Grammar is very basic to human communication, and without it you would not make any sense. For example, the sentence, "I love it when people gossip on cell phones loudly on a crowded bus," has an obvious grammatical error. The word "love," when used in the above case, should always be changed to "hate." This is known in grammar as the "imperative antonym substitution."

Sometimes grammar can be altered given a certain situation. Suppose you get together with your loved one whom you haven't seen in a while. The sentence, "Let's watch TV," commits the standard error of "conditional inordinates," a rule which says that any statement including the phrase "watch TV" must always be supplemented with a prefixal word "not" if meeting a loved one. The rule also allows you to place the word "not" in a following sentence, such as, "Let's watch TV. NOT!" Another correction would be replacing "watch TV" with "go out."

Specific word usage can sometimes come under the rigor of grammar. The word "own" as in "I own Radiohead's music," is usually incorrect. Some people mean that they purchased the CD at a store, in which case they "own" the album, but not the music. The remedy is to actually "own" the music, to feel it in your body and sing it in the shower and gesture it like a conductor.

If that hasn't satiated your grammar hunger for today, let's move on to various forms of logic. Logic itself is a type of grammar, one which allows scientists to discover things. One particular manifestation of logic can be found in analogies, which ask you to make relationship distinctions. For example, "The New York Times is to excellent journalism as the Fox News Network is to Greta Van Susteren's cosmetic surgery." Another one would be, "Books are to words and ideas as television is to images and boobs."

Sometimes logic can be twisted to create fallacies. For example, "The new 'Time Machine' movie kicked ass, and if you don't agree, I'll kick your ass." This is known as an appeal to force (argumentum ad baculum– you wish I made that up), not a proper mode of logical argument. This statement could be remedied with a simple statement, "The new 'Time Machine' sucked."

Another fallacy can be found in this statement, "Since I have a THX 5.1 Dolby surround sound system, pumping 1000 watts into my dorm room and can download all my music from KaZaA, I no longer need to go to music concerts or continue playing my amateur guitar." This is the fallacy of technocracy (argumentum ad geekum–yes, I made that up). This dangerous logical error assumes that the purpose of a concert is to receive mediated forms of entertainment from technology that proposes to be better than reality, "hyperreality" if you will. The fallacy can be corrected by simply going to concerts. Another correction is listening to music on a little one-watt stereo that costs $10. This compromise fulfills your musical needs while you wash the dishes and do your homework, as well as reminds you that a real performance is actually much better and has no substitution.

However, mediation is still present at concerts. Rock concerts are loud only because some sound engineer has turned up the volume on the speakers. MTV has tried to counter this with its "Unplugged" series, showing various artists without the crutch of super-techno production values.

Of course, MTV is still television, and therefore remains mediated. The extreme non-mediated entertainment experience can be easily imitated in your living room, playing unaccompanied guitar with your scratchy vocals. Not only does this eliminate the media from your experience, it is something you create and add to culture. You can be uploading culture instead of merely downloading it from above. Don't you just love how far logic can take you?

Now for the final grammar question: what was the tone of this columnist? A. Sarcastic. B. Sardonic. C. Sardines. D. Preachy, Pedantic, Dogmatic, and Elitist. For our last grammar lesson, this column now concludes with the erroneous "dangling question."