ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

2008 America ’s presidential election is finally over.  The result was kind of what we had expected.  The American people are tired of Bush, a Republican president, as a president for 8 years and are looking for changes. 

My son's school has "kids vote".  Of course, the votes do not count because they are not of voting age yet.  I kind of know the reason why my son voted "Obama" not because of us.  We don't discuss that with kids.  We voted for McCain for the long standing support that Republicans have shown towards Taiwan , for foreign policy and economic reasons.

I have seen quite a few people confused with the usage of "to Ving", when to use it and why. 

October 26th, 2008 marked our official first snow of the season.  This signaled that winter is here to stay.  My son has a love-and-hate relationship with snow.  He likes snowing for the thrill from sledding, skating and snow-fight.  He also likes to taste snow.  However, with snow, he will not be able to ride his bike anymore, which is his favorite past-time.  He will not be able to stay outside as long as he wants, not to mention to wear his favorite shorts and short-sleeves.  He hates bundling up.  He also hates that cold may trigger his asthma.

As I woke up the next day, the temperature was around 24 degrees Fahrenheit, which was 4 degrees Celsius below zero.  That is not the coldest of the season.  Can you imagine living in winter for almost half of the year, with subzero degree most of the time from November to February?  The coldest month is January.  If you factor into wind chill effect, we are talking about a 40 or 50-degree below zero temperature in Fahrenheit.  Isn’t that amazing!

I came across an interesting topic about the English translation of 酒後亂性

Adjective Clauses - Restricted vs. Unrestricted

An adjective clause is used to modify nouns.  The pronouns that begin adjective clauses are relative pronouns such as that, which, who, whom, whose and where. 

When can we omit “that”?

(1) “That” used as a relative pronoun.

A common grammar error taught in Taiwan – The Other vs. Another

There are _____ five students waiting in front of the theater.

單一詞在句首用逗點隔開的用法。

 1.  Use commas set off introductory elements of the sentence.  Sometimes, at the beginning of a sentence, the conjunctive adverbs (or adverbial conjunction) will act as a kind of summing up device or transition, and when it does, it is often set off from the rest of the sentence with a comma:

I came across this usage of "wicked" vs. "wickedly" when providing input to one of my knowledge group members.  I had initially thought that for the following sentence, you need to use wickedly instead of wicked.  Since sick is an adjective, we should use an adverb to modify an adjective.  I was right about that grammar rule but wrong about the word “wicked”.    

Wicked is normally used as an adjective; however, it can also be used as an adverb as a slang, meaning “extremely”, “really” or “totally”.

Caution – word usage and grammar accuracy online

I have seen people relying too much on the information obtained from the internet.  We all know that not all information gathered from internet is accurate.  There are all kinds of people providing all sorts of information online and they could have easily made a mistake or a typo. 很多人在用不代表一定對. Unless the information you obtained comes from a reputable site, you should be very precautious on the information you obtained.