Blackboard Books Boxed Set: I Used to Know That, My Grammar and I...Or Should That Be Me, and I Before E (Except After C): I Used to Know That, I Before E. My Grammar and I

145 Pages·2010·2.42 MB·English

by  Taggart

Table of Contents

Epigraph
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
Introduction

ENGLISH
LITERATURE
MATH
SCIENCE
HISTORY
GEOGRAPHY
GENERAL STUDIES

Roman Numerals
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“I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson

For Jon and Nic, who are old enough to start forgetting this sort of stuff; and for
Mishak and Camille, who are just beginning to learn it.
Introduction
When I started to write this book, I realized that I did remember lots of different
things, but I didn’t always remember those facts completely, or necessarily
accurately. I knew, for example, that “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on
the fold” was a perfect example of—what—a dactyl or an anapest? I had to look
it up. I remembered a bit about sines and cosines but had no idea why they were
important. I used to know most of the principal bones in the body. How did that
song go? “The head bone’s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s
connected to the…” Hmmm. And after years of study, I could not seem to name
the dates of important wars or, for that matter, why they were fought (I’m still
having some trouble with that).

Geography was especially challenging—just when I thought I knew the capital
of Burma, they change everything. Myanmar is tragically all over the news, and
I’m left scratching my head in bewilderment as to where it is exactly. There’s
also a wealth of general information that I thought I knew, like Roman numerals
and the Roman equivalent to the Greek gods.

Sometimes I hear a symphony and all I can remember is that it was composed by
a man whose last name starts with V…or was it B?

In the course of talking to other people about what I should include in this book,
I discovered two things: one, that everybody I spoke to had been to school, and
two, that that was pretty much all they had in common. They had all forgotten
completely different things. So with every conversation the book seemed to
grow longer. One chat with an editor friend sent me rushing to add the active and
passive voices to the English chapter. Another friend could recite British poetry
verbatim but could not remember if the poem she so eloquently performed was
by Keats or Shelley. Yet another friend confessed that she had completely
forgotten what a square root was (though I have no idea why she suddenly
wanted to know). In the end I had to stop discussing it, or this book would have
surpassed the size of War and Peace. I also found in the course of researching
the things I used to know that I learned more than a few things that I didn’t.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I hope you, too, will learn
something new or find things here that strike a chord, however faintly. Things
that make you say, “Oh, yes, I used to know that.” Because by the time you read
this, I will almost certainly have forgotten most of them again.
ENGLISH
Learning to read and write was just the beginning. After you had mastered that,
you had to study how the language worked and, when you started to write your
own stories, how to stay focused, develop content, organize material, maintain a
consistent voice and style, and use proper grammar. If (perish the thought) you
had to write poetry as well, there was a whole new set of conventions.…
Parts of Speech
This is a way of categorizing words according to the function they perform in a
sentence, and there are nine of them:
adjective: a describing word. Some examples include tall, short, brown, and
blue. With one possible exception—blond/blonde—adjectives in English (unlike
most European languages) are invariable; that is, they don’t change according to
the number and gender of the thing they are describing.

adverb: a word that describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Adverbs
answer such questions as how, when, or where: She walked aimlessly; light
brown hair (where light is an adverb describing the adjective brown); they lived
fairly frugally (where fairly is an adverb describing the adverb frugally). Most,
but by no means all, adverbs in English are formed by adding -ly to the
adjective.

article: Merriam-Webster defines an article as “any small words or affixes…
used with nouns to limit or give definiteness to the application.” That’s not very
helpful, is it? It may be easier just to remember that the definite article is the and
the indefinite articles are a and an.

conjunction: a joining word. Examples include and, but, though, and so on.