Grasshopper, where you were required to buy a drink to stay, and let’s just say the drinks weren’t the cheapest thing on the menu… The atmosphere was good though and a few of us decided to stay, the rest going to a “café”, where we bought some space cake. Back outside I decided to buy dinner, and a nearby shop looked promising – hotdogs with various toppings, among other things. I bought a hotdog and a drink, but the owner’s English wasn’t the best. “Sixty-fifty! Sixty-fifty!” I was asked to pay, which thankfully only turned out to be 6.50€ (around NZ$13).

Back in the street Thomas (looking dodgy) was accosted by a bloke selling some hard stuff, and some English tourists made their presence known by forming a rugby scrum in the street. The stoners smoked in the cafés and the prostitutes posed in their windows. The atmosphere was energetic. Things in the street eventually quieted down however, and the smoke and cake (and tiredness for me) took its toll and we turned back to the hostel. We got back to our room and collapsed, and were surprised to find that it was only 7pm! 7pm on a Saturday night and town had just died! That couldn’t be right… Thomas theorised that everybody gets stoned early then just goes to bed. After a quick rest we went down to the reception for a beer and to ask where we might find a good bar or something. Nicky stayed behind, the space cake hadn’t gone down too well. The girl in reception gave us a map and showed us where the better part of town was, about 20 minutes walk away. I was still pretty tired, as I was only running on a few hours sleep, so decided to crash instead.

Intense Developments
You would think I took the boring option, but things in the room were actually quite interesting. Nicky was busy spray painting the inside of the rubbish bin, and the British girls were back, quite early too, from an interesting experience on mushrooms. They were also quite talkative about it: ‘It was such a great experience, but I would NEVER do it again’, ‘It felt like we were in that maze for ages, but it was only 7 minutes!’ and repeat. They had all had a freaky experience, but one of them started freaking out then and there, and her friend took her to the loo, where the following conversation took place.

“Just do your thing.”
“Do what?”
“Go to the toilet, like normal.”
“I don’t know how!”
“It’s easy!”
Who are you?”
“It’s me.” “…..”
“Your friend, Jenny.”
“Oh, Jenny Nichols?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Where am I?”
“Bob’s Youth Hostel.”
(Noise in stairwell) “What was that?!”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t matter! Just use the loo!”

Eventually she calmed down though, and I tried to sleep over the girls’ chatter. The others came back later, at around 11pm. Town was still dead, so they had been to a sex show instead.

The Whole Tourist Thing
The next morning we were kicked out of the room at 10am by the cleaners – no sleeping in here! We went to reception for breakfast, as it was included in the price. It was only a few slices of bread, some jam and a hard boiled egg, but it was good nonetheless. We shared our table with a middle aged man with a bit of a speech impediment.

“Go see… Anne Frank… House.” “Yeah, we went yesterday.” “See… sex show… HeheheHEHEE!” At 11am we headed over to Dam Square, in the middle of the city. It is a large open square with nice old buildings surrounding it – the Royal Palace, the New Church (from the 15th C) and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Also in Dam Square is the National Monument, where we were headed. From there we took a free walking tour provided by Sandeman’s New Europe Tours, which starts there every day at 11.15am. The tour goes for 3 hours, and I didn’t think it would be any good – 3 hours walking around and listening to history, boring! But I was wrong.

Our tour guide was Kellie, a delightful young lady from Australia. She kept the tour going with her interesting explanation of Amsterdam’s history, her (most likely well rehearsed) jokes, and little facts (like that it rains 50% of the time there). We started with the National Monument, and a brief history of the city. One of the best bits was this – The Dutch never used to have surnames, all they needed was a picture above the entrance to their homes that showed what they did, right? But when Napoleon came in 1811 and the Netherlands fell under French occupation, the French decided that the Dutch needed proper surnames, and called them all to the town hall to register. The Dutch however, thinking it was only temporary, decided to make fun of the French, who couldn’t speak a word of Dutch, and register surnames such as “Poepjes” (Farts), “Naaktgeboren” (Born Naked) and “Zeldenthuis” (Seldom at Home). Names like this still exist today – think of the poor kids at school!

We went through the Red Light District and Kellie told us about the long history of prostitution in the city while leading us through the Red Light District. The city was a major port back in the day and got lots of business through horny sailors, and more recently tourists and the like. Only female prostitutes (and transvestites) are allowed – there was a male prostitute once but he attracted so much attention and cameras that he was made to stop. The oldest prostitute in the city is around 80. Does she get much business? Well, she has her established clientèle, and is apparently quite experienced. Just on the outskirts of the Red Light District was the Old Church, the name given to the oldest church in town (only a few years older than the New Church, funnily enough). The Dutch say things as they are. The Church’s closeness to the Red Light District may be questionable, but it is really to the their advantage. The Church was a convenient place for the guilty (but satisfied) sailors to repent, for a generous donation of course. Prostitutes get money, Church gets money, sailors are satisfied and don’t go to hell – everybody wins!

Around the corner Kellie was amused when the group started taking photos of a leaning house – another peculiarity of Amsterdam – but the houses effectively lean because of the way the taxes were calculated. Back in the day people were taxed by the width of their house (which also meant that you could tell somebody’s wealth by the width of their house: wider = richer, of course). This lead to the poor people needing smaller houses, and to maximise floor space, the steps were made steeper, at around 60° or more. But then how the hell were you supposed to get your lounge suite upstairs? The Dutch, crafty types, built a hook onto the top of each house, so things could be pulled up and through a window by rope. How to stop the load banging into the side of the house and smashing the windows? Build leaning houses, of course.

As we reached the Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum, Kellie told us about the history of drugs in the Netherlands. Back when pot used to be illegal, there used to be a very big drug problem, both for the usage of pot and the hard stuff. The problem was so big that the police couldn’t cope with it all, so they decided to concentrate on the harder stuff and turn a blind eye to marijuana use. The police were successful and the use of the harder drugs went down, and as a side effect, after marijuana was decriminalised, its usage rate went down as well. I mean, if it’s not illegal, where’s the fun in it? And in fact, the Netherlands is currently one of the countries with the lowest marijuana usage-per-inhabitant rates in the world, the highest being… New Zealand! The difference being though the high number of stoned tourists you’d find in Amsterdam.

At this stage it was time for a lunch break, and Kellie took us along a canal to a nice buffet type place. It was amazing! The food! There was such a wide selection, from sandwiches to soup, fish and chips to stir fry, fruit smoothies to hot chocolate… It was a bit expensive, but not as expensive as most of the places you’d come across in Amsterdam. I chose some pea and ham soup, just like my mother used to make. It was hard to believe that two hours had already gone by. At the lunch table Rowan peeled his banana and stared at it for a while, deciding if he could still eat it after what he saw last night. The sex show had been graphic, naturally, and Thomas had observed that although everything came off, for some reason (safety?) they kept their shoes and socks on during the performance.

Back on the tour, Kellie took us down an interesting alleyway. In the corners of the alleyway were “urine shields” – angled plates 31 of metal that, should a drunken man decide to relieve himself there, would deflect the urine back onto him. Each uniquely designed shield, and the open “Urinoirs”, were the city’s defensive measures against being used as one large public toilet by the masses of drunken tourists, and it was clearly effective – none of us wanted to try one out. Another form of peeing into the wind, if you like.

Shortly after the tour came to an end, across the road/canal from the Anne Frank House. Kellie wrapped things up with a few jokes and told us what a great group we were, naturally. Since she didn’t get paid by the company, providing free tours and all, she asked for some tips if we’d enjoyed ourselves – and we had. Kellie really knew her stuff, was funny, answered every obscure question we could come up with, and made 3 hours walking around the city on a shitty day really fun. We tipped accordingly.

We decided to finish our time in Amsterdam with a boat tour of the canals. Sitting in a covered boat was a nice change. As we toured the canals a recording was played on the speakers that narrated bits in Dutch, French, German and English. We had fun listening to the similarities between Dutch and German, and sometimes we could understand the Dutch quite well. Another thing worth mentioning is our long-haired captain, whose boat driving skills are comparable to Michael Schumacher. He maneuvered the long boat through the narrow canal openings like a bastard, but he actually managed to get us stuck at one point, before announcing that the tour was over.

Leaving, we managed to get lost one last time on the way to the train station, as we seemed to recognise most parts of the city but just not where everything was in relation to everything else. Just outside the train station we found a parking structure, which on closer inspection was filled with bicycles… thousands and thousands of bicycles. It was like the city was giving us one last cultural “what the hell?!” as a farewell. Tired, we regretfully boarded our train. The trip back was long, but to be completely honest I don’t remember a thing about it.

My first image of Germany came as the plane descended into Frankfurt, looking out the window as we went through the clouds and seeing the lights of the city appearing beneath me. My first day in Germany! It was going to be a long one…

I stayed in the airport for a few hours – first I ate breakfast, a roll with salami and cheese, which took me about thirty minutes to eat because the bread was so tough. I had planned on doing some shopping there, getting new shoes and a sim card for my phone, but there wasn’t a sim card that would work on my phone or a decent shoe shop, so eventually I decided to leave at around 9.30. I was going to meet my German friend Adeline in a town called Koblenz, which is somewhere in mid-western Germany. Adeline lives in another town called Trier though. I went to the Frankfurt Airport Fernbahnhof (train station for the long distance trains) and bought a ticket to go to Koblenz. It was bloody expensive – 75 euros (about NZ$150), but I didn’t think much of it. I then rang Adeline on a payphone and woke her up I think, hehe, and told her I was arriving in Koblenz at 1:38 pm. She told me the ticket was probably so expensive because one of the trains I was taking was the ICE, which is a fast train and therefore more expensive.

The train ride was pretty cool, and I was torn between watching the countryside and dozing off in my seat, as I had been travelling for over 24 hours with only two hours sleep. A different train guard seemed to come and check my ticket every five minutes, so I stuck with the countryside. I went past some towns whose names I recognised, but I couldn’t remember where they were on the map and didn’t feel like I had a good feel of where I was heading, but felt that Germany must be really huge! I had to change trains a few times, and at the second to last station, at a town called Waldshut, a lady came up to me with a backpack and explained how her son just left on the train without it, and it had his lunch in it. I said it was a shame, these things happen you know, and asked her where my platform was. Being in contact with Germans in Germany – I was happy, and learning new words already.

Koblenz was only five minutes away on the next train, and Adeline wasn’t there. I waited and had a look around. Koblenz seemed to be quite small, there was a kiosk at the station run by a lady with a strange accent, and all of the trains leaving the station seemed to be going out of the country. After a while I started to think that there was probably another train station in Koblenz, and this was just the one for the trains going to Switzerland or something. I tried calling Adeline on a payphone, but it wouldn’t work. There was a panel next to the phone I could use to send text messages, so I did, but it froze after I sent it and I wasn’t sure if it had actually worked. I kept waiting around, sitting on a bench outside the kiosk and putting warmer clothes on, looking at the approaching cars and expecting to see Adeline any second. Something was not right here…

I can’t remember how exactly I figured it out, but it suddenly just came to me, like there was a puzzle in front of me I didn’t see until I had solved it. It was something the lady at Waldshut said, the payphone here in Koblenz that wouldn’t work, the lady at the kiosk with the accent, a web address printed somewhere… It came to me – Oh fuck! I was in Switzerland! There must be a Koblenz in Switzerland and another one in Germany!

I went to the lady at the kiosk and asked her if I was in Switzerland… Yep, I was. I then asked if there was a Koblenz in Germany as well, and she said no, she was 100% certain. I got out my map of Germany and showed it to her – Koblenz was clearly in the middle. She just said yep, that’s where we are, here’s Switzerland, there’s the boarder… I was so confused. I then figured I could ring Adeline if I put in the country code for Germany, which I did and it worked. I asked, “Is Koblenz in Switzerland?” “Ummm no…” “Uh, I think I’m in Switzerland!”

We had a laugh. She was on her way back to Trier, and she was worried when I didn’t show up and thought I might have fallen asleep on the train and was somewhere else in Germany. I then had to buy tickets to Trier, so went to the ticket place to do that, and would have to ring Adeline later and tell her what time I would arrive in Trier. The guy had trouble putting together the ticket for me, and I had trouble understanding him because of his Swiss accent. I started to feel sick. He eventually did it though, figuring out my timetable, and I had to pay 142 Swiss francs for the ticket… and I had no idea how much that was! I just sighed and handed over my credit card.

I had to wait about an hour in Waldshut, and felt terrible. I was tired, hungry, and annoyed I had made such a big mistake on my first day. But I listened to music to pass the time and started to feel better, it was actually pretty funny – I was in Switzerland for about two hours without even knowing it! That would never happen in New Zealand, catching a train and accidentally ending up in another country. I could see a Burger King nearby but couldn’t be bothered carrying my pack there and back, so I just ate a kit kat and mentos I got off the plane. The train eventually came, which would take me back to Basel, then I switched to an ICE train going to Mannheim – I got some trouble on this train.

The train guard awoke me from dozing and checked my ticket, and he stared at it for ages and started asking questions about where I came from and where I was going. He said my ticket was wrong and I would need to buy a new one – 84 euros! My credit card didn’t work and I only had 60 euros on me, which I gave to him. He figured something out and gave me a new ticket, saying I would now need to stay on this train until Frankfurt Airport again, then could go to Koblenz (in Germany this time!), then to Trier. He gave me one euro change. I was pretty gutted, I now only had like 2 euros, and was annoyed at the Swiss guy for selling me a dud ticket and at me for not being able to completely understand him. I started to doze off again, and the train guard came back and tapped me on my shoulder and asked to see my ticket again.

After looking at it he asked for the one he gave me back, then for his euro. I was pretty pissed off, he took most of my money then came back for the rest! But he then gave me my 60 euros back and apologised because he was wrong – he had been confused because my ticket was weird, so had asked someone, then found out that there is a Koblenz in Switzerland as well as Germany! He thought I’d come from the German one. Even though I had spent heaps of money on these damn tickets, I was now really glad to have these 60 euros back. I eventually got to Trier after another few train switches – I had to be careful on the next ICE and not fall asleep, otherwise I could have ended up in Paris!

Adeline was there at Trier! It was so good to see her. I arrived at about 10.30 and was so tired and hungry, I was a mess. But we went to Burger King for dinner and I felt way better, even though my chicken burger tasted like fish.

What a first day! At least I got to go to Switzerland and got a great story out of it, even if I now have a mild phobia of trains.

McKenzie was well-known and respected for his role in founding philanthropy in New Zealand and his significant contributions to many charities, ranging from the hospice movement to Women’s Refuge.

In his earlier years, Sir Roy attended Timaru Boys’ High School and Otago University, after which he served the Royal New Zealand Air Force in World War Two. He then became a chartered accountant and captained the New Zealand ski team at the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo. His contributions to New Zealand community and education were recognised when he was knighted in 1989 and became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Sir Roy founded the Victoria University Centre for the Study of Families and has an honorary doctorate in Commerce.

Earlier in the year a symposium was held in his honour, with speakers talking on his generosity and love of sports, as he was also a successful tennis player, harness racer and breeder.

He published his memoirs in 1998, entitled Footprints – Harnessing an Inheritance into a Legacy, and in 2004 a film was made about him called Giving It All Away.