WAR'S AMISS. Word lover’s awarded a whirled World

TASK_1. What did J. Joyce intended to express is this sealed sentence:

   They lived und laughed ant 

loved end 

left.

TASK_2. Before entering the subject matter read aloud this sentences, getting the full benefit of all its mighty wit...

SET ONE.  Subject? Verb? ambiguity....

 Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

 Subject1? ..............   Verb1? ..............

Subject2? ..............   Verb2? ..............

1. · What’s the definition of a will? It’s a dead giveaway.
2. · A backward poet writes inverse.
3. · In democracy, it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your count that votes.
4. · She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but broke it off.
5. · He often broke into song, because he couldn’t find the key.

How do they increase their meaning/ambiguity. Tell your partner/s.

SET TWO.

· Every calendar’s days are numbered. 

· He had a photographic memory which was just never developed. 

· When you’ve seen one shopping centre, you’ve seen a mall. 

· Those who jump off a Paris bridge are in Seine. 

· When an actress saw her first strands of grey hair, she thought she’d dye.

· Marathon runners with bad footwear suffer the agony of defeat.

TASK_3.  

Two years ago author Lynne Truss hit the Christmas best-seller list with the book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, subtitled "The zero-tolerance approach to punctuation".

The title alludes to how punctuation, or a lack of it, can utterly change the meaning of a sentence.

Take the peculiar title, which is from a joke:
A panda goes into a café, orders a sandwich, eats it, takes out a revolver, fires it into the air, and goes out. When the waiter calls to ask what is going on, the panda plunks a badly punctuated wildlife manual onto the table and growls:
"Look me up."  

The waiter finds the entry:

"PANDA. Large, black-and-white, bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

TASK_4. We have all heard the expression, the last straw that broke the camel’s back and have felt that one more thing could send us over the edge in times of stress.

A comma can change the whole meaning of a sentence. According to Toronto's Globe and Mail for August 6, 2006, a misplaced comma in a contract to string cable lines along utility poles may cost the Canadian company a whopping $2.13 million.

TASK_5. Missing punctuation leads to much ambiguity, meaning that we have to ask the writer what was meant, rather than it being crystal clear in the first place.

Get the punctuation right and the message will be clear.

Here is a classic illustration of altering punctuation to change meaning:

Do males/females write the same?  

· A woman, without her man, is nothing

· A woman: without her, man is nothing.