Category: blog

I dropped my parents off at the airport this morning, and now it’s back to work. In the ‘forward planning’ bit of my brain, I have long known that once they left, it would head down till Easter. And as if to underline the sudden rush of seasons, I found myself humming Christmas carols as the kettle boiled. Something noble and incarnational, you might ask– worthy in and out of season? Sadly no. All join in now…

Dashing through the snow (through the snow)
In a one horse open sleigh (‘pen sleigh)
O’er the fields we go (we go)
laughing all the way (ha, ha, ha).

Maybe I can rewind by looking for Advent poems this afternoon. I’m not quite ready to face more weighty matters yet.

As we drove between Crainlarich and Callendar today, my father began pondering road signs. He’d been fretting at it for a while before he spoke. He couldn’t decide whether to be bothered by how often the word SLOW was painted across the road when he thought is should say SLOWLY, or to accept that the cost of all those Ls and Ys would have been a terrible waste of public funds.

Which led to a debate on how the word SLOW functions in that context. I’d aways assumed it was an abbreviated form of an imperative phrase (SLOW DOWN). He agreed, but thought the phrase was GO SLOWLY.

Before I could even touch the brake, we found ourselves caught in grammatical knots. Just how does one parse SLOW DOWN? Is slow really a verb?

But if you think that’s too easy, gold stars to the person who best parses or diagrams this sentence (but no prizes for those who guess Dad is from Tennessee):

Y’all slow down now, y’hear?

JPEG, Word or Publisher diagrams can be offered by email by those who have both the grammatical and technological savy to do so.  

This is another Hermione Granger moment, isn’t it? 

All my favourite harvest hymns today — twice. And I will get to sing them again when it is Rothesay’s turn.  Some one of these days I will have the nerve to remove Harvest Home form the pew sheet and let Maddy Prior sing it for us instead.