This and that - a bit about POTUS and educational stuff.

It sounds as though POTUS is having a good visit. There are reports of him walking in front of the queen, photos of him taking Theresa May by the hand once again and this morning I read that he has advised the Prime Minister that she should sue the EU instead of negotiating! There you go!

Here’s another Trump fact: “The Washington Post calculated that Donald Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year of office, an average of 4.9 a day.”

Maybe he should go back to school! We have all been annoyed at times by the crowds of cars blocking the way at school start and finish times. Now people are growing concerned about the air pollution caused by all these cars and the impact on the health of the schoolchildren. And so local authorities, or at least certain schools, are taking steps to cut down the congestion outside school gates. These include closing roads, setting up “park and stride” schemes, walk-to-school initiatives and “playing dead” protests.

Kathryn Shaw, of a charity called Living Streets, said “When parents drive up to the school gates, it’s not just their children they’re dropping off for the day. The toxic fumes from the cars stay too. A lot of parents don’t want to drive all the way but feel there is no other option.”

Jolly good!

Our primary school children have to learn a whole lot of stuff that I don’t think had been invented when we were are school. Okay, I exaggerate but I am not sure that being able to identify dangling participles and the passive voice is an essential skill at primary level.

Here is a collection of jokes about all these linguistic points:-

 “A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

 A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

 Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

 A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite. 

Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type." 

A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

 At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

 A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

 An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

 The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

 A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

 The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

 A dyslexic walks into a bra.

 A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

 An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.

 A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

 A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget. 

A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.”

 I can’t take credit for these, but the malapropism is my favorite.