I wish I was still taking syntax. I still think about it a lot, still wonder why certain sentences work the way they do. Like, the other day, this jumped out at me:

I never go there.
*I not ever go there.
I do not ever go there.
*I do never go there.

(* means that the sentence doesn't work.)

Strange that do-support would interfere with the 'never'/'not ever' thing, and strange that 'never' and 'not ever' are not quite the same thing. Well, strange to me. The rest of you don't care. Me, I've been resisting the urge to draw sentence trees for all of those examples and figure out what exactly is going on. And I've been resisting emailing my old syntax prof about it, because she will just tell me to get my ass into grad school.

But I keep wondering about it, because syntax is like a HUGE sudoku puzzle that is all around you and sometimes you can figure out one little square, but the thing is massive and three-dimensional and it ain't never gonna be done. And to my brain, that spells FUN! That's strange to Christopher (He Who Never Wants To See Another Sentence Tree In His Life), especially when I get distracted in the middle of a conversation and start looking all thoughtful and he thinks I'm thinking about, you know, what we were talking about, but I'm really thinking about a sentence he just said and wondering how it works.

Not that I do that. Often.