how frequent is this use?

Another Guest   Wed Oct 08, 2008 7:33 pm GMT
Humble: yes, it's a bit more complicated than what I explained. Obviously prepositions are not used in all cases of more than one speech, otherwise we'd say things like "I to like to pineapples". As far as I can tell, they are used to mark nonstandard mixes of different parts of speech, such as when something is an indirect object rather than a direct one ("I drove the car to the store") or when a verb is being used as a noun ("I like to swim"; "Do you know how to conjugate 'to go'?").

As for the reversed word order, I'm not clear on what you're saying. How do you think the sentence should be written (and actually, it's not really a sentence but a sentence fragement, complicating the discussion even more)?

As for "chock-full" (I thought it was "chock full", but apparently the hyphen is standard), here's a link. http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19980122

Interesting side question: for how many people here are "chock" and "chalk" homophones?
Uriel   Thu Oct 09, 2008 3:28 am GMT
Chock and chalk are the same for me -- chahk. (Cot-caught merged, US.)

I think by reversed word order he was talking about the verb coming before the noun, as happens in certain constructions.

Let's see, other fun mnemonics I can think of:

King Phillip Came Over From Greater Spain = the major classifications of living things, in descending order: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (thanks, Mom!)

Sincere Dr. M = the systems of the body: skeletal, integumentary, nervous, cardiovascular, endocrine, respiratory, excretory, digestive, reproductive, muscular (thanks, Mr. Forrest, favorite teacher -- high school biology)
Des   Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:21 am GMT
I would say that it is frequently used, but spelling is also important. I have said it before, and I'll say it again that the spelling is trying to represent speech patterns. It is very innacurate, and a better way of doing it would be using the IPA, which isn't that hard to learn. I don't know where you guys are getting this stuff and I truly do think it should be avoided.
K. T.   Tue Oct 14, 2008 2:09 am GMT
The sentence "We were made to laugh." isn't wrong in itself.

"We were made to laugh, to sing, to enjoy the world."

We were created to...

It could be used to describe the laughing "therapy" popular in India (I think) a few years ago. "We were made to laugh as part of the therapy."

It could be used to describe the demands of an acting coach or a stage director.

"We were made to laugh and mock on cue during the play."