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Most of what I've written has been published as e-books and is available at Amazon. Match Play is a golf/suspense novel. Dust of Autumn is a bloody one set in upstate New York. Prairie View is set in South Dakota, with a final scene atop Rattlesnake Butte. Life in the Arbor is a children's book about Rollie Rabbit and his friends (on about a fourth grade level). The Black Widow involves an elaborate extortion scheme. Happy Valley is set in a retirement community. Doggy-Dog World is my memoir. And ES3 is a description of my method for examining English sentence structure.
In case anyone is interested in any of my past posts, an archive list can be found at the bottom of this page. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have by sending me an e-mail note--jertrav33@aol.com. Thanks for your interest.

Monday, October 10

The 2-o

The 2 is an infinitive, that basic form of the verb preceded by its signal word “to.” Mnemonically, it consists of two words, one of which is a homonym, to/two. Don’t mistake this “to” for the word I’m calling a 1. They’re two different words. The 2 can, like any other verb form, have an object, or it can be modified by 1-o’s and adverbs and adverb s-v-o’s. It’s used as a noun, adjective, or adverb. It can even be part of a main verb, but then I don’t consider it a 2 anymore.

First the patterns, then the sentences that go with them:

Most often, the 2 is really pretty simple, although, as in much of English sentence structure, it can be a little sticky at times. Sometimes it can “lose” its signal “to” but like other understood words in a sentence, it’s really still there. This happens most often when the 2 is dragging along its own subject, in a kind of verbal noun clause. For example, “We watched him steal the diamond bracelet.” The entire thing we watched was “him steal the diamond bracelet.” And that word group, acting like the noun object of watched, is an s - 2 - o, with the sign of the 2 understood, “him (to) steal the bracelet.” Notice, in a similar sentence, how the “to” shows up again: “We wanted him to steal the diamond bracelet.” It all depends on the nature of the main V.

Okay, enough for the 2 and all its little idioticsyncrasies. Keep your eyes peeled for examples in magazines and newspapers, and even in your own writing. And I’ll see you tomorrow to thrill you with the characteristics of the 3. Whoopie.



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