Worst Request EVER

Saw this posted on a help list for homeschoolers:



My 5th grader and I are struggling through analyzing and diagraming

sentances. Does anybody have of know of a concise list of all the

parts of speech and their defanitions?



Ow, ow, ow, ow!!



Those of you who cringed while reading that (and who may, coincidentally, have been called a "grammar Nazi" at some point in your life (or at least once a month, depending on your propensity to publicly correct people. Like your spouse.), may enjoy the Grammar Girl podcast. Either do a search on iTunes for Grammar Girl (it's a free podcast, and an interesting thing to listen to right before bed), or go to the website. There you'll find the text on the podcast, as well as supporting references in case you want to argue a point. For example:

Well vs. Good:

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It's such a simple little question: How are you? But I've heard from people
who feel a twinge of trepidation or even full-blown frustration every
time they have to decide whether to say they're good or they're well.

“I'm good” is what you're likely to hear in general conversation, but there
are grammar nitpickers out there who will chide you if you say it. The
wonderful news is that those nitpickers are wrong: it's perfectly
acceptable to say, “I'm good,” and you shouldn't have to shamefully
submit to teasing remarks such as the time-honored and leering, “How
good are you?”

The nitpickers will tell you that well is an adverb (and therefore modifies verbs) and that good is an adjective (and therefore modifies nouns), but the situation isn't that simple.

The key is to understand how linking verbs differ from action verbs. (Trust
me, this is worth it so you can look people in the eye and say, “I'm
good,” with absolute confidence.)

First, let's talk about action verbs. They're easy; they describe actions. Verbs such as run, jump, and swim are all action verbs. If you want to describe an action verb, you use an adverb like well. You could say: He runs well; she jumps well; they swim well. Well is an adverb that relates to all those action verbs.

Linking verbs, on the other hand, are a little bit more complicated. Linking
verbs aren't about actions as much as they are about connecting other
words together (1, 2). They're also sometimes called “copulative
verbs.”

I think of the verb to be as the quintessential linking verb. The word is is a form of the verb to be, and if I say, He is yellow, the main purpose of is is really just to link the word he with the word yellow. Other linking verbs include seem, appear, look, become, and verbs that describe senses, such as feel and smell.
That isn't a comprehensive list of linking verbs—there are at least 60
in the English language (1)—but I hope that will give you an idea of
how they work.

One complication is that some verbs—such as the sensing verbs—can be both linking verbs and action verbs (2, 3). A trick that will help you figure out if you're dealing with a linking verb is to see if you can replace the verb with a form of to be; if so, then it's probably a linking verb (1, 4). For example, you can deduce that feel is a linking verb in the sentence He feels bad because if you replace feels with the word is, the sentence still makes sense: He is bad. On the other hand, if you have a sentence such as He feels badly, and you replace feels with is, it doesn't make sense anymore: He is badly. So in that case you know that feel is functioning as an action verb.



OK, so now you understand the difference between linking verbs and action
verbs. That might seem like a detour on the way to learning why it is
OK to say, "I'm good," but it's important because the thing people seem
to forget is that it's standard to use adjectives—such as good—after
linking verbs (5, 6). When you do it, they are called predicate
adjectives, and they refer back to the noun before the linking verb.
That's why, even though good is primarily an adjective, it is OK to say, "I am good": am is a linking verb, and you use adjectives after linking verbs.



Aside from the linking-verb-action-verb trickiness, another reason people get confused about this topic is that well can be both an adverb and a predicate adjective. As I said earlier, in the sentence He swam well, well is an adverb that describes how he swam. But when you say, “I am well,” you're using well as a predicate adjective. That's fine, but most sources say well
is reserved to mean “healthy” when it's used in this way (1, 3, 4). So
if you are recovering from a long illness and someone is inquiring
about your health, it's appropriate to say, “I am well,” but if you're
just describing yourself on a generally good day and nobody's asking
specifically about your health, a more appropriate response is, “I am
good.”



Finally, it's very important to remember that it's wrong to use good as an adverb after an action verb. For example, it's wrong to say, “He swam good.” Cringe! The proper sentence is He swam well, because swam is an action verb and it needs an adverb to describe it. Remember, you can only use adjectives such as good and bad after linking verbs, you can't use them after action verbs.

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In other language-related news, I see that the phoneme /wh/ is losing the /h/ sound and quickly turning into a simple /w/. Even the games aimed at kids aren't using WHere and WHat. Instead you hear "wear" and "wutt." This disturbs me. Chalk this up along with two of my new pet peeves: "Strength" is apparently now "Strenth" if you're in TV or radio, and ever-popular substitution of "ax" for "ask," as in "Let me ax you a question."

Gack!