The Vine: May 1, 2007
Dear Sars,
I recently took the Swedish equivalent of the SATs (the SWATs, if you will). One part of the test is designed to tests students English skills. While most of the tasks were no-brainers (I used to live in the U.S. and consider myself fairly fluent in English), one of them bugged the heck out of me for reasons I can’t quite figure out. This is where your expertise comes in!
The task was to read a sentence where a word had been omitted, and pick the omitted word from a group of four alternatives. The sentence read as follows:
“In 19 out of 20 applications it [a calculator] produced the correct answer in fractions of a second, but ….X…. then I noticed that the twentieth answer was liable to be wildly wrong.”
The alternatives were: until, before, only, even
My first instinct was to go with “only,” but grammatically that seemed like a poor choice. Ultimately, I settled on “even,” which turned out to be correct. As pleased as I was to be right, I still felt that there was something wrong with the structure and wording of the sentence. I would therefore be eternally grateful if you could tell me if the sentence in question is an acceptable sentence language-wise? I can’t find any obvious grammatical or linguistic errors in it, but there’s something about the wording and flow of it that just doesn’t seem right…
Thanks,
I’ve Always Wanted to Write You a Clever, Witty Question…This Is Not It
Dear Clever,
The sentence is correct; it’s acceptable, and the purpose of the sentence in the test is to test your understanding of English prepositions and/or adverbial phrases, so I guess it does its job — but the testee is supposed to select the right word based on the central meaning of the sentence, and the way it’s phrased, the right word is irrelevant to that meaning.
I mean, the calculator performed 19 out of 20 functions correctly and quickly, but the twentieth function was not merely incorrect but “wildly” so, right? This is ostensibly the information the sentence is trying to communicate — the calculator doesn’t fuck up often, but when it does, it fucks up bad. If that’s the case, you don’t need the phrase “even then” at all, because it’s modifying “I noticed,” so it implies…something about the act of noticing? I don’t really know, honestly, because again, it’s not incorrect; it just has nothing to do with anything.
The sentence is trying to determine whether an ESL speaker can distinguish between various prepositions and adverbs that denote the passage of time, or fix a phrasing at a particular relative time; it just isn’t a very good sentence with which to do that.
Hey Sars!
In a nutshell, it’s noise. My sweetie and I moved about a month ago to our fourth apartment in two and a half years. We’ve been bouncing around because of work, but we’ve finally found jobs we love and an apartment that’s reasonably close to both of them. It’s an adorable little apartment, and we’d like to stay there awhile. The neighbors are generally quiet and pleasant — every now and then somebody has a party, but only on weekend afternoons and they always shut up by 10 PM or so. The walls are thick and it’s nearly impossible to hear what’s going on next door. There are lots of families and trees and whatnot, and for the first time, we don’t think anyone in our building is actively dealing drugs. We like it a lot.
But it’s part of a big, busy complex on a busy corner of a busy street in a busy town, and it’s just never completely quiet. There’s always some form of bass background noise — not loud, but never-ending. Some of it is traffic, some of it is the neighbors coming and going, some of it is people playing their stereos, some of it is just heaters and water going through the water pipes and all the rest of the noise that a bunch of people living close together can’t help but make, even if they’re considerate, which pretty much everybody is.
So this noise is driving me nuts, even though I know it shouldn’t. I just can’t help but notice it, and I notice it more the more I try to ignore it. It’s not loud or earth-shattering or tooth-rattling — it’s just a bunch of low bass sounds, always changing, just on this side of hearing. As a resident of a city I hear is not very sleepy, I thought maybe you could help. Do you get used to the ambient city buzz after awhile? Is there something I can do or buy (earplugs, white noise machines, whatever) to mask it? Should I just get a ladder and climb over myself? Please advise!
Thanks!
Come On Feel The Noise
Dear Girls, Rock Your Earplugs,
I would give it a little more time. I live on one of Brooklyn’s busiest thoroughfares, and the noise varies depending on time of day, but it is constant — garbage trucks, unemployed daytime-drunk social club in front of the deli, horns honking at the gas station next door, car alarms, traffic, the line outside the Lyceum, tires in the rain, it never stops. And I still fucking hate the air horns, especially at two in the goddamn morning, like, there’s one other car on the road, dickhead, so do you mind? But the rest of it, I can sleep through no problem.
On the other hand, you could put me out on the median of the Brooklyn Bridge ramp at rush hour and I probably wouldn’t even roll over, but if Skyrockets starts snoring when I’m trying to fall asleep, I am up. And if he’s snoring in a predictable, even way, it’s fine, but if the snores vary at all, I can’t deal for some reason. My point here is twofold: 1) I think you can get used to a certain baseline of ambient sound, but 2) if it’s not a baseline so much as spikes and waves of different noises, it’s harder. And everyone’s different. Some people require museum quiet to get to sleep; some people need it to stay asleep; it depends.
So what should you do? Give yourself a few more weeks to get acclimated, as I said; experiment with an oscillating fan or an air purifier, something that’s a steady sound that you might find more soothing. But above all, try not to get stressed about it; it just makes it harder for you to fall asleep if you’re lying there, rigid, expecting a sound to irritate you, because then any sound will irritate you. If Skyrockets is sawing a giant log, it’s time for me to make an alphabetical list of Mets players of the 1980s (this is what passes for counting sheep around here), or write a short story in my head about a girl who built herself a robot grandma, or get out of bed and read or moisturize my feet or something.
You’ll probably get used to it after a time; just try to avoid thinking of it as A Big Problem, and do your best to go with the flow. I’m hardly snoring’s biggest fan, but on the plus side, that robot-grandma shit is getting good. If Skyrockets drinks some milk before bed this week, I’m-a finish it.
Tags: grammar roommates
