Month: April 2023

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Serving As Grammarian–Part I

“The grammarian plays an important role in helping all club members improve their grammar and vocabulary. I will listen to the language and grammar usage of all speakers, noting incomplete sentences, mispronunciations, grammatical mistakes, non-sequiturs, malapropisms, etc.”

That is the role description the grammarian at my club shares at the top of the meeting to describe her role responsibilities, but I wonder how many of us truly know what all these things are. In a multi-part posting, I will describe each of these, so that as meeting grammarian you have a better take on what your ears need to detect.

In this posting, we will consider incomplete sentences.

I suppose these occur more in conversational, interactive contexts than when delivering a speech. You start a sentence but never end it, putting in place the period. Instead, were it to appear in written form, it would end with an ellipsis.

Example: I was planning to go to the store, but . . .

Example: Were you going to give a speech at the next meeting, or . . .

I hear these on occasion in my position as a transcriptionist, and I confess that I’ve let things trail off on occasion. The ellipsis is a verbal invitation for the other party to jump in, but that’s in the case of a conversation. A speech is not a conversation, however, so the ellipsis is a bad thing.

Solution: Have mentally ready your complete thought, even if it requires you to take a moment to fully encapsulate it. Remember that in speech presentation a pause is a good thing, so use one if need be to finish in your mind the sentence. What happened as you were planning to go to the store? Were you or were you not going to give a speech at the next meeting?

Your audience would appreciate a complete thought, so why not provide it?

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Club Meetings on Zoom

The arrival of COVID resulted in many clubs moving their meeting to Zoom or another online platform. My clubs still meet online for executive committee meetings, but for club meetings we’ve been back in person (or always were there) for a year or more now.

Fellow DTM Ken Krawchuk put together an award-winning speech titled “I HATE ZOOM!” I encourage you to watch the Zoom recording (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwQVLCdLvmA) he prepared and join the conversation. Here are some food-for-thought questions:

Is Zoom something that you were grateful for when it was needed, then cast off with a sigh of relief once the need went away?

Did your club get hooked on Zoom, now finding itself unable to “kick the habit?”

Does an online meeting format, when not truly needed, benefit us, or does it contribute to laziness, in that members can sit at home in their skivvies? Are we better or worse off as Toastmasters when we shun the in-person meeting at which we can enjoy being social, better display body language, and use stage space, and receive continual audible and visual feedback from the audience, rather than staring at a bunch of video squares with everybody muted? Gack!

Is it just me, or can you also say, ‘I hate Zoom’?

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Proper/improper use of “and” and “so”

Ah, yes. The Ah Counter flagged you at today’s meeting with ample “ands” and so many “sos.” Shame on you–right? Perhaps. Let us, as speakers and Ah Counters, learn when to know when these two words are used rightly, and wrongly as filler words.

Recognize that both are conjunctions. For those of you whose English class was a long time ago, “Conjunctions connect other words or groups of words to one another.”1 Specifically, they are coordinating conjunctions, in that when properly used they “join equivalent structures–two or more nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, phrases, or clauses.”2 Do you remember the Schoolhouse Rock video, “Conjunction Junction?” Watch the three-minute video, again or for the first time, to learn about “hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AyjKgz9tKg

Let us first consider an example of proper and improper use of the word “and.”

Proper example: Joe was a contestant in the International Speech contest and the Tall Tales contest. “International Speech contest” and “Tall Tales contest” are “equivalent structures” in that they are both contests. This contest and that contest.

Improper example: I went to the store yesterday. And I decided to park in the nearest spot. While not grammatically incorrect in the purest sense, simply beginning a sentence with the word “and” is, here, superfluous. Why not simply say, in the second sentence, “I decided to park in the nearest spot”? Some speakers use a string of “ands” to link sentence after sentence after sentence, and that’s what the Ah Counter should ideally listen for. The solution? Insert a period!

Let us turn our attention to “so.” The conjunction “so” can connect independent clauses only. An independent clause can stand alone as a complete sentence.

Example: Betty opted to work four ten-hour days, so she gets Fridays off. The two independent clauses here are “Betty opted to work four ten-hour days” and “She gets Fridays off.”

A fellow Distinguished Toastmaster has suggested that if the word so in one’s sentence can be replaced with the word therefore, it is a legitimate usage. I am not sure if that is all-encompassing, but it seems to be a reasonable metric.

Two definitions of so as a conjunction that should prove helpful:3

1. in order that (often followed by that). Example: Look before you cross, so (that) you won’t get hit by a car.

2. with the result that (often followed by that). Example: He spoke loudly, so (that) everybody heard him.

I hope that you are better attuned to the proper and improper occurrences in your speeches and those of others of “and” and “so” such that you will properly use them in their proper function as conjunctions and avoid the ire of your meeting’s Ah Counter.

1Lunsford, Andrea, and Connors, Robert. The St. Martin’s Handbook. New Yor: St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1989. 148.

2Ibid.

3https://www.dictionary.com/browse/so.

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Like, Ah!

I serve as a transcriptionist, listening to phone calls between automobile insurance adjusters and people who have been in an accident. It is verbatim transcription, which means that each and every crutch/filler word and sound gets typed. As a Toastmaster, it drives me crazy. I want to reach out to the parties and scream, “Join Toastmasters, and learn how to speak!” While it is the insured who is usually the worst transgressor, the adjuster is oftentimes just as bad. Would you not think that insurance adjusters, who communicate all the time with people on the phone, would have some communications training when they take the job? Would it not be advantageous for the insurance company to have competent communicators manning the phones?

Do you sense the need for more corporate clubs?

Here is an extract from a transcript I recently prepared. I believe the interviewee was a teenage girl, and as you will read, her favorite filler is the word “like.” Brace yourself!

So we were at his house and I was, like, parked along the curb and he pulled into his driveway. And then when he, like, got in his car he pulled out of his driveway and started coming towards me. Um, and he, like, wanted to, like, tell me something, I guess, ‘cause, like, I didn’t realize that then until it was, like, too late, that he was, like, rolling down his window to, like, tell me something. Um, and he, like, was coming, like, closer so then he, like, could, like, talk to me. Um, and that’s, like, like, we were both, like, kind of at, like, an angle, like, when we hit.

Wow! (Your exclamation selection might be different) I count 17 uses of “like” in five sentences.

If we strip out her misuse of the filler sound “um,” used three times as a sentence starter, and the filler word “so,” used once as a sentence starter, we have the following, which I trust you find easier to follow:

We were at his house and I was parked along the curb and he pulled into his driveway. And then when he got in his car he pulled out of his driveway and started coming towards me. And he wanted to tell me something, I guess, ‘cause I didn’t realize that then until it was too late, that he was rolling down his window to tell me something. And he was coming closer so then he could talk to me. And that’s, we were both kind of at an angle when we hit.

OK, it ain’t perfect–starting sentences with “and” is not the best choice, and she does have a sentence restart in the last sentence–but it’s a lot better.

Like, what’s the point?

When you take the Ah Counter role at a club meeting I urge you to be prepared (with your Ah Counter’s Log), and to be a diligent listener. Your efforts might just help someone escape from the cursed Loch Like.

See https://www.toastmasters.org/membership/club-meeting-roles/ah-counter for more information

Challenge: Have the word “like” be the word of the day at a club meeting. The Word Master will be listening for proper usage–be aware that it can serve properly as an adjective, noun, adverb, or transitive verb–and the Ah Counter will be listening for improper usage. Let me know if you want me to post here the Word Master slip that can be distributed to attendees at that meeting, describing like’s proper usage. Having read this article, you surely know like’s improper usage.