The Elements of Style gets an illustrated edition, baffling high school students and English majors everywhere who were denied the purty colors when they went to school. Hard-hearted writing instructors, however, have pledged to permanently ban this new volume from their classrooms, as they remain convinced that teaching grammar involves inflexible rigidity and a dry and humorless approach that bores most sensible people to tears. More importantly, the new hues don’t fit in well with the grey and asbestos-ridden squalor of contemporary classrooms.
Category / Language
A Short List of Words That Inexplicably Turn Me On
From today’s edition of TMI Linguistics:
- librarian
- sizzle
- crackle
- Molly (and yet, strangely enough, I’ve never dated a Molly; likely because I’m terrified that the frequent use of this word in my presence (“Can I get you something, Molly?”) might cause me to move too fast)
- Almost any word with two Ls, except “Lolita” and “flagellation.”
- muffle (but not “muffin,” which sounds vaguely pederastic)
- pink slip (Fortunately, I’ve never been handed one. Or else the prospect of termination would become strangely alluring.)
- recherche
- splendiferous
- lap
- stipple
- comfort (in both noun and verb form; it is often confusing when women in particular refer to “comfort food,” as I suspect that these folks may have some interesting fetish that I’d like to find out about)
- wrinkle (only in verb form and in a highly specific context)
[SIDE NOTE: Would it be too much to ask for them to come up with a sexy word for intricate and orante? “Baroque” sounds like someone has just replaced the washcloth with a Brillo Pad without your knowledge and “rococo” reminds me of a certain cereal I didn’t care for as a child (that had an obnoxious bird mascot nonetheless).]
Primates Prove More Successful at Witty Cocktail Banter Than Humans, Who Are Too Busy Discussing Last Week’s Episode of “Lost”
New Scientist: “The data analysis showed strong relationships between vocal repertoire size and group size, as well as between repertoire size and the amount of time spent grooming, says McComb: ‘This suggests that changes in communication can facilitate changes in social behaviour.'”
I Always Fancied the Colon Because It Reminded Me of Something
It’s National Puncutation Day, and there’s plenty of background information on those outgoing punctuation signs you’ve learned love over the years.
In Defense of Conversational Adverbs
Apparently, some folks are taking offense to using “actually” in conversation. Actually, there’s something very nice about using adverbs in regular conversation. Realistically, it beats the tongue-tied swagger or the awkward pauses because, actually, the brain gets an extra second as the beads of sweat form hideous spoors on your forehead while hot lights, cameras and an audience are upon you and you hope to hell that you’re coming across as articulately as the perfectionist producers demand (yes, even on CSPAN!). Actually, it’s not quite like that at all. But having been on camera, it’s close. Inadvertently, in print, adverbs stick out long sore thumbs but, actually, adverbs announce a moment of discovery, a sense that one is discovering a point or a thesis in the process of response and, actually, if someone has a problem with this, well then we suspect that they may not have many ideas to contribute to the world, save complaints over very minute things. Actually.