What is the difference between a swimming instructor and a swimming instructor? You might think that a silly question, but look again. The difference lies in the word swimming, identical in spelling but different in grammar. Here’s a hint: in one of the phrases, the instructor might be swimming; in the other, the instructor must …
Author Archives: rultimo
Finding the Center First
So much depends on method. When we want to do something—and what we do with our mind is just as real as what we do with our hands—the way we begin can make all the difference, because where we launch out from will determine how we fare to our goal of understanding or making something. …
Sticky or Cohesive Thoughts?
Contemplative traditions and meditative disciplines often describe thoughts as sticky. One thought glues itself to some other vaguely related thought that happens to come along, and before you know it, you’re stuck fast in a gooey and unshapely conceptual world of your own making, a ramble that takes you far from the simple, wise, and …
Do You Feel Different or Differently?
Well, that depends. And what it depends upon can help us both to review a point of grammar and to sharpen our critical thinking. We use words to represent our mentality, our state of mind, about a given circumstance. We might be in the very situation about which we are constructing sentences, or we might …
The Prose in Poetry
What is the difference between a paragraph and a stanza? Or, put another way, what is the difference between prose and poetry? Prose (the word comes from the Latin phrase prosa oratio, straightforward speech) is the sentences our everyday mind produces, saying this about that, constructing thoughts in clauses, and linking one after the next, …