So Exciting and Geeky

 

This book arrived in my mailbox this week. What a thrill! 

I can't remember how I heard of it, but the pleasure of diagramming sentences came back to me in a rush. There's something so special about dismantling a sentence and putting all the pieces into their designated slots. 

I ordered it right away. I have aspirations of choosing a sentence every day to diagram, just for the fun of it.  

I suppose this confirms my grammar geek status. 

As if it was ever in doubt.

Attention to Detail?

Um, not so much.

Avoiding mistakes? Not a chance.

A Find

The world of books is a marvelous place.

These beautiful Chinese books came in as part of a donation to the library's used book store. They are especially intriguing because they are "backwards" - opening left to right, and reading "back" to "front" and in vertical lines of text. I have heard of this but have never actually seen it, so they are a thrill.

I hope we can find them a new owner who will cherish them as they deserve. Do you know anyone? They are $2 each. (I'll mail them for free!)

Southernisms

There are plenty of colorful Southern phrases around (for samples, try this cleverly named and hilarious SouthMouth collection), and I enjoy hearing them, but I particularly enjoy the ones that I would describe as Southern grammar.

Many people, including some very highly educated folks, use these expressions in casual communications, both spoken and written. We are friendly here in the South,* and maybe we take a little more time with our daily routines than other folks; including a few extra words that add meaning is one of the ways we show that.

Here are a few little pearls I've heard recently:

Who all - the plural of who, as in "Who all is going to this?"

All y'all - when y'all isn't expansive enough. In the South, there's you, meaning you alone; then there's y'all, meaning you and a few others, and all y'all, meaning you, your whole family, and all your friends.  As in, "I'd love for all y'all to be there."

Might oughta - favorably considering a possible course of action, as in "With all this rain lately, I might oughta start building an ark."

Fixin' to - preparing to do something, as the first step in actually doing it. As in, "I'm fixin' to start dinner, just as soon as I finish my drink."

*It could be argued that Florida is not the South, because so many of its citizens are from elsewhere. That said, Southern culture is still pretty strong here, especially in the northern half of the state and in rural areas. It could also be argued that because of the phenomenon known as Weird Florida, we exist in a category all our own.

Freudian Typo

This made me laugh when it showed up in my e-mail today:

Subject: Author Sighing Friday

This Friday 6 to 8 PM . . . . will be signing her latest work, a set of captivating stories in Paranormal Romance - a timeless seduction, a unique temptation and a whole world of dark desires.

Wow. No wonder she's sighing!

Red Pencil Queen

I can't help myself. I edit everything. I can't even read the back of a cereal box without noting the grammar and punctuation.

The grad students I coach know that whatever they submit for my review will come back with many comments in the margins. Some comments are admittedly picky, and I've learned to label them as such, and to be tactful. They are really only suggestions, after all.  Even student authors retain the right to accept or reject my ideas about what they should change to make their paper clearer, more specific, or more correct.

It's a pleasant dialog, for the most part. The good students like seeing their papers improve, even if the process is a tad painful. The great students embrace the process wholeheartedly, even the pain. 

A few years back I coached a student who sent me his papers with comments like, "Be brutal. I can take it." It became a running joke between us.

I told that story to one of this year's students and he clearly took it to heart.  The most recent paper he sent for my review was accompanied by an e-mail that said, "Be your usual ruthless self."  

Requests like that make the Red Pencil Queen smile.    

"Deserving of a Wider Audience," Indeed

Sometimes things are just too doggone good not to share.

My most recent example comes from the fabulous blog Letters of Note and has nearly all of the elements that make for good reading: superb writing, the kind of intelligent cleverness that makes me think "Gosh, I wish I'd thought of that," and the come-uppance of someone who very much deserves it (bonus: who also happens to be a lawyer).

Click here for the whole deal: Steve, I've Got News

Well played, Ms. Klemt!

Title Alert

When I was in the Master of Liberal Studies program, it was an ongoing phenomenon that whenever anyone floated a really interesting, slightly (or majorly) offbeat theory about a particular work of art or literature, a murmur would run through the class.

"Topic alert! Topic alert!"

All of us, even those of us who were years from graduation, were obsessed with the idea of writing our thesis. We knew we needed a really thrilling topic that would sustain our interest for an entire semester and allow us to produce an 80-page paper that didn't cause our faculty advisor to doze off in the first 5 pages.

So whenever anyone said anything good, we would seize on it immediately. Some of us would even write the ideas down.

I don't know if anyone ever used those half-baked ideas that came up at random moments, but it made us feel good, just knowing they were out there.

I don't write many papers anymore, but I'm still practicing a similar way of acknowledging a great idea or a really clever turn of phrase. It's become a running joke with my most literary of friends, and we are having a lot of fun with it.

Now we say, "And that's going to be the title of my autobiography."

I think I'm going to start a log of them, just in case I need them someday.

I suppose I could explain how they came about, but that might spoil the fun. After all, a good title should stand on its own, shouldn't it?

So far we have:

And I Didn't Die That Time, Either

Sugared Up for the End of the World

Dunce Caps for Giants

Feel free to suggest your own in the comments! Who knows? I might like your idea even better.

Humor with Substance

"The wisest man I ever knew taught me something I never forgot. And although I never forgot it, I never quite memorized it either. So what I’m left with is the memory of having learned something very wise that I can’t quite remember."

George Carlin said that. It was quoted in a presentation I saw the other night, and not only is it funny, it is a very subtle remark when you stop laughing and think about it.

That's so typical of George Carlin. I think of him as a serious philosopher, masking the big questions behind raucous, sometimes scatological humor.

The most important of these examples, perhaps, was his famous "Seven Words That You Can Never Say on TV" (no, I am not going to link to it). I read that case in First Amendment class and I was really impressed.

Not so much with the cleverness of the court determining that the FCC could make rules limiting the broadcast of "indecency" to the hours between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., because most kids would be asleep then -- wow, those were the days, huh? -- but because I absorbed the impression that Carlin was really riffing on the power of words: the fact that there were 7 out of the 400,000 words in English that were just plain unsayable in polite company or over the airwaves.

To me, this is a whole different issue than what's going on now with Cher, Nicole Richie and Meryl Streep (no, I am not going to link to them, either!), which strikes me as merely a trip to the crossroads of live t.v. and limited vocabulary. Not a whole lotta philosophy happening there.

Carlin was something different, and I'll always feel admiration and affection for a man who loves words and takes them seriously.

And have you heard him on Baseball v. Football? Words again, and funny. Thoughtful, too.

When You Quit in a Huff

I've been thinking philosophically this morning. Perhaps it's a side effect of coaching a bunch of students through Plato, whose main character is Socrates, the inventor of the Question Everything method. Or it could be the new pumpkin spice coffee I'm drinking.

Either way, here's my question. When you go away mad, are you only hurting yourself?

I have a couple of examples I'm trying to string together. One involves the Halloween Horror activities that are in full swing at the local theme parks. Last year, one of the ad campaigns featured a truly creepy, blood-tinged, eyes-with-no pupils image that appeared on billboards all over town, including several I had to pass daily.

Although usually I'm on the side of free speech, this image tested my mettle. I changed my route home so I wouldn't have to drive by it. Because much as I hated it, it was hard not to look. And once I looked that first time, the image was in my brain so even if I didn't actually look, I could still picture it.

There was some pushback here in town by parents who said their children were upset by the images (so it wasn't just me). The last straw was when the same image started showing up as an ad when I checked weather.com. Checking the weather by putting in my zip code triggered the ad, apparently.

I sent off a smoking (for me) e-mail to the Weather Channel, complaining that it was bad enough to see that horrible image around town, but having it come into my own home on my very own computer was simply too much. I told them I would be using another source for the weather until Halloween was over. It definitely made me feel better, both to write and to stay away.

I don't know if quitting did any good, but this year the billboards are decidedly less creepy.

A second example involves "The Writer's Almanac." I used to be a fan, first of the radio broadcast, and then through an e-mail subscription. A few years ago, the poems began to contain glaring typos on a fairly consistent basis. In a way, this was even worse than the billboards.

A poet invests a lot of time and energy into getting just the right words in just the right order. It's part of the magic of poetry that, when done right, the result becomes more than the sum of its parts.

To have the work published with errors is really a shame. It's doubly a shame when the source of the incorrect version is someone who glorifies language and English majors on a regular basis; in this case, that's Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame. I know he probably doesn't type in the poems himself, but maybe he should. It's his name at the top, after all.

I sent a couple of e-mails, politely requesting more careful proofreading. But the errors continued, and I quit in a huff. No more subscription. No more daily poems. A slightly smaller perspective on life.

Now "The Writer's Almanac" has come back onto my radar and I'm going to give it another try. I'm eager for the chance to discover a new poet or poem every day, and to open a window into the world from a different perspective. We'll see if the typo situation has been resolved.

As for conclusions drawn from these experiences? Still working on those. Right now all I can say is, "It depends what you're leaving when you walk away."

(Just Asking)

Wait, I Thought I Was Speaking English

Me, on the phone to the local grocery store: Do you have a program to recover the shopping carts that leave your property?

Clerk: No, we just send someone to pick them up.

Attempted and Abandoned

I hardly ever, almost never fail to finish a book. Even if I don't like it, I usually plunge on through.

Lately, however, the philosophy that "life is too short to read books you don't like" is starting to make sense to me.

Hence, no more of this book. It is just too incoherent for my taste. It is more like a listing of facts and figures, with some personal asides thrown in. I can find no logical progressions, no connections between paragraphs, no transitions between subjects. It's as if the author did a lot of rather random research on, say, adolescence, wrote each fun fact on an index card, typed them into the manuscript without making any effort to put them in some kind of order, and called it a chapter. I'd like to buy a "however," please, Pat.

I'm on page 48, so I've given the author some time to get organized. Meanwhile, I'm constantly distracted by thoughts of "Good grief, did anyone edit this thing???" Surprisingly, the author himself is a multiply-published writer of fiction and non-fiction, an editor, and an English professor. Perhaps he is drinking too much coffee.

I'm quite disappointed, as I was looking forward to reading this one, based on the title and some things I'd read about it. But alas, it's not for me. Page 48 is as far as I go.

Has anyone read this? What's your opinion? I'd like to hear it.

Excerpt:

(2-sentence paragraph about possible evolutionary purpose for adolescent acne)

(5-sentence paragraph about testosterone, no mention of acne)

Hair grows about half an inch a month; it grows fastest in young adults, and fastest of all in girls between ages 16 and 24. Brain scans of people processing a romantic gaze, new mothers listening to infant cries, and subjects under the influence of cocaine bear a striking resemblance to one another. According to Daniel McNeill, "Our pupils reach peak size in adolescence, almost certainly as a lure in love, then slowly contract till age sixty." As [my teenaged daughter] Natalie would say--as she actually did say--"That's awesome."

When she asked me why people write graffiti, I tried to explain how teenage boys need to ruin what's there in order to become who they are. I talked about boys at the swimming pool who simply wouldn't obey the pleasant female lifeguard asking them to leave the pool at closing time; they left only when asked gruffly by the male African-American lifeguard, and then they left immediately.

(8-sentence paragraph about his father's memory of hitting his grandfather in the face with a kickball)

(1-sentence quote from Boyd McCandless about a child "being" the body)

(2-sentence quote from Tolstoy about criminal tendencies of children between 12 and 14 out of curiosity or desire for action)

Promise Kept, Promise Made

Even C.S. will be surprised to hear this confession: I just finished a paper.

I swore to myself I wouldn't whine about this one, and I didn't. Which meant I didn't talk about it at all.

It was a pure slog all the way, and I feel none of the giddy satisfaction that usually comes from putting the last word on paper and adjusting the commas for the final time.

I didn't even enjoy the endnotes, which I normally love. Everyone has a natural talent for something, and mine is academic citation. MLA, Turabian, ALWD, and Bluebook: I'm fluent in all of those languages. People have even called me the Footnote Queen.

You'd think that with the endnotes being in Australian for this paper (using a project-specific editor's manual plus the Australian Guide to Legal Citation), I'd be thrilled about picking up a new language. Alas, this requirement led to a lot of bad jokes about "Aussifying" (ossifying) the paper, but no genuine enthusiasm. The stress of the writing process loomed too large.

What I like best about footnotes is that you can actually get them right. Writing can be "better" and "worse," but there is nothing that truly qualifies as "perfect." In contrast, the objectiveness of footnotes fulfils my desire for correctness, order and completion. Either the comma goes inside the quote marks, or it doesn't. End of story.

Now I've decided that this paper is the last one I'm going to write, if I can possibly arrange that. My writing is always good enough, but it always falls short of what I have in my head, which cranks up the pressure. If there was no deadline, I'd be in search of perfection--planning and thinking and researching--forever and ever.

So from now on, I'm going to do myself a favor and stick with editing others and the pleasures of footnotes. Life is just too darn short for the paper kind of voluntary anguish.

Yeesh, Who Wrote This???

When I was in N.O. for a legal conference, a "New Orleans Restaurant Guide from ZagatSurvey" took up four pages in the official newsletter that was handed out. All I can say is, someone somewhere should be hanging his/her head in shame.

A representative sample:

Antoine's
This Vieux Carre "shrine" to "golden-age" Creole-French cooking "still delivers" the "essence of old New Orleans" in its "rich" signature dishes and desserts like the baked Alaska ("order in advance"); the "beautiful", "antiques-filled rooms" are overseen by a "black-tie-attired" "lifelong staff" that "would bring you the Eiffel Tower if you asked", but to get the full experience "make sure you have the name of a waiter" and "follow his advice"; N.B. closed Tuesday-Wednesday, brunch-only on Sundays.

Bayona
"Culinary genius" Susan Spicer creates "imaginative", "delectable" New American dishes with "local flavor", which are delivered by her "crackerjack" staff at the "shining star" in a Creole cottage "tucked away from the craziness of the French Quarter"; its "picturesque" patio and "multiple, intimate" dining areas ("request the first floor") are equally "attractive", adding up to a "slice of heaven" that's "well worth the price"; P.S. "go for lunch" - it's a "bargain" and the "duck PB&J will make you glad you're an adult now".

Further Proof of a French Deficiency

No college class gave me as much trouble as French. It terrified me. Madame Vallois mimicked my southern accent when correcting my mistakes, bringing laughter from the other students, and I have a recurring dream in which I sit down to take a make-or-break French final without having ever studied or attended a class. Invariably, I wake up in a panic.

It all hit me again as I was reading a first printing of The Optimist's Daughter, Eudora Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. When she mentions a "chaise longue," I had one of those ah-ha moments. Typo! Misplaced "u." Should be "chaise lounge." First printings are a breeding ground for small goofs -- and one foolproof way of telling a first printing from a (corrected) later one. You have the "man-woman" instead of "mad-woman" first printing error on page 25 of Cold Mountain. All first printings of The Corrections include an erratum slip with instructions to reverse-read pages 430 and 431.

I thought for sure I had found the publishing equivalent of a birthmark in Optimist's. But, upon further review, what I really discovered was that "chaise longue" was no typo at all, that it is French for "long chair." That's right. The French originated the word and we English speakers have mangled it over the centuries. Etymologists have found examples of "chaise lounge" starting to appear in our writings as far back as the 1850s. Welty was being true to the original.

Perhaps, had I been a better French student in college, I would have known that.