scottferguson.com

• You snicker when someone’s from Lima, because you think of the state hospital.
• You think all pro football teams are supposed to wear orange.
• Schools close for the state basketball tournament (deer season, too).
• You’re proud of your state fair, but would rather go to Cedar Point.
• You know all the four seasons: winter, still winter, almost winter, and construction.
• You live less than 30 minutes from some college or university.
• You know what a buckeye really is and have a recipe for candy ones.
• You’ve heard of the Great Nickel Beer Night Riot.
• “Toward the lake” means north and “toward the river” means south.
• You know if other Ohioans are from southern or northern Ohio as soon as they open their mouths.
• You root for a college team even though you’ve never taken a class there.
• You can spell words like Cuyahoga, Olentangy, Bellefontaine, Tuscarawas, Wapakoneta and you know which letter is doubled in Cincinnati.
• You carry jumper cables in your car.
• You always visit two amusement parks in one summer.
• You measure distance in minutes.
• You know that Serpent Mounds were not made by snakes.
• You know what game they’re playing when the Mud Hens take on the Clippers.
• “Vacation” means spending a day at Cedar Point or King’s Island.
• “Down south” to you means Kentucky.
• Your school classes were canceled because of cold.
• Your school classes were canceled because of heat.
• You’ve ridden the school bus for an hour each way.
• You’ve had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” in the same day.
• You design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.
• You know what should be knee-high by the fourth of July.
• You end your sentences with an unnecessary preposition: “Where’s my coat at?”
• You know what “pop” is.
• Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
• You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.
• The local paper covers national and international headlines on one page, but requires 6 pages for sports.
• You think sexy lingerie is tube socks and a flannel nightie.
• You think deer season is a national holiday.
• You know which leaves make good toilet paper.
• You actually get these jokes and tell them to your Ohio friends.

Read this somewhere… thought it was great.  Dedicated to Mr.D.P.

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?
24. Don’t abbrev.
25. Check to see if you any words out.
26. Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.
27. About sentence fragments.
28. When dangling, don’t use participles.
29. Don’t use no double negatives.
30. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
31. Just between you and I, case is important.
32. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
33. Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary.
34. Its important to use apostrophe’s right.
35. It’s better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.
36. Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.
37. Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital and end with a period
38. Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.
39. In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.
40. Watch out for irregular verbs which have creeped into our language.
41. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
42. Avoid unnecessary redundancy.
43. A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.
44. Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.

USA skier Lindsey Vonn was stripped of her gold medal by the Olympic Committee today. The Olympic Committee has announced that it has taken the gold medal from Lindsay Vonn and given it to Barack Obama. Apparently he is going downhill much faster.