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First you take a stalk of oat. Then you separate the fibers into strands. Somehow you comb or press them until they're very thin--thin as threads. Then you sew your wild oats. Actually, you are sewing WITH your wild oats, but that's how the expression goes.
Maybe I just take things too literally? When I see words written the wrong way I get distracted (see above). I suppose I should simply try to translate what they wrote into what they probably mean.
As I've said before, I'm not a writer and not even an English major. I simply grew up when language was still taught in the schools, that's all. I didn't learn language in college because I had already learned it in high school. We diagrammed, we took spelling tests, we had vocabulary quizzes--and always, spelling counted. We even learned how to speak properly and in 7th grade I was part of a reading choir.
Today all of that sounds antiquated.
Today many educated people cannot write or speak correctly.
My former MIL, who never went to college, always said that in HER day, the schools were so good that you didn't need college. She used to read thick books that were non fiction, tomes that few would attempt today.
The reason I'm saying this is that someone previously mentioned that they were reading novels set in the '40s and '50s and the kids in the books were learning things that they had never heard of.
It's true. I know, for instance, that my own parents, in the 1930s, had a more "classical" education, based upon the knowledge of ancient times, the Greeks and the Romans. I don't know what they learned but they seemed to know about Greek philosophers and their works. They certainly could spell and speak and write well. College may have prepared you for your specialty but you didn't get out of high school without knowing about language.
By the time I was in school the classical education had been dropped by the wayside. That's probably not such a bad thing except that it did give a person a will polished educational background. We still studied English with its dangling participles, gerunds, subjunctive voice, types of punctuation, and so on.
I'll stop now but I just felt like backing up what that poster said. Education really has changed --and not for the better. Today, it's hard to figure out what people are trying to say-- do too they're writing and speaking.
(Just had a thought: it might be interesting to read about the history of education, especially the history of how the language has been taught. Okay, you can tell I used to be a teacher--but not of English.)
I have seen a fairly large number of people write, "once in the while", instead of, "once in awhile".
For the life of me, I just can't understand how such commonly-used expressions become distorted like that.
To add to my earlier post, I just read a post in an auto maintenance blog that said, "All of the sudden, my car began to...". This is not the first time that I have seen somebody substitute, "the", for, "a", in that expression.
Huh?
As I asked previously...How do such commonly-used expressions become distorted in that manner?
To some extent, I can understand how a woman whom I used to know would talk about, "a change of paste".
Perhaps her hearing was not good, and definitely she was...not bright.
However, in the two expressions that I noted above, I can't understand the reasons for the word substitutions that I have seen on several occasions.
I just cannot phantom the pain and sorrow for so many at the same time
...if only it was phantom pain...
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