#SoCS – back to school!

‘Goodness me! What a great prompt, Linda.’

‘Adverb’

‘What’s an adverb? I know I know the answer. It’s just a tad buried in the ol’ brain’ I mutter, fairly perplexed.

‘I’ll google it. That’s not cheating. It’s researching!’ snuffing out an inner argument quickly, before it gets going.

‘Aha! Here we go…’

“a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc. (e.g., gently, quite, then, there ).”

‘Oh heck. There’s more than one type!’ I splutter loudly, much to Mr D’s surprise.

‘What are you wittering on about, Cath? he asks with a level of irritation.

‘Adverbs. Linda’s prompt is adverbs. I was just checking my understanding before I write.’ I reply. ‘There’s five types of the little grammatical blighters!’

‘You sound surprised, Cath.’ says Mr D, grinning broadly.

‘Okay, Mr Smarty Pants, enlighten me.’ This should be funny. Mr D is not known for his grasp of grammar and punctuation. He’s been known to write entire paragraphs using just one solitary comma.

‘Well, as far as I remember, adverbs describe stuff like how, when, where, how much and how often.’ he says, somewhat smugly.

‘Wow! How do you remember all that weird grammar stuff?’ I reply, clearly in awe of his knowledge.

‘I don’t. I just looked it up on Pinterest while you were busy having a small meltdown. There’s loads of cheat sheets on practically every grammatical thingy you can think of.’ he says, waving his iPad victoriously at me.

‘Every day’s a school day.’ I reply in gracious defeat.

‘More so with you around, Cath!’ he says, swiftly ducking out of my reach.

Should I let him have the last word? Yes. It does him good to surprise me occasionally.