Thursday, September 07, 2006

books i have finished this summer

this is mostly for my own purposes because i have very selective memory loss about books... if you actually read my blog, i would very much like to discuss these books, especially the ones with *'s.
-the brothers karamazov* (dostoyevsky)
-buddenbrooks* (thomas mann)
-death in venice* (thomas mann)
-the professor's house (willa cather)
-the garden of eden* (hemingway)
-saturday (ian mcewan)
-privilege (ross duthat)
-the double helix (james watson)
-freakonomics (levitt and dubner)

grammatical correctness of picture labelling

i posted this as a facebook note, but since i no longer want to go on facebook that much anymore, i am going to begin collecting all of my thoughts here...

you know, i was sitting here eating my yogurt and thinking about how people always put "_____ and i" as a picture caption and for a long time it's been a pet peeve of mine because it's not grammatically correct--you would never label a picture "i;" you would label it "me."

however, in my stalking this summer i've noted so many pictures labeled "____ and i" that i began to wonder if it were actually an acceptable thing to do. i really don't think so, because while you can say "____ and i went to the _____," saying "please give the papers to _____ and i" is terrible because "i" is the wrong part of speech, or something like that. (please let me know if this is incorrect.)

anyway, i deem this business more stylistically gauche than preposition dangling, which has become much more acceptable with the youths of our day... often i find myself dangling prepositions to not sound totally stuffy. ("with whom are you going to the movies, sir?" just sounds ridiculous.)