I never met Dr. Charles Darling, but I always liked him. He put together one of the finest grammar websites I’ve ever seen, The Guide to Grammar and Writing.

I discovered his site several years ago when I tutored students in English at the AOL Academic Assistance Center. We often referred students to this site when they needed one more explanation of a grammatical concept or if they needed more practice. This site is rich with explanations and self-checking quizzes. I started using it in my own classroom and recommended it to colleagues.

A site this extensive (check out the index) can only be the product of a person who is completely dedicated to helping people who are trying to improve their writing. Hosted by the Capital Community College of Hartford, Connecticut, the site never had any advertising, even though it would have used more bandwidth in one evening that many sites use all week. Dr. Darling provided all these resources free of charge.

Unlike many Web ventures, the site has been updated and expanded over the years. Even after I stopped tutoring online, I’d visit the site occasionally to see the new developments. At one point an announcement asked for patience as Dr. Darling was recovering from surgery. During my last visit, a new page announced his passing.

His site wasn’t just about basic writing skills — it was a demonstration of what happens when someone shares their passion with others. With his death some of that passion, some generosity and caring have gone out of the world. It remains for us to continue that spirit.

Rest in peace, Charles Darling. And thank you.

Cowboy poetry speaks for a unique segment of American life. The Web site Western and Cowboy Poetry, music and more at the Bar-D Ranch offers a glimpse of poetry that reflects a lifestyle that is fading.

• Don’t miss Wallace McRae’s humorous classic, “Reincarnation.”
• “Lariat Laureate” Brenda “Sam” DeLeeuw’s poem “Spring” depicts the arrival of the season in the desert.
• Other collections of poems, including cowboy toasts and poems about chuckwagons, are also available.

Visitors can also subscribe to a newsletter. Don’t miss this great collection of poems about the Great American West!

On July 30, 1954, Elvis Presley made his debut as a performer promoting his single, “That’s All Right, Mama.” He introduced a new style of music sometimes called “rockabilly.” His stage gyrations caused parents to worry about his impact on the youth of America. But never mind the hips — let’s talk about his lyrics. The man was the despair of English teachers everywhere:

“Heartbreak Hotel”
…
Well, the bellhops’ tears keep flowin’
And the desk clerk’s dressed in black.
Well, they been so long on Lonely Street
They ain’t never comin’ back.

“Love Me Tender”
Love me tender, love me sweet
Never let me go …

“Hound Dog”
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
cryin all the time,
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
cryin all the time.
Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit
and you ain’t no friend of mine.

“Teddy Bear”
…
I don’t wanna be a tiger
‘Cause tigers play too rough.
I don’t wanna be a lion
‘Cause lions ain’t the kind
you love enough.

English teachers might have cringed at that language in the Fifties, but it seems tame today. I wonder what they’ll be singing 50 years from now?

Henry Adams once said, “A teacher affects eternity. No one can tell where their influence stops.” These end-of-course assessment comments may reflect a more variable attitude:

• “I am convinced that you can learn by osmosis by just sitting in his class.”
• “Help! I’ve fallen asleep and I can’t wake up!”
• “Recitation was great. It was so confusing that I forgot who I was, where I was, and what I was doing — it’s a great stress reliever.”
• “I would sit in class and stare out the window at the squirrels. They’ve got a cool nest in the tree.”
• “He is one of the best teachers I have ever had. He is well-organized, presents good lectures, and creates interest in the subject. I hope my comments don’t hurt his chances of getting tenure.”

This blog entry started because today is the anniversary of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw’s birth in 1856. He is widely misattributed with the observation that English spelling is so irregular that ghoti could be pronounced the same as fish:

gh as in rough
o as in women
ti as in nation

That got me thinking about other irregularities in English, and I remembered one of my favorite schticks from the comedian Gallagher, who pointed out problems with spelling and pronunciation. This blog won’t do justice to his presentation, but you can get the general idea:

• Why don’t good and food rhyme? They both end in -ood.
• If L-A-U-G-H-T-E-R is pronounced “laffter,” shouldn’t D-A-U-G-H-T-E-R be pronounced “daffter”?
• Comb, tomb, and numb: why don’t these words rhyme?
• Finally, go and do should rhyme. As Gallagher observes, “These ain’t two words off in the corner somewhere that we don’t use. These are GO and DO!”

Shaw was interested in spelling reform, and after his death the Shavian Alphabet was developed. In that alphabet, the word currently spelled “fish” would be spelled with a new letter indicating the “sh” sound.

Or we could try it this way.

What is a butt bra? Have you ever seen floordrobe? Where would you buy carbon offsets?

These are words newly coined and popping up in the media. Words to watch. Words that might make the end-of-the-year Best New Word (or Worst). Paul McFedries at Word Spy tracks these neologisms.

What a fun site to lose an hour with! My triva for today: the phrase “big box store” dates back to 1988, the era of equally big hair. NIMBY (not in my back yard) dates to 1980. I wonder if the phrase is still current — it sounds dated to my ear.

Quite a few phrases understandably emerged late in 2001; 9/11 is one example. The site points out, “This term … became a part of the lexicon literally overnight. By September 12, 2001, most of the world knew or could easily figure out what 9/11 meant. This was even true (although to a lesser extent) in countries (such as Canada, Britain, and Australia) where 9/11 means November 9.”

Word Spy’s home page lists the most recent additions to the collection. Use tabs at the top to find a browsable database of words organized by subject (don’t miss “Verbed Nouns”), archives dating back to 1996, and a very extensive collection of quotations about words. You can subscribe to updates of new words or new quotations.

You’ve heard of podcasts, you know what they are, but have you actually LISTENED to one yet? If not, it’s time to start; and there’s no better starting point for an English teacher than Grammar Girl.

Go on, go to the site and click on “listen now.” I’ll wait.

Wasn’t that good? Short, sweet, and to the point.

Grammar Girl, a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty, started podcasting in July 2006, and her audience developed quickly. Her background as a technical writer prepared her to explain the nuances of the subjunctive mood or the question of hanged vs. hung in clear, common-sense terms. The podcast was so successful that she quit her day job. In a March interview Fogarty said, “This was my hobby when I started. I thought maybe a few people would be interested. But never in my wildest dreams did I think it would become as popular as it has.”

Grammar Girl is a great resource for English teachers experiencing a moment of doubt (what IS that rule about which vs. that?). It might also be a good backup for the student who needs just one more explanation of a concept. A Grammar Girl-style podcast might also serve as a way for students to demonstrate their learning at the end of a writing unit.

Grammar Girl also serves as a reminder that what we do really counts for something. People DO notice lapses in style, and people DO want their writing to be correct. Never mind what your fifth period class told you about semicolons. (Mine called them “the world’s most boring punctuation mark.”) The day will come when they’ll be glad they know.

I haven’t started Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet. It will be another week before I get home to the copy that is supposed to be waiting for me, and I’m avoiding all the reviews that might include any kind of spoiler. Please don’t tell me how it ends. (I’m not worried about Harry, but I am concerned about Hagrid.)

I figured checking up on the title would be safe. The word hallow has all but died from English as a noun. I’ve seen it as a verb: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address states, “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” In that sense I understood hallowing to be something a person can do to show honor or to set something aside as holy.

In church I learned hallowed as an adjective: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

At some point I learned that Hallowe’en was a corruption of “All Hallows Eve,” but I never quite caught on to what a hallow was in that context. I thought it was a dead person.

So when I saw the phrase “deathly hallows,” I hope I can be forgiven some confusion. Apparently I was not alone, because the folks at the Merriam-Webster dictionary site (my favorite!) updated their entry for hallows and mentioned Rowling’s novel as the cause.

Hallows, according to Merriam-Webster, are saints, shrines, or relics. But in Rowling’s book they are deathly. Hmmmm … this should be interesting. Don’t tell me …

Intersection in Concord, MA

I grabbed some breakfast at Dunkin Donuts and headed up toward The Walden Woods Workshop. Turning right, I glanced up at the street signs and smiled. “That’s a metaphor for this whole week,” I thought, “the intersection of Thoreau and Walden.”

Before this workshop, if you’d asked me about Henry David Thoreau, I would have mentioned Walden and might, later, have remembered to add “Civil Disobedience.” In my mind I had merged the man with the location. Big mistake.

There is more to Walden Pond than its most famous temporary resident, as our nature walks have revealed. Sandy soil unfit for farming helped preserve the trees. Its water is crystal clear, even though no stream enters or exits it. Spotted salamanders, a variety of frogs and toads, and a chorus of birds form a portion of the rich biodiversity here. Now part of the Massachusetts State Reservation (Park) system, the pond is also a popular hiking, picnicking, and swimming spot.

And there is much more to Thoreau than a cabin in the woods. Throughout his life he was an active member of his community, a highly respected surveyor, a powerful speaker and writer, a keen observer of nature, and a good friend.

For a period of 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days, the man and the pond intersected; and the result was a book that has resonated with readers so much that it has not gone out of print since the year Thoreau died. It’s a good book, but not the only thing he wrote. Living in the woods was a wonderful experiment, but not the only valuable thing he ever did.

As Thoreau himself wrote in Walden:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. … I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

This week’s workshop has been a tremendous intersection of location, experts, and colleagues. It is time for us, however, like Thoreau, to return to the other lives we live.

*****
I’m blogging this week from Walden Pond, where I am attending the Approaching Walden workshop sponsored by The Walden Woods Project.

The Concord School of Philosophy

Bronson Alcott founded the Concord School of Philosophy in 1879. Despite its age the building is still in use, and on Wednesday Sandy Petrulionis gave a wonderful presentation, “Daughters of American Radicalism: The Alcotts and (John) Browns.” It was based on her book, To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord.

Part of her extensive research included confirmation that the Thoreau family, among others in Concord, participated in the Underground Railroad, helping escaping slaves to freedom in Canada. We don’t know how many people escaped through Concord because, she pointed out, it wasn’t wise to keep written records of this illegal activity.

Concord, it turns out, also actively supported Captain John Brown’s efforts to end slavery. During a discussion earlier in the day, Jeffrey Cramer, the Thoreau Institute’s Curator of Collections at the Walden Woods Project, explored Thoreau’s transition over the years from opposing slavery via nonviolent civil disobedience to finally acknowledging that ending slavery might require taking up arms. Thoreau was the first to publically support Captain Brown after his capture at Harper’s Ferry. If the entire town had been donating money toward his cause, the passion in his essay “A Plea for Captain John Brown” might be seen also as a reminder of those ideals the community had embraced. Most of the people who had publically favored Brown before October 16, 1859, distanced themselves right after his arrest. They felt, Cramer said, that Brown had “gone too far.” Thoreau’s speech persuaded them to reconsider.

Thoreau wrote, “I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown.”

Our focus on Wednesday was Thoreau as social reformer. We are studying Thoreau, but he was in good company with other gadflies to the national conscience, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott.

*****
I’m blogging this week from Walden Pond, where I am attending the Approaching Walden workshop sponsored by The Walden Woods Project.