I'm becoming increasingly irritated by the misuse of certain parts of speech by people who really should know better.

The most frequently observed of these is the failure to form correctly a past participle. Sometimes this occurs when the participle is used verbally and sometimes when it's being used adjectivally.

Like this:

His writing was often cliche. (don't know how to do the accent in html, sorry)

No. Here's how it should be:

His writing was often cliched.

Or again, with another adjectival example:

Her tan skin stood out against the white shirt.

And correctly written:

Her tanned skin stood out against the white shirt.

Here's a verbal example:

That's what I was suppose to do.

And here's the correct form:

That's what I was supposed to do.

See? Not so hard after all.

On a different note, am I the only person in the world who thinks 'apocalyptic' is an adjective and not a noun? Even N. T. Wright seems to refer pretty freely to 'apocalyptic' as a genre. I keep wanting to scream 'apocalyptic literature'. It seems to be the convention, but it must be wrong, mustn't it? The noun is 'apocalyse'. To make another noun from the adjective of the first noun is just plain ridiculous.

...but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

When I looked at the paper I almost decided not to bother until I'd done at least another week's work. Five questions out of a choice of six. One and a half of which I was fairly sure I could answer. Ten minutes in, inspiration struck for a second. I guessed the other half of the half. Still two more to try. Desperately clawing things out of my mind from an essay on mediaeval scholasticism I wrote four years ago, I scraped together another one. The fifth ended up being no more than two paragraphs, both of which were quite repetitive.

We'll see. For now, it's back to the NT books. I've finally started crossing some off the list but it's slow going.