What's Wrong with Using "THERE"?

Over the years, I've often done recap posts after the annual spring LDStorymakers Writers Conference, which is always a highlight of my year. In my opinion, it's THE best conference in Utah, and likely well beyond. That's saying something, because Utah has an unusually strong writing community that puts on a lot of conferences.

I hope to do a full recap at some point, but today I want to talk about something I posted on Instagram during the awesome Chris Crowe's 2-hour intensive class about micro-revision.

For those who haven't followed me and my blog ramblings over the years (or as a refresher, seeing as I'm not here as often as I once was), I've been editing professionally almost as long as I've been writing professionally. I've worked on books ranging from first attempts by beginners to pros' books that went on to win awards and become best-sellers. (I could totally name drop but won't; you'll just have to trust me on that one.)

Whenever I'd had returning clients, they mention how much they learned from the previous edit. That is hugely satisfying! It also means that their next book is better than the last one because they've learned new skills, and in turn, that means that my edit can take that next book to an even higher level.

(Important side note here: I'm not taking on new clients right now. I have a few friends and one old client I'll still work for, but typically, if you ask me to do an edit for you, I'll probably have to refer you to someone else. It's a matter of time, balance, and priorities. First and foremost, I'm a writer, but I reached a point where I was an editor who sometimes managed to sneak in a little writing, and I had to change that!)

Above you'll see a slightly cropped version of the picture I posted, which shows a portion of Dr. Crowe's class handout.

The responses to my post varied from those who cheered Dr. Crowe's advice to those who were genuinely confused as to what the problem is with using THERE. And thus this post was born.

The most important thing to keep in mind about writing is that there are no hard and fast rules. For every so-called rule, you can find exceptions. If someone ever says ALWAYS do this or NEVER do that, you can safely assume that they're wrong at least part of the time.

About the only guiding rule I follow as a writer is this: 

Anything that separates my reader from the deep experience of being immersed in my story—anything that holds them at a distance, pulls them out, or otherwise reminds them at they're reading a book—defeats my goal.

In my two-plus decades of professional experience, stronger sentences are one of the best ways to reach that goal. Words and sentences are the tools we use to create a story world and make it come so alive that it immerses the reader.

For those wondering about my passion for grammar and how that fits in, consider this: 

A big part of creating stronger sentences includes all of my grammar, usage, and punctuation rants from Word Nerd Wednesdays.

Why? Clunky, ungrammatical, ambiguous, and otherwise troublesome writing automatically makes for weak and confusing writing that pulls the reader out, making for a shallow reading experience.

All of that leads to my main point: 

The vast majority of the time (note I didn't say always), sentences beginning with THERE WAS, THERE WERE, and variations, are weak. Such sentences tend to TELL instead of SHOW. Other times, they end up wordy and redundant. They may even have a strong verb, but it's buried inside the sentence.

The Good News Is Two Fold: 

• You can easily do a search for phrases like there were and there was to find those weak sentences.
• Strengthening those weak sentences is almost as easy as finding them.

There Were: Weak Examples

I made these up on the spot, and I make no claims about their brilliance, but they should do the job:

• There was the teacher lecturing at the front of the classroom. 
• There were many streets leading to the cemetery.
• There were dozens of couples waltzing around the dance floor.

None of those sentences is grammatically incorrect. None is wrong from a technical standpoint. But none is great, either. They could all certainly be stronger, and stronger writing should be every writer's goal.

Okay, so we've figured out how to identify the weak constructions. Now what?

STEP ONE: DELETE THE OFFENDING WORDS

Just cut off THERE WAS/WERE from the front of each sentence. Using the example sentences above, let's see what we have left:

• . . . the teacher lecturing at the front of the classroom. 
• . . . many streets leading to the cemetery.
• . . . dozens of couples waltzing around the dance floor.

Check it out: Each sentence already has a strong noun we can use as the subject instead of the weak THERE. Plus, the verbs are already a whole lot stronger than WAS or WERE: 

• teacher lecturing
• streets leading
• couples waltzing

So if we already have strong subjects and verbs, why on earth would we want to fall back on something that will water down the image? The phrase there were is so bland on its own that it literally requires an explanation to be understood.

Yet chances are good that the explanation already following the THERE opening is pretty strong. In which case, simply cut the dead wood before the explanation and let it stand alone.

To show just how weak THERE can be, try this: Imagine your eyes are closed and you hear someone begin a story with, "There was . . . "

The storyteller pauses. What do you picture?

I'd wager that your mind would be blank. You couldn't picturing anything, because those words don't tell us anything. We have to wait to hear more before becoming part of the story. We've started with garbage words. They do nothing.

Just Cut to the Chase

Let's take the strong subjects and verbs we already have. The only real other change needed is tweaking the verb so it makes sense, and that's easy:

There was the teacher lecturing at the front of the classroom

BECOMES

The teacher lectured at the front of the classroom. 

BOOM. See how we're immediately in the classroom, listening to a lecture? Before, we were being held at arm's length as someone else points out what we're supposed to notice. (Over there is a classroom . . .)

We can then expand on the image and experience, building the rest of the scene with other writing building blocks.

Here's another take on that same sentence: Flip the order and start with the location to orient the reader right away: 

At the front of the classroom, the teacher lectured.

Depending on the context, tone, pacing, and other factors of the scene, that might work even better.

You could come up with a hundred other ways to change it up, and almost all of them would be stronger than starting with THERE WAS or THERE WERE.

Another One of Our Example Sentences: 

Original: There were many streets leading to the cemetery.
Deleting first two words: . . . many streets leading to the cemetery.
Changing the verb tense as needed: Many streets led to the cemetery.

See? So easy, it's almost like a game. Let's Fix the Third Sentence: 

Original: There were dozens of couples waltzing around the dance floor.
Deleting the first two words: . . . dozens of couples waltzing around the dance floor.
Changing the verb as needed: Dozens of couples waltzed around the dance floor.

Tada! 

This kind of revision is one of my favorites to make: it's very effective and oh-so-easy to implement! 

Tightening sentences by cutting the dead wood such as THERE makes a huge difference, especially when you're talking about a novel-length work.

Don't make your reader slog through wordy, meandering sentences. Experiment with cutting THERE, then see how much stronger your scenes become.

Answer & a Post

For those wondering about this week's Word Nerd Wednesday, Sandra got it right!

All the words in that list describe groups of animals. When I first saw this list, I knew a couple of them, but into a big group like this, even those definitions dissolved, and I couldn't figure it out until someone else told me. The full list is below.

Also: Today I'm guest posting at my friend Liz's group blog. (I've blogged about the awesome Liz, who I've known for over half my life, HERE.)

Read my guest post over at Hey Nonny HERE.

And the animal list:

Kindle of Kittens
Sleuth of Bears
Leash of Greyhounds
Brace of Ducks
Charm of Goldfinches
Drift of Swine
Exaltation of Larks
Grist of Bees
Leap of Leopards
Murder of Crows
Bed of Clams
Sounder of Boars
Chattering of Choughs
Spring of Teals
Trip of Seals
Watch of Nightingales
Wing of Plovers
Rafter of Turkeys
Clamor of Rooks
Kettle of Hawks
Mute of Hounds
Unkindness of Ravens
Wisdom of Owls
Train of Camels
Gulp of Cormorants
Skulk of Foxes
Rhumba of Rattlesnakes
Clutter of Cats
Bloat of Hippos
Troubling of Goldfish

Writing Journey: Evolution of a Word Nerd

TODAY IS READER QUESTION TIME:

Alexes from One Cluttered Brain asked me several all at once, and they're all sort of related, so I'm answering them together:

When did this fascination with grammar and words begin? Does it interfere much when you write something? And aren't you an editor as well? How does that work when you are trying your writing hat on? Does your editing hat ever get in the way?

Being as I grew up with a linguist as a father, conversations about words were typical dinner-table fodder.

(I thought this was normal. Apparently not.)

I don't remember ever not thinking that words and etymologies and so forth were interesting.

I also grew up with a mother who was always reading. My father used to joke that he couldn't get into his own bedroom without a library card. The master bedroom had several bookcases which were filled, stuffed, and then crammed with books.

The basement was the same. So was the kitchen. Every room in the house had books. And I mean every room. Yes, even the bathroom had a bookcase. (Not kidding.) When I moved out, guess what moved into my bedroom? Yep: more bookcases.

As a result of being the child of both a linguist and a bibliophile, I think it was pretty much inevitable that I'd develop a love of language and books.

On the other hand, the specific grammar and punctuation switch got turned on in 10th grade when I had Miss Drummond for honors English. She made those subjects suddenly make sense and be fascinating to boot!

I loved her as a teacher so much that I was her aide in 11th grade and then I took College Prep English from her in 12th. (After which, I challenged the AP test and passed with a 5, because she's just that good of a teacher.)

Even my brother, who has no interest in anything English, had her in high school and admitted that she was the only teacher who ever made grammar make sense to him. She made him get it.

(See? GRAMMAR CAN BE TAUGHT! It's not just freaks like me who can understand this stuff!)

The poor woman couldn't get rid of me. She also couldn't get rid of my family. First she had Dad as a professor at BYU, then my brother as a student, then my older sister as a student, and then me . . . twice. (Or for three years, if you count the aide thing.) Of us siblings, only one of us didn't have her as a teacher.

In college, two classes with Dr. Oaks cemented my love for all things language, whether it's grammar, usage, punctuation, or anything linguistic. But on some level, the interest has always been there thanks to Dad's PhD in linguistics and Mom's passion for books.

So on to the second part of the question: Does my word nerdiness interfere with my writing? After all, I do edit professionally as well on the side. Do they conflict? Not really. In some ways, having that background helps.

The nerdiness and internal editor are just part of who I am. Yes, there are times I put on my editor hat specifically to look at grammar and usage issues, but even in a rough draft, it's just not in me to throw in a random "less" when it should be "fewer" or to mess up "imply" and "infer." That's not how I speak or write. The rules are so ingrained that some things simply come out correctly the first time.

One thing that's easy to mess up as I type is homonyms, but that's not because I don't know the right word but because my fingers often get going on one word, and it's the wrong one, so I have to fix it later.

(So yes, even I, the person who wrote a book on the topic, mess up at times when I'm randomly throwing out a comment in on a blog or on a Facebook status, as Jessica noted so ably recently when I wrote "there" instead of "their.")

On the other hand, I do have to make a point of separating my editor side from my creative side. While I'd never write, "less times" (unless it's an intentional character quirk in dialogue), there are plenty of other editorial things I could be stressing out over, and drafting is not the time for that.

Trying to edit as I draft would be paralyzing, because writing is a creative experience. You have to let go to create, let yourself get lost in the world and the characters and the story. I can't worry about revisions and editing at that point. Those will come later.

So I let go. I take off my editor hat, knowing I'll come back and put it on another time. I love drafting. It's a ball living for a time in my own little world.

The nice part is that when I do come back for revisions with my editor hat on, I know that what I have to fix won't generally be grammar errors and spelling mistakes. (Just a small bonus, really.) That's not to say I won't have plenty of other things to fix (character motivation, plot holes, telling instead of showing, lame dialogue . . . holy moly, truly, on some days, the list goes on and on).

The one place my obsession does interfere with is reading. It's really, really hard to take off the word nerd/editor hat then, which is frustrating. I have a difficult time picking up a book and enjoying it for its own sake.

It's a rare gem that draws me in so fully that I don't notice clunky punctuation or where I don't mentally rewrite sentences or groan at a really bad typo or grammar error.

My personal favorite error I caught a few years ago: three times in the same book I found prostate instead of prostrate. Oy. Where oh, where was the proofer?! I also caught a dang funny dangling modifier in one of the Twilight books. I giggled like crazy (it implied that Bella was her own father), but obviously no one else gave a snit about it.

(Then again, I doubt I'd care the slightest bit about a dangling modifier if my books were on the NY Times list for dozens of weeks on end, sold millions of copies and were made into blockbuster movies. But I digress.)

Got a question about anything writing or publishing-related? Ask away!

I'm a Nerd Elsewhere, Too!

I first "met" Jordan McCollum in bloggy land. I learned a lot about blogging and her philosophy on motherhood (one close to my heart) from her personal blog, MamaBlogga (see the link below).

Not long after, I got to be the guest-judge for Scribbit's monthly Write Away contest. The judging was totally blind; I was sent the entries without any author names on them. As I read through them and marked them up, putting them in various stacks (maybe, definitely no, etc.), one entry stood out from all the rest. I deemed it the winner.

I found out later that the winning entry was Jordan's. Dude, the girl can write.

Shortly thereafter, she came to one of my book signings and kept me company for a good half hour. (So did Wonder Woman . . . thanks for that! It was so fun!). 

I discovered during our chat that Jordan was an actual linguistics major (Hello!!! One of my favorite subjects ever . . . even though I'm an amateur and don't have a degree in it).

Then I about passed out when she mentioned knowing  about the Kalevala (a book near and dear to my heart, the collection of Finnish mythology/folktales). Who in the world knows about the Kalevala (besides J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and other folks who are into Norse mythology . . . like Jessica Day George? Oh, and Burt Wilson, who began the entire BYU folklore program because of the Kalevala, but I digress).

At BYU, Jordan had even heard my dad lecture about the Kalevala. (When I was a freshman, Dad was the Linguistics chair and had a nice, big office with a couch. I took a few naps there when I was wiped, since most of my classes were in the humanities building anyway.) Dad retired as Associate Dean of Humanities. So I think I went up a coolness point or two when Jordan realized I'm his daughter. (And that was a really cool lecture, Dad.) 

Jordan herself went up a few coolness points for me when I found out her dad also went on a mission to Finland like mine did, which was part of the reason she became interested in linguistics, and that she can pronounce Finnish words almost perfectly.

In addition to being a great blogger (check out MamaBlogga when you need a boost as a mom), she's also a writer, professionally and otherwise. She's working on some novels right now, so at that book signing, I convinced her to come to the LDStorymakers conference in April.

While at the conference, she asked me to guest post on her new writing blog, specifically on her May theme: verbs. I said sure! I'd love to!

But then my brain froze, taking a post-conference vacation somewhere along the way, because it took me three weeks (or so) to come up with something interesting to say about verbs that would be Jordan-worthy. (She'd already covered passive versus active and modals and all kinds of good stuff. Not that I was intimidated or anything. Not at all . . . nope . . .)

Today my guest post is up! It is about verbs, but specifically about verbs in dialogue tags, so I think it's a good refresher for all fiction writers out there.

Check it out here!

(In it, I refer to a horrid, self-published book, but not by name, because I'm not cruel. I still have the book more than a decade later. It's like a train-wreck I can't stop looking at. I flip through it when I need a good laugh or when I need to remind myself that yes, I do know a few things about this craft.)

Post-Christmas Stress

Because of the way weekends hit, this is the longest Christmas break the kids have ever experienced. They've been around each other all day, every day, for a long time already.

It was fine at first; they even spent hours in the snow making forts and snow houses and came in with rosy cheeks and grins. But now the Christmas cheer is wearing thin. I'm already getting, "I'm bored!" (What, did all your Christmas toys break already? Didn't think so.)

I'm also getting sibling fights that rival the WWF. Today, one child actually drew blood. "Accidentally."

Uh, huh. Sure.

I planned to get a bunch of stuff done during this week, including some housework stuff that's languished for months (my mending "pile" resembles Kilimanjaro, for starters). But I also feel pressure to make sure the kids have fun during their break.

Like how I promised to take them ice skating at some point. If they weren't so set on killing each other, I wouldn't dread that outing. Somehow I'm thinking that putting sharp metal edges on the feet of children already annoyed with one another isn't the wisest thing to do.

Today was a great start to the week: I had yet another appointment regarding my chronic headaches (I swear I live at the dentist's office), did a Costco run (not much food in the house after Christmas and a trip to Grandma's), and I managed to fold laundry, gather dirty clothes, and throw in a load. I don't have all the dirty ones collected yet, because I was too lazy to make the kids unpack properly when we got home yesterday.

I still have a few Christmas decorations up mocking me that I'm trying to ignore. Stupid, I know, because if I were to just put them away I'd be much happier and the place would be less cluttered. But that would make too much sense.

The kitchen looks like a cyclone swept through it. I can't seem to get the kids practicing piano again after a week off. The little one refuses to do her daily chore, although she's been pretending to do it for two hours now (a chore that would take a motivated 6-year-old oh, five minutes). She's gonna be so ticked when I tell her she can't have a friend over this afternoon because she ran out of time to play.

We have another week until school starts again. Heaven help me.

On a happier note, apparently being a Word Nerd is genetic. A few days ago, I overheard the following from my tween:

"Oh, cool, guys. Check it out. I found a typo on Club Penguin!"

My kids might be trying to kill each other, but at least I've passed on something useful.

Chocolate! And a Cool New Site for Writers

First off, I've discovered an interesting phenomenon. My top three posts (based on hits and comments) have been about the following:

1) Politics
2) Twilight
3) Winning chocolate

Hmm. I should post more often on topics that people feel passionately about!

NOW . . . announcing the winner of the Word Nerd Wednesday contest:

Really truly, I used an online random number generator to pick the winner. I typed in the number of people who left their scores in the comments. The site picked #7. Then I counted down to find the winner.

I swear this isn't a matter of family loyalty, but it's still pretty darn cool that my sister-in-law at Lyon Pride won! (Yay, Tina!)

And for the sake of the sheer creativity of her comment, I'm going to award a second truffle bar to LisAway! (Lisa, e-mail me your address, k? I already have Tina's, so we're good there. :)

Finally, I have to point any aspiring writers to a cool new site where you can get critique feedback from other writers. It's called Review Fuse, and I found out about it through my brother-in-law, who's one of the brains behind the thing. (Check out the about us page. You'll see a Lyon there!)

Here's the idea behind Review Fuse:
You post your work. When you get reviews back, you get to comment on how helpful each one was. You also then review other writers' work and get reviewed on how helpful you've been. The result is that the site learns your skill level and learns to better connect you with people on your level. In addition, you decide whether to keep your work in the public catalog for anyone to view or to keep it private for just your reviewers to look at.

All around, the concept is way cool.

They've recently added the ability to create critique groups, so you and several friends (even ones geographically distant!) can create your own groups and run it on the site, or you can create a group from current site members.

They've even got a blog with advice on writing, where I (and some of my friends) might be guest blogging at some point. Stay tuned.

The site is still in beta. Members are coming on daily, so it's really growing. The best news? It's FREE.

I know there are tons of people out there who love to write but for whatever reason have a hard time finding readers and/or a critique group. This could be your answer. Check it out here.

Final note: During my bloggy break, I kept composing posts in my head as I fell asleep at night. Of course I wouldn't forget what they were about, right? Not after I thought through them so thoroughly. Never.

Yeah. Of course they're all gone now. I have no earthly idea what they were about. But trust me; they were brilliant.

Word Nerd Wednesday: Go for Launch!

Since the Word Nerd poll had an overwhelmingly positive response, I will be doing Word Nerd Wednesdays (although I'm making no promises about them being every week).

I'll be taking a blogcation for the rest of this week to enjoy Thanksgiving, so I thought I'd put up a fun Word Nerd activity until I get back.

How well do you know your homophones?

Take this test to find out.

Here's the deal: I've got a Utah Truffles bar to award!

To enter the drawing, take the quiz at the link above and then post your score in the comments. I won't be picking the highest score or anything like that. It'll be a random drawing from everyone who posts their score.

Being the ultimate word nerd, I feel like I should know it all, so I'm feeling a bit dumb that I didn't get all 43 correct. I missed one. Darn it!

Happy Thanksgiving!

(If you have an idea for a future Word Nerd Wednesday post, let me know!)

Dissing Dora

Thanks to a tip from a friend, I found out that today author Lynne Truss is speaking at the BYU Devotional.

Woo! Yes! Snoopy happy dance! News like that is akin to Word Nerd Crack.

Alas . . . I can't make it. (I know. That fact is about killing me.)

No worries: I've already set my TiVo to record the devotional. The one they broadcast on KBYU had better be the live one. (If not, I'll still dig around and find the video to watch. I just GOTTA. It's Lynne Truss, people!)

Last night when I set the TiVo up to record, I got the warning that Dora the Explorer and The Wonder Pets! overlap with the devotional and wouldn't be recorded if I proceeded.

I had to choose: A speech by a writer I think is hilarious and witty on one hand, and my sweet little kindergartner who loves Dora and Tuck and all the little Wonder Pets on the other.

Simple answer, really. I'm hoping to keep #4 distracted from the TV today. She'll forgive me, right?

I Heart Heat

Very early Sunday morning (or, rather, really late Saturday night), we woke up to the delightful smell of burning plastic wafting through the heat vents. As an added bonus, the house was freezing.

Yep. Our furnace is on the fritz.

I'm trying to put a good spin on the situation:

• It's November, not January.
• Getting it fixed might not cost an arm and a leg. It'll still probably cost a few toes or fingers, and that stinks, since the furnace is all of 4 1/2 years old, but hey, I'm all for paying less. Even if I'm getting used to paying for broken stuff (like our transmission that died in August. That was fun.)
• Our gas fireplace pumps out heat pretty well.
• Baking rolls when your furnace is out helps heat up the kitchen.
• I have that nifty mini fireplace for my office that I'm blaring all day long.
• Recently, hubby got a space heater for the master bedroom (which is always the coldest place in the house even when the furnace is functioning). It, too, runs all the time now.

I never thought I'd be so grateful for three little heater thingys.

But they aren't quite enough. The basement feels remarkably like the arctic tundra right now. You walk down the stairs, and the change in temperature hits you like a wall.

Problem: That's where all the kids sleep.

So last night we threw an impromptu slumber party for them in the great room by the fireplace. With the noise and necessary light on for the girls, my son couldn't sleep and headed to his frigid cave of a room anyway. Somehow he survived the night without frostbite.

It was lovely, truly, when he had to get up to practice piano extra early because he has his lesson on Monday mornings. Yeah. The girls loved waking up to that.

In other news, I'm toying with the idea of doing a word nerd-type post on some semi-regular basis, something along the lines of the whole luff-tenant thing I went over recently. I've even thought of calling it, "Word Nerd Wednesday" or something like that.

I've gotten other questions here and there (like, "Why is Dick a nickname for Richard?") that would make for some interesting (to me, anyway) posts. But I won't inflict them on my readers if those posts would bore the rest of blogdom to tears. Vote in the poll at the right! (Be honest.)

Also, don't forget to visit (and bid at!) the Whitney Auction. New items are up all the time. Click on the Whitney Auction button at the top of this page and you'll go to the store front (where you can put some items into your cart and just buy them) or use the handy-dandy link below that to view all of the auction items at eBay at the same time.

An Answer: Word Nerd Rears Her Head

It's been weeks since MelanieJ asked a linguistic question involving the letter Q. In typical word nerd fashion, I dug around and answered it. Because I have a compulsion like that.

In the comments, I volunteered to explain why Brits insist on pronouncing "lieutenant" as if there's an "f" in the middle ("luff-tenant"). A couple of commenters expressed interest. Whether they were just being nice, I'll never know.

But for all three people out there who enjoy these things, here we go. Keep in mind that I'm not a linguist or an expert on these things. This is just what I've pieced together from my time in college and doing minor research on my own. So take it for what it's worth:

Many, many years ago (in the ages of Old and/or Middle English), the letters F and V were pretty much interchangeable and pronounced the same.

So fox could be (and often was) spelled vox.

Remember, this is before the printing press, public education, and other things cemented spelling rules and made the language change at a slower rate. Multiple spellings of the same word were common.

To complicate matters further, V and U were also interchangeable.

This is why you can find engravings atop public libraries where it's written out as:

PVBLIC LIBRARY

with a V instead of a U. Ever seen that and wondered why? Yeah.

I don't have proof, but I think people most likely got lazy with the V and made it round at the bottom instead of pointy, and that's how U became interchangeable with V.

In many respects, then, the letters F, V, and U could all be used for each other. And they were. Sometimes they meant different sounds (sometimes a U/V meant a vowel and at others, U/V/F indicated a consonant).

Now if you check out the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary, my favorite toy and the best dictionary in English), it has an entry for FOXES from the year 1225.

It's spelled: UOXES.

Putting it all together:

The word lieutenant was probably spelled with an interchangeable U/V in the middle:

both as LIEUTENANT and LIEVTENANT.

Since V and F were also interchangeable, the word could be pronounced with an F sound where the V was: LieF-tenant (LUFF-tenant).

Somehow pronouncing it with the V/F sound (as far as I can tell, no one agrees as to WHY) stuck in the UK but didn't in the US.

Instead, Americans kept the U sound: LIEU-tenant instead of V-inspired LUFF-tenant.

Tada! (Did that make sense to anyone else?)

I know. I'm a nerd. And proud of it. This stuff is fascinating to me.

(Did you know there's linguistic rule called Grimm's Law named after Jacob Grimm of the BROTHERS GRIMM?! Way cool! Even better, the law is all about voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives and a bunch of wicked awesome linguistic terms like that. Fascinating, right? RIGHT?!)

There's a reason I'd love to study linguistics if I ever returned to school for a master's degree. (Total nerd. Yep.)

(Hey, Dad, thanks for making me one!)

If you beg and plead, maybe sometime I'll explain how voiced and voiceless stops are connected to the following phrase, and why they made it a tongue-twister for my Finnish classmates learning English:

The big, pink pig