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.

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.

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.    

Blogger Ate My Paragraphs

Augh!

I changed the settings to make Blogger stop adding multiple spaces between paragraphs. Now a return is just a return,* thank goodness, and every post is no longer akin to hand-to-hand combat.

Every piece of progress comes at a price, though.  I should have known it was too easy. 

Now all my old posts, they have no paragraphs anymore.

Gah!


*And a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and a cigar is just a cigar.  (Yes, I have had waaaaay too much coffee already today.)

Too Funny

I just found out about this. Perhaps I am the last to know about it. However, it was a true day-brightener and therefore irresistible for sharing purposes.

Did you hear that some time ago Sarah Schmelling rewrote Hamlet as Facebook updates? NPR featured it recently.

There is a book, too, with lots of other works done in the same style. Incredibly clever and geeky book humor, yes?

Pardon me while I go add Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook* to my Wish List.

* But shouldn't that be "onto"? Just asking.

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".

Today's Laugh

I was so happy to find a gem in verse during some internet ramblings today. C.S. says yes, it's definitely bloggable, so here goes.

Click here, grammar geeks, for a little fun with spellcheck!

File This Under "Unintentionally Funny"

It doesn't take long to get out of the city here and start seeing those homemade roadside signs that indicate watermelon, sweet corn, oranges, or strawberries ahead. Heck, sometimes it's even fresh shrimp (on ice) sold out of the back of someone's pick-up truck.

I always enjoy seeing the signs, with their earnest pitches and folk art. They tend to occur in sequences, too, because one sign just isn't enough to get you to pull over.

Today's sequence went like this:

Beef Jerky

Turkey Jerky

Gator Jerky

Cowboy Jerky

Do you think they use real cowboys?

Did You Hear?

A mishmash of interesting things in the news lately makes me want to share them, in case the things that come to my attention are not necessarily things that other people know about. I'm never sure if I'm out of touch, or just in touch with a different reality.

Did you hear about Rebound Designs, which sells purses made from old books, and wallets made from old paperbacks? I have mixed feelings about this, but the proprietor seems sensitive to the fact that she's destroying books. I just hope she's checking the used book prices before she starts cutting! Otherwise that could be one expensive purse.

This reminds me of the time I helped out at a church basement sale in the tiny town of Plymouth, New Hampshire. We had a box of FREE books left over at the end of the sale, and the woman in charge directed me to throw them into the dumpster. Even though the word "valueless" is pretty thoroughly defined by the phrase "Yankee yard sale freebie leftover," I just couldn't do it. It made me feel like a Nazi.

Did you hear that The Elements of Style is turning 50 this week? I'm one of those people who calls it "Strunk and White" and uses it regularly. It's really all you need to know to write well. Not only is it full of splendid advice, it's delightful to read and its own best example. I'll stack Strunk and White's "Omit needless words" up against Thoreau's "Simplify, simplify, simplify" any day. (Seriously. Did he really need to say it three times?)

Did you hear NPR's unscientific picks of the most "forgotten" Pulitzer prize for fiction winners? There were some spirited defenses of some of their picks, and now my interest is piqued. As a self-identified book snob, I have avoided adopting the Pulitzer fiction list because it is "too popular." But now I'm thinking: it might be really interesting to read the more obscure ones. Maybe I could start with the ones I've never heard of before.

Yeah, like I need any more books on my TBR list!

Happiness is a Paragraph, Right Where You Want It

Okay, now I'm going to embarrass myself by demonstrating how little I know about using a computer. When I interface with this blog, am I using a computer language? Is it called "code"? Is it called "html"? I know so little, I can't even talk about it!

There are a few things I know about computers, though. I remember that my college friend's roommate, a computer science major, would sometimes disappear for days. We'd all be asking, "Hey, where's Alberto?" and Ted would say, "Working on a project." We all knew what that meant. Alberto would reappear 3 or 4 days later, unwashed and unshaven, from the depths of the computer lab, bearing a thick stack of punchcards and a banner on green-and-white striped printout paper, with HAPPY BIRTHDAY TED spelled out in huge letters (with the big H made up of little H's, the big A of little A's, and so on). That's one thing I know about computers: when you get going on something and have glitches to fix, it takes days.

Another thing I know is: when you know what you're doing, it's easy. I once worked in an office where both of the lawyers were also computer types, and they used to change the cards in the computer while I working on a document! Apparently they knew what they were doing, because it never caused a problem. It made me terribly nervous, though. I spent a lot of time saying things like "PLEASE. Don't do brain surgery while the patient is still conscious!"

But I digress. The original point of this post is that I have discovered how to fix my perpetual problem with paragraphs. (Too bad it isn't Alliteration Saturday. I'd be all over it.)

Perhaps you know what I'm talking about, or maybe I'm the last person to have this problem. Sometimes there were too many spaces between paragraphs. Sometimes there were too few. Sometimes when I took the extra spaces out, I couldn't get ANY spaces back in again, no matter how many times I used the return key. Sometimes I would do the right thing by accident. Often I would just give up. I exhausted my trial-and-error repertoire, without making any progress whatsoever.

Now, thanks to Melissa's tip sheet, which I found through Oreneta Aground, I am still clueless about how it all works, but I have a tool that allows me to solve the problem when it occurs. I tried to write the actual fix into this post, but when I typed it in, it didn't show up, it just made a new paragraph begin! How cool is that?

Anyway, life is good when I can insert paragraphs at will. Sometimes I just don't care about the process, I just want to get the result, you know?

Yeah, I'm way behind the times. I'm okay with that. And even though the computer and I don't always understand each other, at least we are communicating.

Hooray for "code" or "html" or whatever it is! Hooray for paragraphs!

Was This Necessary?

(Photo credit: Bill Greene/Globe Staff)

From the Boston Globe: “Actress Renée Zellweger (center) was honored (or roasted) today as woman of the year at the annual Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard University.”

Now, I ask you. Did they need to say “(center)”?

I'd say the old Style Manual let someone down.

Sentence Intermission

I am presently reminded of a sign that hung inside the newsroom of a paper I once worked for. It read: "The period is the noblest of punctuation marks."

I thought of it just now after surfacing for air from reading Frog, as I am on page 708 and have not seen hide nor hair of a period since 696. That's right. The past 12 pages have been one long, labyrinthine sentence containing oodles of dashes, quotation marks, colons, semicolons and even the occasional question mark -- but not one damn, sentence-ending period.

Uncle!