Have You Eaten Grandma?

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It can be much harder than it seems; commas, colons, semi-colons, and even apostrophes can drive us all mad at times, but it riles no one more than the longest-serving resident of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner, grammar guru Gyles Brandreth.In this brilliantly funny tirade on grammar, Brandreth anatomizes the linguistic horrors of our times, tells us where we’ve been going wrong (and why) and shows us how, in the future, we can get it right every time. Is ‘alright’ all right? You’ll find out right here. From dangling clauses to gerunds, you’ll also discover why Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.In Have You Eaten Grandma?, he waxes lyrical about the importance of language as, after all, it is what we use to define ourselves and is ultimately what makes us human. Have You Eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth – eBook Details A former Oxford Scholar, President of the Oxford Union and MP for the City of Chester, Gyles Brandreth’s career has ranged from being a Whip and Lord Commissioner of the Treasury in John Major’s government to starring in his own award-winning musical revue in London’s West End. A prolific broadcaster (in programmes ranging from Just a Minute to Have I Got News for You), an acclaimed interviewer (principally for the Sunday Telegraph), a novelist, children’s author and biographer, his best-selling diary, Breaking the Code, was described as ‘By far the best political diary of recent years, far more perceptive and revealing than Alan Clark’s’ ( The Times) and ‘Searingly honest, wildly indiscreet, and incredibly funny’ ( Daily Mail). He is the author of two acclaimed royal biographies: Philip Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage and Charles Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair. In 2007/2008, John Murray in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US began publishing The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries, his series of Victorian murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as the detective. His past books include; Word Play, Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries.

Chapter one, ‘Basic Punctuation or Have You Eaten Grandma?’, begins the foray into punctuation, followed by ‘Dashes, Hyphens, Slashes and more’, and ‘Apostrophes, Possession and Omission’. Brandreth also covers spelling in this book, with common (and sometimes less than helpful) rules, guides to prefixes and silent letters. There are also chapters on British English versus American English, abbreviations with a fresh inclusion of many that are commonly used today and on social media (some with a very humorous twist), slang, and rules for good communication. There are also fun sections that keen wordsmiths will enjoy, such as the A to Z of useful Scrabble words, and new words. Whether you are obsessed with getting grammar right, baffled by grammar or (like us) just in love with words, you are going to love this. A hilarious and definitive guide to 21st-century language * Newcastle Evening Chronicle * Ok, forget that. We’re starting off with the bad stuff in this book. Because it’s mostly bad. The bad Lies, lies, liesI’m going to focus on two parts here: Brandreth’s misunderstanding of discourse markers and his misunderstanding of grammar (including his own). First, let’s talk about everyone’s favorite word: like. Gyles Daubeney Brandreth is an British theatre producer, actor, politician, journalist, author, and TV presenter. Born in Germany, he moved to London at the age of three and, after his education at New College, Oxford, he began his career in television.

A book on pronunciation, grammar, amd spelling may sound very dry and boring, but Have You Eaten Garndma? is anything but. Pedantic about punctuation or scrupulous about spelling? You'll love this hilarious and definitive guide to 21st century language from grammar-guru Gyles Brandreth There are a few places where Brandreth manages to not completely step in it. He tells us not to be which hunters but also says who has to be used for humans (p. 194). So it’s a wash. He also has a surprisingly good explanation of plurals in English – except for the end where he says words like government need to take a singular verb (p. 125). This isn’t the case, especially when the collective noun is made of people. So, again, ups and downs. It’s a shame, though, that Brandreth also feels he needs to pay lip service to the idea of “political correctness” as some kind of dark language-inhibiting force, perhaps because the market for such books skews to an older demographic. “You can have lots of fun with political correctness,” he says brightly, before hoping to demonstrate his point by making up a list of things that literally no one has ever said, eg: “Don’t call them ‘dead’ – say ‘they’re metabolically challenged’.” But it’s clear his heart is not really in it, because elsewhere he writes: “The Brandreth Rule is simple: at all times avoid racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic language – and, when in doubt, err on the side of sensitivity. In my book, bigoted language, and language that can be perceived as bigoted, is bad language [...] Good communication is about courtesy and kindness as well as clarity and getting your message across.”Have you Eaten Grandma?" Good question. And one you could legitimately ask of your brother, your sister, or any of your first cousins, should you suspect them of being cannibalistically inclined. Best thing ever, laugh-a-lot, spanning everything. Great book, I'm loving this * Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2 * I’ll admit that I love languages and therefore find the subject interesting. Still, I wasn’t expecting the humour, and there is plenty. Gyles Brandreth not only provides a lot of information on the English language, he does so in a very accessible manner, enticing the reader with his funny, and often cheeky, voice. As he states, the way we express ourselves is a kind of power. Acquiring it doesn’t have to be a hardship. On the contrary, it can be entertaining, as seen in the following poem. Try reading it out loud :0)

All this bluster leads into what we’re really here for: language hating. (Full disclosure: I read this book knowing I was going to probably hate it. And I did, so I guess we’re even.) Brandreth says that his mission in writing this book is “to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time”. Linguistic horrors. I saw that one coming. (Another thing I’m sad to say that I saw coming: The chapter with linguistic horrors ends on shaming a young woman. Because of course it does.) The guide does cover some ground with regard to some key areas of grammar (punctuation, commas, confused words, etc.) and even some of the linguistic differences between British and American words and expressions, but at the end of the day, I think you can find a better guide for grammar out there if that is something you are looking for to help you improve your craft. At times, this book is a little unfocused and tends to wander or drift for a while on a topic that could have been condensed a little. Prove it, Brandreth. Because these kinds of comments are not made by people who study language. Linguists don’t rank languages in terms of how “rich” they are – because that doesn’t make any sense. You can like a language more than another, but that’s akin to liking one kind of fruit more than another. It’s doesn’t make your favorite fruit better or worse than others. And your opinion matters about as much as a rotten banana. Suspiciously absent from that list are words like “linguist” or “language professional” or even “person who reads books on linguistics and grammar”. Also, how come Brandreth’s family – if they brought him up with a love for words – didn’t already have a copy of Fowler’s?This is a grammar guide that only Gyles Brandreth could write! Full of humour throughout, this is his definitive guide to punctuation, spelling and good English for the twenty-first century Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald

This is a grammar guide that only Gyles Brandreth could write! Full of humour throughout, this is his definitive guide to punctuation, spelling and good English for the twenty-first century * Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald * Lol. The subject of the sentence is absolutely not the person or thing doing the action – that’s the agent and that’s a semantic analysis. The Subject is a term for syntactic analysis and we figure out what it is in a few different ways. But guess what? The subject of a sentence in English can be a noun phrase, a prepositional phrase, a finite clause, a non-finite clause – all kinds of stuff. Again, just a peak into a linguistics book or a grammar would clear this up for Brandreth. But I guess it’s too much torture.Overall a fun and informative read that's already come in useful at work (it settled a discussion on the plural of clerk of works?) The person or thing doing the action is the subject of the sentence. The subject is either a noun or a pronoun.” (p. 288, bolding Brandreth’s) Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn’t when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn’t set in stone. Once upon a time, to split an infinitive was wrong, wrong, wrong. Since the coming of Star Trek in 1966, when “to boldly go where no man has gone before” was what the now-iconic TV series promised to do, we’ve all been at it. “To actually get,” “to really want,” “to truly love,” “to just go”—you may not like them as turns of phrase, but take it from me: they are acceptable nowadays. End of.