Future Blockbusters: Some Suggestions for Producers

Anacoluthon!: By the makers of Anaconda.   A department bands together after several professors notice sentences warping themselves into all sorts of strange forms.  Further investigation reveals the psychic influence of a gigantic, bizarre snake, which lies coiled in the building's decrepit furnace. 

Apostrophe Now: In a dark future, the apostrophe has vanished from possessives, and taken refuge on mysterious grocery store signs ("six banana's for one dollar").  The government sends an intrepid but naive young English professor into the dusty stacks of an ancient research library, hoping that she will retrieve the apostrophe and restore possessives to the world. 

Back to the Future Tense: With the aid of a time machine, one doughty instructor seeks to restore hope to a world unable to free itself from the past (tense). 

The English Predicate: A young graduate student finds herself nurturing a predicate...without a subject.  As she seeks to find out just whom this sentence fragment is about, she encounters romance, treachery, and an incredibly handsome subjunctive mood. 

The Santa Clause IV: Independence Day: Followup to the popular (?) "Santa Clause" series, starring Tim Allen.  In this Christmas release, Mr. and Mrs. Claus find themselves under assault by mysterious dependent markers, which leave them unable to deliver presents on their own.  However, a potential crisis is averted by the elves, who spend the night before Christmas cobbling together complete sentences out of random quotations from Proust.   

The Missing Linking Verb: A newly-discovered verb turns out to contain dangerous information about the origins of "to be," which threatens to spark a war amongst grammarians, lexicographers, and linguists.  A government cover-up ensues. 

The Mummy's Cursive: Grumpy students, attempting to decipher their instructor's handwriting, conclude that "these comments look like they were written by a mummy."  Little do they know what evil lurks in the dank, teeming depths of the department's seminar room...

The Phantom of the Object: A young instructor, unwilling to admit his inability to remember basic grammatical terms from one day to the next, finds himself taken under the wing of a masked, shadowy figure who resides in the adminstration building's basement.  Soon, for the first time, he finds himself able to tell the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.  But at what price?

Terms of Enjambment: A poet and her daughter suffer joys and hardships as they debate accentual-syllabic meter, oral poetry, and end-stopping.

 

 

 

Comments

[Sir Orang-Outang]

Even misplaced commas can have a disastrous effect.
I am an executor of a will and yesterday the executors were told they must "go to the local branch [of a bank] together, with a copy of the will." As the executors live several hundred miles apart it was fortunate we asked how we were supposed to do this before we tried and were told that we should actually "go to the local branch, together with a copy of the will..."

[Cheeseandresponsibility.blogspot.com]

This is awesome. I cracked up at The English Predicate and had to take a moment.

[Kevin]

Don't forget the Planet of the Homonyms.... Kevin

[Mom]

Don't forget War of the Words.

[Ray Girvan]

Synonym City? The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Run-On?