Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with noun

Grammatical Case Headspace....

mary8nne — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:15:21 -0800

LanguageFilter: How can a native English speaker develop a better sense of grammatical cases? So I'm learning some Russian and have just started getting into the noun & adjective case distinctions. But as a native English speaker it is quite difficult to think in terms of what noun cases are used in a particular sentence (ie is this the nominative, accusative, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental, vocative or genitive case of the noun/adjective that I need to use).

I've been reading some of the wikipedia entries on declension, grammatical case, noun cases, gender cases etc but it very quickly goes completely over my head.

So I was just wondeing if anyone here had say some tips, advice or resources on getting into the grammatical case headspace?

I imagine its just a matter of doing 'exercises' or something? (but is this really possible with English examples when we don't distinguish linguistically between most of them?)

Proper noun problem:

serazin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:45:06 -0800

You capitalize "The Civil War", right? And you capitalize "The Civil Rights Movement", right? Do you capitalize "The Women's Movement"? Do you capitalize "The Anti-Globalization Movement"? What about the "Spay and Neuter 'Movement'"? Is every specific movement or event in history considered a proper noun – and if not, why not? Do I get to just arbitrarily decide what to capitalize in these sorts of examples, or is there some 'rule' that only applies to historic events that hold a certain level of significance – and who decides what is significant enough? This isn't just idle curiosity – I'm transcribing an interview where the subject talks about a number of movements - American Civil Rights Movement, Gay Rights Movement, etc, and I don't know what to capitalize!

The all-purpose gerund

rosemere — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:59:36 -0800

I'm trying to find an exact quote about swearing. It went something like "When a British soldier uses the word 'fucking', it's only to let you know a noun is coming up." The original source might be Ashley Montague or Robert Graves, but print and Google searches have failed me.

What's up with "hamburger sandwich"?

Servo5678 — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:02:29 -0800

Why do senior citizens refer to one-word objects with two words? Maybe I'm just noticing this a lot more lately, but senior citizens around me - family, co-workers, even on television - are suddenly using two words to identify things I've always considered one-word objects, and it's only the elderly I've noticed doing it.

For instance: "Where did I park my Cadillac car?", "I ate a hamburger sandwich on a bread roll", "I'm going to the bank to get some cash money", etc. Where did this language habit come from?

Bloggy?

Nikolai — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:42:51 -0800

Is there a single-word noun that means "things that relate to blogs/are in the manner of blogs?" If not, any ideas for a made-up one?