Now if I was the English major protégée that I’m not, this would be my opening thesis in which I would state in one sentence something intellectual that I am about to discuss for the next few paragraphs, but the thing is, words are not my forte. They're more like the joker to my inner Batman. I’m a very visual person (oh I also really like parentheses, sometimes I have parentheses paragraphs, not something an English teacher would be fond of mind you) so, where was I right, visual person.... I love doodling, painting, tie-dye, the Sunday funnies, color-coding my classes, numbers/ math, but letters and words I just don’t get. English rules are set rules only because they "just are that way."
I still don’t get the i-before-e-except-after-c-rule, (does it mean i is before e but after c or that it’s before e only when not after c, the except part throws me off…) and it’s not like spell check has helped me improve my spelling knowledge. Often times there’s more red than white on my word document it looks like I've murdered someone and tried to clean it up with my research paper... But numbers…ahhhhh…numbers stay the same. Any number plus two will ALWAYS be two more than what you started with, it doesn’t matter if its 42 or 87 or 593,015! Add two and YOU’LL HAVE TWO MORE. I mean come on it’s how the game is played. There’s no two-before-three-except-after-four rule. Granted ∞+2=∞ but at least I care enough to actually KNOW that and I understand why it is, but for the sake of this discussion, “ that (the ∞ thing) is beyond the scope of this class.”
To demonstrate my "love" of English (wow I'm really on a using-quotations frenzy tonight aren’t I…) I shall recall an epiphany I had in fifth grade during "reading" class. We were learning about adjectives and adverbs and stupid names and parts of clauses, and who knows what, and it just came to me, like inspiration from the heavens. All these rules and names are unnecessary complications; all words are nouns, end of story. There you have it. Take the word jump for instance. At first glace it may seem like a verb, but would be mistaken, because a-hum (gotta clear the throat for this breakthrough) it is a noun. Oh poor undeveloped brain I shall explain, jump is a word a word is a thing and a thing is a noun. By definition a noun IS a person place or THING, so there. Problem solved. Time for recess. Be back in 15.
