The man in the ski mask ran down the stairs.

4:06 PM 2/7/11

I'm working on a Schaum's Outline of English Grammar. I'm enjoying it - I usually do enjoy studying grammar. There's almost always something funny about it.

I started wondering about implied values, assumptions, beliefs, etc. of the book's author and readers. The sentences that I'm studying are not just meaningless, neutral sentences. They are all about something specific. So why would the author choose to write particular sentences and not others? There are a variety of topics in the sentences. Someone from another culture or another type of environment would have written different sentences to study.

There seems to be a lot of robbery going on, more than I usually encounter in my daily life. Somebody's always stealing something from somebody, committing a crime and calling their lawyer, etc. Whoever wrote this book must have lived in a big city. They didn't write a lot of sentences about horses eating grass, trees growing, streams flowing, flowers blooming, deer running through the fields, or other rural topics.

I can't remember the exact words, but it was Tommy? from Shawshank Redemption, the guy who said 'Cats crawling up trees... TWO POINTS!' and threw the paper in the garbage after Andy tested him on his English exam. I haven't seen any cats crawling up trees yet though.

The one that made me start to notice the 'robbery' theme was 'The man in the ski mask ran down the stairs.'

Assumptions and implications: Why was he running? Because he did something bad. He robbed somebody. People wearing masks are not to be trusted (a quote from 'The Princess Bride'). He was running away to escape.

It didn't occur to me at first that maybe he was just very excited about going skiing. Maybe the stairwell of his building was very cold, so he put on his ski mask before going outside. Maybe they lost the electricity and there wasn't any heat.

This got me laughing. I told you that when I study grammar, something will almost always strike me as funny or hilarious.