Oh Claire...and you claim to be a grammarian?

See, that's the thing. I do. I do claim to be a grammarian.


And a good one.


And, when it comes to it, one to whom you would actually want to pay money to help improve your own language skills.

So why can I not work out what is structurally wrong with the following sentence?


"It wasn't me who baited him this time."


(This is quite beside the point, but I feel the appropriate response to this tweet would have been "I am most proud of you for your sudden maturity".)


Now, in the sentence "It wasn't me" - I thought me was a direct object. Whereas in the sentence "I did not bait him", the word I is clearly an subject. Which makes it all very confusing. How can I be a subject and an object at the same time?


But. Once I'd torn myself away from twitter, I practised saying "It was not I who baited him" in a posh British accent (my own) and I have to say, it does have a certain ring of, well, rightness to it.


Somebody called @blabbate quickly picked me up on my subject/object issue, which I had foolishly assumed would silence the critics, dizzying them with all my jargon. But oh, no. @blabbate said:. "Direct objects do not follow linking verbs. Subject complements do. In this case, a predicate nominative. In prescriptive English you must use the nominative case, which is "I". However, a descriptivist will tell you either is fine."


Ha! I would say next. See. We are both right. Even Wikipedia says so.


Except that, like Josh Malina, I *am* a prescriptive grammarian. There are elements of my "descriptive" grammar textbook which make me wince when I am supposed to teach them. Such as the lie that "whom" does not exist anymore. Don't be ridiculous! Of course "whom" exists.


This appeared to be one of those moments, like being twenty-three and having a degree from Cambridge and realising one has been spelling "forty" wrong all one's life. Why did no one ever tell me it wasn't "fourty" till I worked in a bank? (If only that had been the worst mistake I'd made there. But anyway...) Shame on me.


These points, in my defence: And yes, Josh Malina, and yes, Safari spell-check, I do mean defence with a C. We are not all American, you know.


- I was not wholly focused on the task in hand. I was, in fact, teaching a French lesson. But as previously discussed on this blog, I am unable to ignore tweets from certain people, whatever the time of day or night. Still, I do feel a little guilty about this, and I wish I could say it would not happen again.


- I was also a little dizzy with the excitement of being engaged in two of my favourite activities at the same time: grammar, and bantering with Josh Malina.


- We Brits in our 30s did not have any grammatical knowledge imparted to us at school. The reason for which I know some is my Belgian education. This whole "It is me" thing does not apply in French.


In fact, there it is. That's the reason. Mother tongue interference. "C'est moi qui". Never "c'est je qui".


Yet, here I am again, late to bed because of twitter, and standing duly corrected, duly rebuked, duly ashamed. At least now I have a posh-sounding excuse for it.

twitter and sleep deprivation

Tired, tired, so tired.

Which is all Josh Malina's fault.

Well, okay, it's kind of mostly mine. I should have known better than to bait him on twitter regarding his - ahem - favourite West Wing co-star round about the time I was getting ready to sleep. The whole twitterverse promptly climbed on board and suddenly everyone was talking to me, about me, about me and Josh Malina in the same breath. And, he was talking to me.

I'm so tired, I said to my friend this lunchtime. I tried to explain.

"I couldn't turn off twitter when Josh Malina was tweeting me!"

"Why?" she said.

"Because he's famous! A famous person was tweeting me! I couldn't go to bed!"

"Why?" she said again.

And, let's face it, she has a point. I mean, I know why. I understand what goes on in that complicated brain of mine. But still.

Josh Malina is not only famous, he's the very best kind of famous. He's also funny. And he tweets me! Semi regularly! In fact, I have communicated with him this week more than I have with my own mother. (We're not close.)

So kudos to him for interaction with his fans, and making me feel special. (Ahem, somebody please take note.)

But, why? Why does it make me feel special that Josh Malina is tweeting me?

My friend had a point.

He's famous. (Think you've got that by now, though.) He's on the West Wing. He's one degree removed from ... well, you know, he who should probably not be named in the same breath. He's funny. He has 10,000 ish followers on twitter, as against my measly 300ish.

So, if he tweets me, if those tweets to me are mentioned on TV interviews, does that make me somehow famous too?

Somehow important?

Is fame really the same thing as greatness?

And even if it was, is contact with that kind of greatness what gives me my significance, my identity, my greatness?

Didn't think so.

NaBloPoMo or the art of drivel

I've just signed up to NaBloPoMo - which is not, as you might think, a hitherto-undiscovered strain of swine flu (or 'flu - hands up if you still write that, and 'cello, and 'phone). It's National Blog Post Month. Or something like that, anyway. And since I've recently decided I need to up my word count if I'm going to stand a chance of ever being able to write this novel anything like as well as I would like to, I've decided to give it a go.

Much like practising the oboe, which seems to bascially consist of making the same mistakes and then some new ones day after day until it all magically falls into place (apparently), if I churn out enough drivel, one day I will write something good.

Lucky you, you get to read the drivel.

I have to admit, I was hoping NaBloPoMo would come up with some kind of Daily Prompter, but all it has is a theme.

This month, the theme is "Big".

Which is lucky, because something "big" happened to me today. Well, it's actually something very tiny, but I am bouncing up and down and unable to concentrate on anything else so well, what better topic for this, my first of this month's thirty blogposts.

Rob Lowe tweeted me!

Rob Lowe!

You know, Sam Seaborn. From the West Wing. That programme I go on about endlessly and have probably mentioned or alluded to in every blogpost since time immemorial.

Sorry, Janel Moloney, but even getting a signed picture of you in the post this week does not trump this. (Though, to clarify: I bounced a little then, too.)

I have to say, I have not been this excited since I got my first tweet from Josh Malina - and then - even more excitingly -a DM from him - then a retweet - and then, oh miracle, he started following me. Goodness knows why - I doubt he enjoys my daily adulation of Bradley Whitford. (They have some kind of rivalry going: it amused me greatly when I spotted a line that Brad made Josh say in a West Wing episode he wrote - "I can't act; I'm a terrible actor." Josh deserves it though - he does things like tear out the last page of books before the person has read them. Ouch.)

And he still hasn't unfollowed me - I know this, thanks to Qwitter, which I don't suggest you sign up for if you have any issues with self-confidence. And who doesn't.

Quite why any of this should be so exciting eludes me. Somewhere in my list of blog posts to be written is the title "fame - the illusion of greatness". There's one to ponder. But first, sleep.