Active Sentence

A sentence which describes an action from the agent’s point of view.

What Does That Mean?

It talks about whatever the Agent’s doing, like when you tell your friends “Man, that Liang chick is chugging those beers like they were water. She’s on her 7th…8th…9th…I totally lost count”

EX: So you wanna know how got I home last night when I was flat broke and had no train fare?, do you? If you must know, some guy paid for my ticket on the last train home. Didn’t even get to catch a glimpse of the guy’s face before he went off. All I know is that he was on a train with a bunch kids from some convention about those weird Japanese toons. I guessed as much from the all the crazy hair styles and costumes they were wearing. But hey, if being a fan of crap breeds that kind of consideration and kindness I’ll bite the bullet and watch a few myself, even if the majority of that crap is misogynistic and about as substantional as cotton candy

Auxiliary Adjective 

A dependent adjective that is preceded by and attached to a verb or another adjective.

What Does That Mean?

One adjective is attached to the end of another adjective/a verb to give it a certain tone or intent, like when we’d say someone’s accident-prone (prone being the Auxiliary Adjective here). The same principle applies to Auxiliary Verbs

EX: Man, what’re some sorta Man-hater, or something? This guy treats you like royalty, and you’d still go for that punk who acts like you should be at beck and call? And for what, because he’s more exciting to be around, or because you think you change into what you think a man should be like? If that’s the case, you need get your head outta your backside and work on yourself first. Can’t force nobody what they don’t wanna be even you do hold access to something he wants. When you can respect your self then people’ll start doing the same for you. 

We often hear those of previous generations discuss how rapidly things have changed and how much more expensive it’s become to maintain the status quo, and if what you want has to be imported or has some sort regulations on it, this goes double. Take, for example, this quotation discussing what the people of Japan have to pay.

“Japanese citizens pay about one-third more on average for everything than do their American counterparts. It is quite common for Japanese to go on shopping trips abroad to take advantage of lower prices. Regulations and other forms of government controls are a major reason Japanese firms now have, on average, the world’s highest costs.” Source: Japan Global Studies Handbook

Remember that the next time you think you pay out the nose for the things you want and need

“Although explicit direction to cognates can limit the advantage of cognates on a given task, the long-term consciousness raising that results is likely beneficial. Banta (1981: 134) writes of English speakers learning German that, ‘Probably the most useful fact we can tell our students about loan words is that they exist’. Learners are often suspicious of their loanword intuitions, and in some cases their conscious minds may restrain them from acting on these intuitions, even in the case of helpful cognates. Understanding that lexical transfer is ideally an unconscious process, and that it is susceptible to outside influence, opens an intriguing possibility.

Applied linguistics has borrowed repeatedly from social psychology, obvious examples including behaviourism and error analysis. It may be possible to use a social psychology technique to induce learners to more readily use their (native language) knowledge to process (Foreign Language) input; the technique is non-conscious priming, the activation of pre-existing, automatised mental processes without an individual’s awareness (e.g. Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). For instance, a scrambled word puzzle full of borrowed words might prime learners’ automated processing of cognates in a subsequent task.”

-Japan’s Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

In other words, don’t be afraid to use what you already know and to use your friends to help you better how you use a language!

Causative Sentence 

Sentences in which someone/something makes or lets someone/something do an action

What Does That Mean?

Depending on the sentence, they either let something happen or force it to happen, like when a workmate says “Yeah, you can borrow my stapler” or when you overhear someone say “Don’t make me break my foot off in your ass!”

EX: You know, no one made you buy that technicolor dress. You let the credit card purchase happen to make that dress yours, and now it’s part of your wardrobe until you decide to release it into the wilds of the Salvaltion Army or Goodwill

Pronominal

A verb/adjective which precedes a noun and modifies it

What Does That Mean?

It gives more detail to whatever you’re talking about, like when your friend tell you they managed to cook an edible chicken soup or a workmate calls your plan to try Skydiving sex a horrible idea.

EX: Seriously, all I want for Christmas is a working computer that stand up to the crap I put through put on a daily basis and still performance like a champ down the line. If money was no object, I’d totally want one of those Falcon Northwest computer that has a handle and is small enough to carry around without too much trouble. It’ll come in handy when I finaly time to go to one of those LAN parties he keeps blabbing about. Probably just wants to see me get my ass lit up at Counter-Strike again

Pronominal

A verb/adjective which precedes a noun and modifies it

What Does That Mean?

It gives more detail to whatever you’re talking about, like when your friend tell you they managed to cook an edible chicken soup or a workmate calls your plan to try Skydiving sex a horrible idea.

EX: Seriously, all I want for Christmas is a working computer that stand up to the crap I put through put on a daily basis and still performance like a champ down line. If money was no object, I’d totally want one of those Falcon Northwest computer that has a handle and is small enough to carry around without to much trouble. It’ll come in handy when I finaly time to go to one of those LAN parties he keeps blabbing about. Probably just wants to see me get my ass lit up at Counter-Strike again

Gerund

A verb that takes the place of a noun in a sentence

What Does That Mean?

It can used the same way you use a noun, the word’s exact appearance depending on language standards (English using verbs ending with ‘–ing’ as its Gerund). You’ll hear its use when someone says something like “Training is hard work” after practicing their 3 point shot at the gym or “Editing gets kinda lonely, sometimes” after they get off of a long day of working on transcripts and talk to their friend. When a verb is used as an adjective or adverb-like in ‘The Running Man’ or ‘A Broken Education System’- it’s called a Participle, and when it appears in its plain form-like when someone’s called ‘The One to Beat’ it’s called an Infinitive. 

EX: To gaze upon the shining red jewel is like gazing into the face of your chosen deity of worship. I should know, I got the jewel back at my pad waiting to find a home with some kindly rich nutjob. 

Intransitive Verb 

A verb which does not require a direct object

What Does That Mean?

It talks about whatever the subject at hand was doing, in this case discussing it in a more detached and observant tone. It’s like when your workmate asks you about what happened to your roommate last night and you say “Oh, Steve? Nothing much, he just worked overtime to cover for some girl he likes. When I got home and chatted with him, he fell asleep watching SportsCenter.”

EX: Last night at the bar that guy ate a bowl filled to the top with wings trying to set the record. You should’ve seen the bowl, dude, it was totally the size of the kitchen table!

Transitive Verb 

A verb that requires a direct object.

What Does That Mean?

It’s a verb that needs something to act on, the lack of it leading to confusion. It’s like when you and a friend are hanging out at your house and you say “Cook.” as you glance at the frozen pizza on the table. Your friend, not seeing this glance, asks “Cook what?” unaware of what you want to them to cook, because you didn’t say what, exactly, you want them to cook

EX: Why’d you dock my English paper, teach? I did my research and penned the paper in the format you asked.

That you did, but the way you write isn’t the way you’d wanna write a school paper. Your ideas gotta be fleshed out and organized, your claims gotta be stated clearly, and you gotta remember that if you wanna do well in a scholastic environment like this, your format has to work within scholastic standards. Besides, ‘U’ is a letter, not a pronoun.