heliona | Entries tagged with writing

I'm posting from work. It's been a quiet night, just routine stuff. It's beginning to get light now (not that it stays dark for very long at this time of the year this far north anyway), so I feel as though I'm reaching the end now! I'm now 2/3 of the way through my first night shift, and am now looking forward to my bed!

One of my fanfic betas has come up with Brit-picking question (she's American) that I'm stuck over. She wants a British alternative to the word 'busted' in the following context:

Ginny saw Madam Pomfrey coming towards them out of the corner of her eye, but ignored the warning signal in her head, and leant in to kiss Harry.

"Miss Weasley! Stop that at once, or else I'll have to ask you to leave!" the Healer barked at them.

Harry and Ginny grinned at each other and said in unison, "Busted!"

All I can come up with is 'nabbed' which doesn't really work in this instance. Any ideas?

That's all I have to say! Good morning!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Navy Buildings

Remember a wee while ago I asked about whether 'Oliver and I' was correct as opposed to 'Oliver and me'? (I was for the 'I' side and pretty much everyone else was on the 'me' side.)

Well,

kyizi's question about apostrophes had me hunting the internet for stuff about grammar and look what I found:

Many people utter such statements as "Mary and me are friends," whereas conventional grammar insists, categorically, that it should be "Mary and I are friends." English rules of case require that any noun or pronoun that serves as the subject of a sentence must be in the nominative case. Since English nouns take the same form in both the nominative and objective case, this rule is of no consequence with nouns, but it is important with personal pronouns because all of them (except it and you) have different forms in the nominative and objective cases. In the sentence, "Mary and I are friends," the pronoun is the subject (it can be nothing else); thus, the appropriate form of the pronoun is I, not me.

The full article is here: Grammar Mudge

It pretty much says what I was trying to say to everyone that insisted it should be 'Oliver and me'. I'd now vindicated that I was right all along! :p

[ETA: I wasn't really expressing myself well yesterday! What I wanted to say was that 'Oliver and me' wasn't the correct form in every circumstance, which seemed to me what people were telling me. This article proves that I was right on that count: there are times when it should be 'Oliver and I'.

I was wrong about the instance where I had written it, and once it was explained to me, I understood why (although notasalmon's explanation makes more sense than anyone else's, probably because she's actually using grammatical language, as opposed to just saying that it just is!). (Which I know I do a lot, but as I never studied grammar past the age of about eight, even though I know most of the rules, I don't know how to express them.)

There, does that make more sense than what I wrote up above? *g*]

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: office
Current Music: humming of printer

Snerched from

kyizi:

( Writing Meme )

Am very tired now, so am going to bed. Managed to locate my house-elf (she'd hidden away under the kitchen table) and my bed is lovely and toasty now.

Current Mood: artistic

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Wolves' Lair

British synonym suggestion please.

Grammar

Writing meme

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March 2011

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