A Blogger by Any Other Name....

It is a universally acknowledged truth of Murphy’s Law, that when a blogger decides to shift her blog, in rapid succession:

• Her operating system will decide to spend over a week downloading a massive - and massively connection-slowing - update;
• She will be obliged to spend an evening clearing up another outbreak of spam; and
• The number of her subscribers will suddenly spike, so that she can inconvenience as many people as possible.

For some time now I’ve been toying with the idea of a new username. Since, genius that I am, I used the old one as my subdomain, that of necessity entails a new subdomain. I will admit that simple procrastination slowed the process also - I hate putting people to any degree of trouble.

Like updating links and feeds and whatever. But I have finally told myself to get on with it and do something for myself for a change.

The new URL is

http://alifebetweenthecovers.blogspot.com

Only links to the main page need changing; this edition will be left to float in cyberspace so all connections to individual posts will remain valid.

Apologies for the inconvenience, and hope to see you soon.

Booking Through Thursday: Grammar

In honor of National Grammar Day … it IS “March Fourth” after all … do you have any grammar books? Punctuation? Writing guidelines? Style books?

More importantly, have you read them?

How do you feel about grammar in general? Important? Vital? Unnecessary? Fussy?

There’s a National Grammar Day? *Sigh* ... I wish we had one of those.

In answer to the question: none of the above. Which is surprising, given that those are just the sorts of books I’d adore. I’m forever mentally editing other people’s errors wherever I encounter them. Bad grammar makes me cringe, and does not make me think well of the perpetrator.

And yet for a self-confessed grammar pedant I know very little about the subject, beyond what I’ve simply absorbed by osmosis. Around Year 4, I learned about nouns, verbs, and adjectives. And that’s it. I can also identify adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions, and I know what split infinitives are because I looked it up. (And I’ve heard of things called participles, but have no idea what they are.)

But then, I came through an education system which taught me precisely zero history prior to 1788, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.