shel

Shel

@shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.

I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.

I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock

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Propaganda Rock! #17 Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here

Originally Aired: April 13th, 1974
Written by: Bob Dorough
Performed by: Bod Dorough

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵
Animation: 📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬

I hate this song I hate this song I hate this song. Bob has decided to do something absolutely ridiculous and awful and sing a song where he speeds up and slows down his own voice to different speeds to make it sound "older" or "younger" and then overlaps all of them to "harmonize" in a "chorus" and it is so incredibly grating and awful to listen to I hate it so fucking much. What's more? It's not even a catchy song, it's annoying Alvin and the Chipmunks shit. Also, it's boring to look at, newspaper strip on a white background nonsense, and most of the actual adverbs are on screen and not in the song, and there's so so so much spoken exposition over the song which also gives inaccurate information!

Adverbs are a very controversial catch-all category in Linguistics. A lot of things get labeled adverbs which are very different, and it's very hard to pin down how an "adverbial phrase" works in the study of linguistic syntax. Furthermore, when we expand outside of English, we find it very difficult to pin-down adverbs in any consistent cross-linguistic manner. That said, while some scholars do consider the word "there" to be an adverb, since "He placed it over there" is describing the... act... of placing? The fact is that in terms of grammatical syntax "there" is a deixic noun. It is a noun which stands-in for another noun which is already known by context.

Illustration of Deixis, explaining words like here, there, now, then, etc.

"Here" and "there" are locations you know by context. They always function, syntactically, the same as the noun they are replacing. In the same way that pronouns fit into the sentence the same places you'd place someone's name, "here" will always go in the same part of the sentence as "my apartment" or "Pennsylvania." "There" always goes in the same part of the sentence as "on the table" or "in China." A neat thing about deixis is that in addition to standing in for the core noun, it also can stand in for the preposition if that's known through context as well. I don't have to say "on top of there" if you can tell by where I'm pointing that it's "on top." That said, I may do so if I want to be specific. Grammatically, I cannot place deixic nouns in the same places I'd place adverbs. In English, adverbs have very interesting syntactic rules. "I gently bit my girlfriend" and "I bit my girlfriend gently" are both grammatical; but "I bit gently my girlfriend" is not grammatical. And yet, "I ran quickly to the store" is grammatical too. So you can place an adverb between a dative verb and the dative object of a verb; but you cannot place it between an accusative verb and the accusative object of a verb.

Here and there follow completely different rules. They follow the same rules as the noun. I cannot say "I there ran," I can only say "I ran there." I cannot say "I her bit." I can only say "I bit her." But I can say "I quickly ran" or "I ran quickly." It's a deixic noun, basically a pronoun for places. Of course, not all deixic words are nouns. "Yesterday" is, in fact, an adverb.... sometimes... linguists fucking hate adverbs, and I hate this song.

Only one yikes point because of Capitalism and my fuuucckiinnnggg eaarrrsss but like, hey, it's not even an all-white cast this time.

June's Review

Music 🎵🎵

I can't give this a 3/5 because if I do someone might notice I ranked this higher then Conjunction Junction and try to kill me in my own home. But I like this song :3 I always thought it was fun. The yelling guy at the end was funny to me. Yeah it's real fuckin' annoying, but like... half the songs on this show are annoying. I do think some of the voices are Bad though.

Animation 📺📺📺

I actually really like a ton of details about this. I love the black and white store with the colored details, I love the way it cuts in an out of being commercials, I love that all the words are like Grocery Store Products. Also, as a kid for some reason the fact that both of the adults do relatively normal commercials and then the kid goes "HI! SUPPOSE YOU'RE GOIN' NUT GATHERIN'!" was the funniest shit I could imagine. Why would you be nut gathering? Why is this the first thing you went to? I love it. It is pretty basic though, and I hated the big machine that adds endings to other words, why do they have legs.

Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓

Wow! That's a lot of grammar stuff Shel wrote that's really smart! You should read it! This song mostly taught me that "indubitably" was a word which I then had to ask what it meant and was glad I knew. Three points!

Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯🎯/5

Yikes 0/5

NUT GATHERIN' 🌰/🌰

Up Next: Season 2 is over so it's time for our preliminary Grammar Rock! Round-Up! Lots of numbers. Then, uh oh, it's finally time for America Rock!

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in reply to @PropagandaRock's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

honestly this might be my favorite song in Grammar Rock lol, oh yeah that recording technique is terrible, don't listen too closely, but I love the actual song.

also I have now mentally moved those words to pronouns so thanks, they never really made sense as adverbs in the first place. I've realized as I've gotten older that all the systems they tried to teach me as a kid in English class that I struggled with were just always bullshit. Phonics aren't fucking real. There really isn't a clean definition of adverb, it's a catchall. It's like trying to find indigo in the rainbow, someone decided that the conceptual elegance of there only being a few categories was more important than the categories actually fucking meaning anything. and it infuriates me that the supposition was that I was being unreasonable when I didn't understand them.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

I think there's room for something like phonics, but I stand by that long and short vowels are not only incorrect, vowel length is a real concept that English doesn't actually have, but are also reductive, each vowel can make at least three sounds, not to mention for some fucking reason phonics doesn't even mention the schwa, and beyond that pretending English only has like 10 vowel sounds is also damaging. I could sight read in Kindergarten, and had way better pronunciation than my entire class for pretty much all of elementary school, and I failed phonics hard, because it actively conflicted with how I conceptualized writing. Trying to understand it made me worse at speaking, and I distinctly remember giving up and filling in blanks at random in any phonics-based tests until they'd finally stop giving them to me.

edit: I started trying to look up phonics just to confirm that it was really this bad and yeah I'm all fired up again, I just realized I lied to myself until just now what the definition of short and long vowels were because the definition accepted in phonics actively hurts my brain lol, it's a fake concept anyway who cares

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caro
@caro

oh yeah fuck the way phonics is taught sometimes. I think it can be done right as long as it's 1) good to begin with and 2) within a system that is flexible enough that if individual students dont mesh well with the approach they can get personalized guidance (or in ur case just allowed to test out) but unfortunately neither of those are givens

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

I'd probably be a terrible teacher simply because I think this, but honestly? Teach the kids about the Great Vowel Shift, and then talk about pre-shift and post-shift vowels. Speak like Chaucer for a bit, speak like Shakespeare for a bit, speak with a Spanish accent for a bit, do the funny voices and show the kids all the crazy diversity that put English where it ended up today. English can only be taught in one of two ways: repeated exposure to all of the inconsistencies until their little neural networks fit to them, which does work, even phonics just tries to approximate the beginning of this process when it works, or showing them why all this happened.

I understood this history as a kid! I could tell that the vowels came in sets, it's still how I think of them, funny accents and all, I just didn't have any names for it all, but I was like okay this word is pronounced with the Latin vowels, this is pronounced with the alphabet ones, you just kinda skip this one, etc. There's such a rich tapestry you can start kids off early on!

Heck, teach them meter! Kids got the beat! They don't need to actually understand everything, whatever sticks, sticks, whatever doesn't, doesn't, but at least they'll catch glimpses of things that people spend their whole lives on, and I believe giving them that texture will help their grip a lot more than over-sterilized phonics ever would.

But you know, everyone thinks they can revolutionize teaching rofl, I'll do everyone a favor and keep it to dumb comment threads.

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virtualmarmalade
@virtualmarmalade

i always thought the adjectives had "legs" because someone was carrying like posterboard or something with the word written on and just hiding behind it to the camera except their legs... but looking again only "slow" has a hand peeking around the top so now i'm not sure and it bothers me

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caro
@caro

  1. there is so much in this song. there is so much. just give prepositions their own song

  2. i like the nut gatherin part because it implies the dad let his kid participate in their own way rather than making them read off a script

  3. does nut gatherin points count towards final score

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sleepygf
@sleepygf

This song devotes so much time to the Lolly family, when the family and their store aren't an especially interesting, fun, or relevant conceit, or even one that lends itself to memorable rhymes. And the song goes so dreadfully long before telling you anything substantial - a full minute in which they define what an adverb is, and that's all the info you get.

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the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

While I remembered the song reasonably well, for some reason I thought it went harder than it does. I did not remember them beclaring "there" an adverb because similar to what Shel has written I presumed that "there" would be best classified as a pronoun used as the object of a verb. I guess it's true, grammar is fake and made up

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