l'affiche, i merely pointed out that categories for parts-of-speech break down when you admit that one word can fall into different categories, i.e. what good are the categories of parts-of-speech if some words are exclusive to some categories and some words are free to jump in between categories? these categories must then be significantly arbitrary. this is why teachers now ignore sentence diagrams as you're wasting your time focusing on parts-of-speech categories that are incomplete descriptions of possibilities. they are not the litmus test of a perfected system. as in the question: what part of speech is "this"? you answered, "adjective", "adverb", and "pronoun". how could this be if the categories actually existed (of course they don't, it merely makes a rhetorical attempt at difficult description)? weren't they specifically developed to extricate this problem? my point being, the word came before grammar. these parts-of-speech categories attempt to organize but fail (notice the meaning would not have been changed in the previous sentence had i said "the parts-of-speech categories"

another question: if i had said "people who use said as an adjective should shampoo my crotch", would my meaning have been enhanced? obviously not (though it would have passed through your filter). due to the tricky nature of "this" and "that", to suggest that anyone on this board would have linked "said" to an "adjective" is wishful thinking even for a grammar nazi. my point, which, of course, you understood, was that the usage of "said" to simply mean "that", is annoying; as, like your criticisms, it seeks to pretentiously elevate the status of an ordinary sentence through a cliché. save this nerd-cool bs for the garden state and portlandia message boards.

as to the form of "this/that", use some common sense and ask yourself how sure you are that they're adjectives. through your corrections (which have interested and even educated me i admit) i'd agree that i didn't mean "preposition" as much as "article". i realize you have the book on grammar with a list that confirms "this" does not fall into articles, but what about the etymology? can you look at a 4-letter word starting with "th" and not assume it's closely related to "the", the most prominent article? i'm not exactly opening the OED to figure this one out, but i'd say it's no accident that "the" and "this" are tremendously alike in sound and spelling. they likely have similar origins.

have a test: which pair is more closely related: "the ship: this ship" or "blue ship: this ship".

again, the 1st-graders would win out.. only the sophisticated system of grammar analysis which boils down to word-play could tell you the second pair is related in any way.

this is now a grammar/usage thread