Oh dear. This is much worse than Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Opus, I’d send you chocolates. And a nice big, mushy Valentine’s Day card.
I liked diagramming. It appealed to my sense of order and my enjoyment of patterns. But I wonder if all English sentences can be fitted into one. John McWhorter in Words on the Move (great book, btw) says that the word well, in a sentence like “well, horses run fast” is a polite indication that the information about to be imparted may be new or slightly different from the hearer’s expectation. How do you diagram that?
My maternal grandmother, a talented amateur naturalist whose observations were limited to her garden because of the need to take care of a very sick child, told me she once let a black widow spider bite her on the arm. She said it was no worse than a bee sting(!) (This was in northwest Washington—they may be more venomous in the South.) Personally, I swell badly for yellowjacket stings and even mosquito bites, but I’ve never been bitten by a spider in spite all the cobwebs I’ve knocked down over the years. Some of us react more than others to such assaults. Shaunnmunn, I am sorry to hear about your brown recluse bite. It sounds awful.
Off topic: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=311029316146641&id=105789098196