Thursday, November 13, 2008

You know you've been staring at your grammar notes kinda long when...

You start replacing words with their categories.

Taken from an exercise that Ludwig's given us:

conjunction Barack Obama met George Bush for the first time four years ago, it verb an unhappy encounter.  Matters were not helped at the start when a presidential aide squirted sanitiser on determiner hands preposition they shook.  Yesterday, the determiner US president met the man who will be the forty-fourth at the White House again in very different circumstances.  determiner time there was no sanitiser and none of the condescension relative pronoun Obama complained of on the first occasion.  Obama was at the White House as president-elect to-infinitive discuss the transfer of power.  He was adverb adverb as the fulfilment of the dream of Americans pronoun lived through segregation and the 1960s adjective rights movement.  Like other African-Americans, he is deeply conscious of the White House's adjective history: verb by slaves and staffed by slaves throughout its first 50 years and home of repeated racial slights and snubs that lasted into the 1970s.  Obama had spoken adverb of the potency of his presence on the adjective grounds, and that was confirmed when the long-awaited image immediately went preposition the world.  Speaking preposition the campaign, he contemplated further images that will help to suggest that America has entered a new noun: his daughters, Malia and Sasha, verb round the White House and playing on its famous lawn.

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