Not lost, just undiscovered.

So I was on The Weather Network website checking the weather for this upcoming week and I ended up roaming through the various Weather Cameras.

They have webcams in various locations where you can actually see what the weather is now. Much like the traffic cameras you see online and on television. It’s actually pretty interesting because there are so many feeds to watch. Take a look at all the snow out in Western Canada for example.

Anyway, after clicking on a few links, I somehow ended up on MontrealCam and for two minutes watched people skating at the Old Port.

See but in one flick, the webcam showed three people on the ice: a couple and one single person skating. Then it flicked and refreshed again and that lone person was lying on the ice.

This means that many hundreds of kilometers away I basically saw someone wipe-out on the ice.

It’s a good thing I didn’t laugh. That would be even worse than physically being there and laughing, no? It’s like private amusement at someone else’s misfortune and that’s evil. Right?

Over the past few months I’ve been looking to review my grammar, punctuation, and overall writing skills. I’ve learned many things in school before but it’s easy to forget some. I had decided that reviewing these skills a few more times would definitely help to drill them into my memory. It has been moving along slowly, but at least it’s moving!

I read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss in September. It was very informative and highly amusing – at least for my easily-amused personality. I came out of it determined to beef up my hyphen and semi-colon use, as well as to reduce my ellipses use.

Now, I am currently going through When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People: How to Avoid Common Errors in English by Ann Batko.

I’ll post any other tidbits that I found helpful (as long as some from Truss’ book), but here’s one that I’m currently amazed by: The Who vs. Whom issue.

So many people pick and use the wrong word of the two. The book looks at Who is the present for? vs. Whom is the present for?

Without going into details and breaking down the sentence to talk about clauses, subjects and objects, etc. here’s a tip:

Think of how you would restate the sentence with the pronoun he/him or they/them, and if you use a form that ends in “m,” you need “whom.” For example, in this example, you’d say, Is the present for them? You wouldn’t say, Is the present for they.

So! Instead of incorrectly saying That’s the actor who Sally adores, you should be saying That’s the actor whom Sally adores. This is because Sally adores him and not he.

Right.