Liquid Ridiculous

The Joy of Writing

2011-04-21T00:17:00.000-04:00

Thanks to facebook, I discovered this most unlikely source of hilarious genius: a press release. As the (predictably) NPR story discusses, it's totally fake, and its author knew nothing about the subject matter; he simply made the whole thing up. By the way, the author of this press release about a new small-time indie band is Chuck Klosterman, who is famous enough that I know the name but not famous enough that I could have told you anything he's done or even his profession before reading the article. Actually I would have guessed he was an old-time boxer, or perhaps a two-way football player. In any event, the article is interesting as far as it goes, but the headliner is the press release itself, which is reprinted in its entirety in the article, and can be found after the jump. Evidently, amazingly, somebody somewhere thought it was for real.

THE CRITICS UNILATERALLY CONCUR: DELICATE STEVE IS A BAND WHO CREATES MUSIC

Newton, N.J. – Every 30 or 40 or 500 years, the DNA of culture itself emerges from the translucent blackness of the not-so-shallow underground. You hear a new band, and you think, "This is really something. This is like My Bloody Valentine, minus the guitars." But then you think, "No, that's not true. That's not what this is like at all. Plus, there are lots of guitars here. I'm a goddamn idiot." You want to walk away, but now it's too late; now, you start to wonder what makes this music so deeply arresting. You wonder why you are dancing against your will, and you wonder why every other sound you've ever heard suddenly sounds like the insignificant prologue to a moment you're experiencing in the present tense. You find yourself unable to perform the simplest of activities — a cigarette becomes impossible to light, a mewing kitten cannot be stroked, a liverish lover cannot be ignored. By the album's third track, there is nothing left in your life; everything is gone, crushed into a beatific sonic wasteland you never want to escape. This, more than anything else imaginable, is the manifestation of artistic truth ... a truer kind of truth ... the only kind of truth that cannot lie, even with the cold steel of a .357 revolver jammed inside its wet mouth, truculently demanding a random falsehood.

Welcome to the work-a-day world of Delicate Steve.

Like a hydro-electric Mothra rising from the ashes of an African village burned to the ground by post-rock minotaurs, the music of Delicate Steve will literally make you the happiest person who has never lived. Discovered firsthand by Luaka Bop A & R man Wills Glasspiegel in the parking lot of a Newton, N.J., strip mall, Delicate Steve was signed to the label before anyone at Luaka Bop heard even a moment of their music – all he needed to experience was a random conversation about what they hoped to achieve as a musical five-piece.

"They were just sitting around in lawn chairs, dressed like 19th century criminals, casually saying the most remarkable things," recalls Glasspiegel. "It was wild. It was obtuse. One fellow would say, `Oh, I like Led Zeppelin III, but it skews a little dumptruck.' Then another would say, `The problem with those early Prince albums is that he spent too much time shopping.' I really had no idea what they were talking about, but it all somehow made sense. `We'll be a different kind of group," they said. `We will introduce people to themselves. We'll inoculate them from discourse.' I was immediately intrigued. I asked them if they wanted to have dinner, so we walked to a Chinese restaurant that was right up the road. I suggested we all get different dishes and share everything family style. They agreed. But then they ordered five identical entrees! So we sat there and ate a mountain of General Tso's chicken for three straight hours, talking about music and literature and box kites and dystopias. Twenty-four later, they were signed to Luaka and inside a studio."

Those studio sessions led to Wondervisions, the indescribable 12-track instrumental debut that reconstructs influences as diverse as Yes, Vampire Weekend, The Fall, Ravi Shankur, 10 cc, The Orbital, Jann Hammer, the first half of OK Computer, the second act of The Wizard of Oz, and the final pages of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Originally conceived as a radio-friendly concept album about the early life of D.B. Cooper, de facto Delicate Steve leader Steve Marion decided to tear away the lyrics and move everything in a more experimental direction. "We don't need the middlebrow to dig our music," says the soft-spoken Marion. "We write for the fringes – the very, very rich and the very, very poor. That's the audience we relate to, and that's who these songs are about."

THE BAND AT A GLANCE:

Steve Marion, 23 (guitar): A polymath who plays over 40 instruments, Marion recorded his first "bedroom EP" on a four-track as a 12-year-old ("It was sort of a second-rate Slanted and Enchanted," he scoffs today, "and more than a little derivative."). Already a Jersey legendary for his worth-ethic and perfectionism (he once studied a single Jandek guitar riff for an entire summer), Marion's the piston behind Delicate Steve, and — somewhat paradoxically – the group's harshest critic. "I named the band Delicate Steve as a reminder that we've accomplished nothing," he says flatly. "We are as delicate as the wings of a butterfly with AIDS. Anything could crush us. And until we all decide that art is the only thing that makes life livable, we'll just be another instrumental five-piece from New Jersey. Emotionally and intellectually, I'm not sure if the rest of the band is there yet. But I am."

Steve's goal is to create music that lasts "substantially longer than forever."

Mickey Sanchez, 22 (keyboard): A freewheeling hoaxster (and Marion's best friend from Hebrew school), Sanchez provides Delicate Steve with off-kilter music flourishes and a necessary dose of common sense. "Steve can be difficult to work with," says Sanchez, "but I know how to handle that hoss. Sometimes he just needs to look into the mouth of the lion – and I'm the lion." An avid horseback rider and pastry chef, Sanchez also intends to pursue a second-career as a city planner.

Mickey's goal is to make people hate Bruce Springsteen.

Rob Scheuerman, 21 (guitar): Previously featured on axe in the teen-pop power-trio Yesterday's Airport of Tomorrow, Scheuerman is probably better known as the alleged one-time paramour of Gossip Girl star Blake Lively (a rumor he sheepishly denies: "I was too tired to make it. She was too tired to fight about it."). What he adds to the band musically is akin to what he adds personally: cobalt charisma and a hunger for flesh. "Do you remember that old song `I Know What Boys Like' by the Waitresses," he asks. "Well, let's just say the scythe slices both ways."

Rob's goal is to seduce every female journalist he encounters.

Adam Pumilla, 23 (bass): No member of Delicate Steve has taken a more circuitous path than Pumilla. A three-sport athlete who rushed for 1400 yards as a veer option quarterback in high school, Pumilla received scholarship offers from several Big East football powers before opting for a career as a bassist – despite the fact that he'd never played the instrument in his life. "There was always something about the bass," he says today. "Four strings, sublime heaviness, living inside the pocket, locking into the drums. It spoke to me in its own bass language, long before I ever possessed the object itself. I knew that bass guitar was something I could excel at. I am a bassist. I have a bassist's blood." After spending five exploratory years in rural Scotland ("I needed space to invent my bass style"), Pumilla returned to the U.S. and met Marion at Ed Westwick's Halloween party. "I knew he was the man for this band from the moment I met him," recalls Marion. "When he shook my hand to introduce himself, he didn't even say his name. He just said, `Bass.' Just that one word. Nothing else. He was a serious person."

Adam has no defined goal.

Mike Duncan, 21 (percussion): Don't let his boyish looks fool you – Duncan is no choirboy. Raised on a steady diet of Stewart Coupland, Neil Peart and economic desperation, Duncan views drumming as a way to turn his self-described "sociopathic inclinations" into something the world can appreciate. "I love to brawl," he says. "I'll fight anyone, for any reason. I'll fight a dog for no reason. I've seen the inside of juvenile hall. I've tasted blood in my mouth. I've stepped on throats and I've thrown bottles at strangers. But that was all in the past. It's still part of me, but – now – I use that intensity for good. I want to attack people with music the same way I used to attack them with my fists."

Mike's goal is the political liberation of Quebec.

A WARNING:

This is a press release, and press releases are supposed to be wholly positive. That's the shared expectation, both from the writer and the reader. Typically, press releases hide a band's true reality. But not this one. We need to be straight with you, potential rock writer: It's hard to predict what will happen to Delicate Steve. Emotions run high in this band, and most of these songs are both too musical and too insane for the typically dim-witted American consumer. In all likelihood, even you won't understand it, because you're probably a fraud. This music doesn't directly threaten the status quo, but it certainly makes the status quo nervous. It's not on par with hearing the Velvet Underground in the summer of 1965, but it's probably like hearing the Velvet Underground in the winter of 1966. Can Delicate Steve become the wordless New Jersey U2? Sure, maybe. But maybe not. There might be too much at stake (and too many people in the way). Still, one listen to Wondervisions will irrefutably prove the only thing you really need to know: Delicate Steve makes music. And in today's awful world, that's almost all that matters. Right?

Everyday Metaphors

2011-04-15T12:40:00.000-04:00

Good read in the Times, by David Brooks (pasted below in full):

April 11, 2011

Poetry for Everyday Life

By DAVID BROOKS

Here’s a clunky but unremarkable sentence that appeared in the British press before the last national election: “Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction, but confused economic data and the high risk of hung Parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.”

The sentence is only worth quoting because in 28 words it contains four metaphors. Economies don’t really gain traction, like a tractor. Momentum doesn’t literally get snuffed out, like a cigarette. We just use those metaphors, without even thinking about it, as a way to capture what is going on.

In his fine new book, “I Is an Other,” James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked.

When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.

When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.

The psychologist Michael Morris points out that when the stock market is going up, we tend to use agent metaphors, implying the market is a living thing with clear intentions. We say the market climbs or soars or fights its way upward. When the market goes down, on the other hand, we use object metaphors, implying it is inanimate. The market falls, plummets or slides.

Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events, we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.

Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.

Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist. That’s a “desktop” on your computer screen.

Metaphors are things we pass down from generation to generation, which transmit a culture’s distinct way of seeing and being in the world. In his superb book “Judaism: A Way of Being,” David Gelernter notes that Jewish thought uses the image of a veil to describe how Jews perceive God — as a presence to be sensed but not seen, which is intimate and yet apart.

Judaism also emphasizes the metaphor of separateness as a path to sanctification. The Israelites had to separate themselves from Egypt. The Sabbath is separate from the week. Kosher food is separate from the nonkosher. The metaphor describes a life in which one moves from nature and conventional society to the sacred realm.

To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.

Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”

2010: The Year in Grammar

2011-01-06T13:38:00.000-05:00

Huffington Post just published this article, "Grammar Pet Peeves: The Stories of 2010." Here are their picks for top ten grammar stories of the year:

• How To Use An Apostrophe
(original story - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe)

• Huffington Post Readers Pick The Worst Grammar Pet Peeves

• Worst Grammar Mistakes Ever

• New Dictionary Words

• Chicago Manual Changes Rules

• 'Unnecessary' Quotation Marks 'Infect' The Nation: Grammar Pet Peeves

• National Punctuation Day

• 'Toponymity': The 13 Strangest Birthplaces Of Common Words

• Lexical Ambiguity

• Grammar Pet Peeves

• Top Words of 2010

• Google Ngrams: Charting The History Of English

What are you favorite Grammar Stories of the year?

Grammar Round-up

2010-06-15T18:43:00.002-04:00

I just came across this apparently weekly NY Times column explaining the editors' position on various grammatical issues and rounding up usage errors of the past week. Definitely worth a read!

Here is the beginning:

The ‘Tweet’ Debate

By PHILIP B. CORBETT

After I distributed the in-house version of After Deadline to my colleagues last week, word leaked out that I had supposedly “banned” use of the word “tweet” to refer to messages posted on Twitter.

I had suggested that outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” should still be treated as colloquial rather than as standard English. It can be used for special effect, or in places where a colloquial tone is appropriate, but should not be used routinely in straight news articles. I had made this point before; my memo was simply a reminder.

Reaction outside The Times was swift, widespread and often negative. The scorn we encounter from traditionalists for allowing “data” as either singular or plural — previously my benchmark for an incendiary stylebook issue — pales in comparison.

...
[the rest of the article]

Wordplay Winners

2010-06-03T22:42:00.000-04:00

We blogged a few months ago about Princeton Prof. Joshua Katz's freshman seminar on wordplay. An article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine at that time announced a constrained writing contest. Now the results are in, and we're impressed! The winning entry, pictured above, took it's constraint cue from the letters in a regulation Scrabble bag. Impressive effort -- congrats to Justin Werfel, who took top honors.

The best part of wordplay is that it encourages other wordplay. One of the honorable mentions, Arlen Kassof Hastings, submitted this in response to Werfel's winning entry:

If any of you, dear readers, have what it takes to compose a piece of constrained writing using only the letters (and blanks!) in a regulation Scrabble set, submit it to us and we will surely post the results!

Communicating ... with aliens!

2010-04-13T14:09:00.001-04:00

The link in the title is not about language in the traditional Liquid Ridiculous sense, but rather about communication. Would you know how to greet an alien who didn't speak English, who maybe didn't speak at all? If everything from your backgrounds were as different as they are likely to be, on what basis would or could you interact?

Anyone who has read Contact by Carl Sagan or seen the movie based thereon has been exposed to the the concept that we will be largely unable to communicate with extraterrestrials if we encounter them. Ratcheting up the nerd factor, an excellent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled Darmok addresses similar ideas. Here's a commonsense guide to keep in your pocket in case you should ever find yourself face-to-face (if it has a face) with E.T. (should you be lucky enough to meet a bipedal and carbon-based -- let alone Reese's Pieces-eating -- alien).

Words as Weapons

2010-04-05T11:52:00.013-04:00

I saw this in yesterday's New York Times. It raises important questions about the power of words to define our reality and, therefore, to determine our political and social responses to that reality.

One meta-political question it raises implicitly: Does the word "terrorism" have a cogent definition, or does it mean different things to different people (possibly dependent on different agendas)?

Here are a few excerpts; click above for the full article.

• WASHINGTON — Words can be weapons, too. So after nearly every new report of political violence, whether merely plotted or actually carried out, there is a vocabulary debate: Should it be labeled “terrorism”?
...
But more is at stake here than semantics or petty point-scoring in the blogosphere. Political violence has two elements: the act, and the meaning attached to it. Long after the smoke of an explosion has cleared, the battle over language goes on, as contending sides seek to aggrandize the act or dismiss it, portray it as noble or denounce it as vile.
...

From the debate over word choice came the adage that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” a cliché already by the 1980s.

“That’s a catchy phrase, but also misleading,” President Ronald Reagan said in a 1986 radio address. “Freedom fighters do not need to terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people.”
...
Thinking of ends and not means, Mr. Reagan praised the Nicaraguan contra rebels, who had a bloody record fighting the Communist Sandinistas, as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” In the cold war contest with the Soviet Union, he armed and embraced the Afghan “freedom fighters” and their Arab allies, some of whom evolved into the terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That long-ago radio address sounds naïve in retrospect in another respect, too. “History is likely to record that 1986 was the year when the world, at long last, came to grips with the plague of terrorism,” President Reagan declared. President Obama is unlikely to venture a similar prediction anytime soon.

Grammar Lovers, Unite!

2010-03-10T22:28:00.001-05:00

It has come to our attention that we missed a major grammar milestone last week. Apparently, March 4 was National Grammar Day. They even recorded a YouTube music video of their original song, "March Forth" (Get it? Of course you do, if you're reading Liquid Ridiculous). That website has a number of other delectable offerings, such as grammar-related poetry.

In addition, there are a few things every Liquid Ridiculous reader should know about. You'll probably want to become acquainted with the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG), at whose website you can download your very own official membership card. I also recommend joining their facebook group (search SPOGG) and perusing the photos of bad grammar posted by members.

I heartily endorse the Society's online journal; I'm surprised they don't call it the SPOGG Blog. Like us, they post grammatical musings, only more regularly. Also, there's a fantastic list of grammar-related links in honor of National Grammar Day.

Finally, you might just want to get yourself a copy of grammar maven Martha Brockenbrough's new book, Things That Make Us [Sic]. Pointing out bad grammar in the world is fun! And sometimes it makes us feel better about ourselves -- isn't that right, dear readers?

We hope you had a syntactically satisfying National Grammar Day, and we wish you many more. And we pledge not to forget it next year.

Discovering Ambrose Bierce

2010-03-10T10:30:00.003-05:00

Your Liquid Ridiculous team recently came across a pair of radio broadcasts on the topic of Ambrose Bierce, a famous turn-of-the-previous-century linguist, pedant, and apparently general curmudgeon. He's probably most famous for The Devil's Dictionary, a clever and sarcastic dictionary with, as an example, a definition of "love" that begins: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage." In a special mini-podcast edition of the independent radio show "A Way With Words" -- which incidentally we highly recommend if your public radio station subscribes to it or you're of a podcasting bent -- one of the hosts interviewed an author who's written a new book about Bierce's writings, life, and character. We hope to review it for the blog one day. (We hope generally to begin writing germane book reviews, but that would require having time to read books.) NPR also recently ran a quaint little story about quirky linguistic pet peeves, which naturally included some great material from Bierce.

Art as Palindrome

2010-02-22T13:48:00.002-05:00

There is beauty in symmetry; so saith both experience and science, which attempts to explain why we find symmetrical faces more attractive.

Some artists have taken that a step further, creating not just symmetrical portraits or depictions of symmetric things -- Salvador Dali's Santiago El Grande being a great example -- but completely symmetrical paintings, such as Barnett Newman's Onement I. Some have taken forays into self-conscious symmetry. Aesthetics are often better served with almost perfect symmetry, which M.C. Escher used to great effect, but it's an interesting exercise in using science to further art. (How often do you hear that happening?)

The recent post about Palindrome as Art got me thinking about symmetry in language, specifically on the subject of ambigrams. Ambigrams are an interesting variation on palindromes: words or phrases written in such a way that they read the same when turned upside down. For example,

MOW

is an ambigram (using some fonts). A more interesting ambigram, and the earliest reference I could find to an ambigram, is the word "chump" written in cursive:

This is a more interesting variation, because as you can see, there is not a one-to-one correlation of one letter turning into another when turned upside-down. The c and h together become the p and the end of the m, and in fact, except for the c, each letter becomes part of two letters.

The modern ambigram uses distortion to create an ambigram. In this way, an 'a' can become an 'e' or even an 'o'. Another "trick" is to have seemingly superfluous marks that are ignored by the eye when read one way, but are noticed as being part of the letters when read the other way. Look at happy holiday for extraneous marks and happy birthday for distortion (although they both use both techniques).

In fact, using distortion one can make an ambigram out of virtually any combination of letters, although it's often so distorted that you can't decipher the ambigram without knowing what it's supposed to say. However, good ambigrams give the reader other cues, visual or otherwise, to assist in deciphering.

But I find the simplest and most pure (i.e., least unnecessary extra letter pieces) ambigrams the most aesthetically pleasing. Pure symmetry alone is not the answer. John Langdon's book on ambigrams is an excellent collection of ambigrams made by the author, and I suggest at the least you take a look at the cover. "Wordplay" as an ambigram delights me on multiple levels.

To return to the topic back to symmetry in art, why is it that certain asymmetry is also desired? Dali's paintings, Escher's drawings, even John Langdon's "Joy to You" are not perfectly symmetrical. Slight variation keeps the pictures from being too mechanical, too artificial. So despite scientific proof of our preference for symmetry, true artists know how to use asymmetry as well to create an aesthetically pleasing picture.

Sui Generis Expressions

2010-02-18T10:38:00.000-05:00

Groundhog Day: Quick, what's the first idea that comes to mind? It's February, so it's possible that it's Punxsutawney Phil and an implausibly unironic highfalute of Gobbler's Nob village elders in top hats. (I propose "highfalute" as the collective noun for village elders in bombastic headgear.) If you're from New England there's an outside chance it's a quahog predicting the weather before being frittered. But most of the time, for most people, it's an experience of being trapped in a mundane, repeating cycle. That may be accompanied by visions of Bill Murray's sad-sack newsman repeatedly waking up at 6:00 AM to cover the same soul-crushing story and eventually trying to kill himself before turning his life around and triumphantly sleeping with Andie MacDowell. But what's interesting is that there's a good chance it's not.

Every now and then, a bit of pop culture so embeds itself in the collective consciousness that it creates a concept that persists independent of the source material. "Groundhog Day" is such a concept. The monotony of daily life for many people is a phenomenon that needed a pithy term to encompass it, and "groundhog day" fits the bill. One day, perhaps not too far off -- the kids born when the movie came out are applying to college -- people will be using the term in this sense without any idea where it came from.

Your intrepid bloggers have come up with a few other examples of this phenomenon, but we trust that our distinguished readers will come up with many others, and we invite you to share.

Bucket list - Another term that brings pith to a somewhat familiar idea, "list of things to do before you die." This will probably be a part of the general lexicon without any association to the movie faster than groundhog day because the term evokes the idea directly, rather than by way of the source material.
White whale - This phrase may never be truly divorced from Moby Dick, particularly because its users tend to be erudite enough to know where it comes from, but as a term for a self-destructive obsession it has a place in the language.
Albatross - More likely to be used without consciousness of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe a self-created curse or affliction with a karmic dimension.

Please, dear readers, offer up your suggestions to add to the list.

Word Play for Fun -- and Credit!

2010-02-10T12:50:00.001-05:00

I was delighted to read in the February 3 Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine about a freshman seminar called "Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble" (by Merrell Noden, link to full article above). Joshua Katz, Professor of Classics and linguist extraordinaire, leads 15 students in the examination and creation of various types of word play, such as constrained writing. Examples of constrained writing include palindromes, lipograms, alliteratives, anagrams, and, more commonly, rhyme and meter. As an example of one of my favorite types of constrained writing, watch this footage of word wizard Victor Borge's Inflationary Language; as far as I know, he invented this grammatical gimmick.

We here at liquidridiculous are jealous that these undergraduate students get to spend 3 hours each week as ludic linguists. Would that we could have had such opportunities in our misspent youth! You really must take a moment to appreciate the impressive work these students have done for this class.

To the skeptics out there who find such obsessions frivolous, I have two responses:
1) Why are you reading this blog? It is a veritable monument to frivolity; and
2) Read the PAW article, especially toward the end, where Prof. Katz discusses the bigger issues at stake in understanding the delightfully complicated ins and outs of language.

There is something universal at work here. "There is something in all of us, [Katz] says, that craves wordplay. 'That's one of the things that's so interesting about it,' he muses. 'It resonates so seriously with children the world over, [in the form of] puns, oral games, rhymes, and songs.' As we get older, most of us stifle our fascination with it. But these lucky students, with Katz as their guide, are rediscovering the deep and serious pleasure of playing with words."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Keep up the good work.

In the meantime, for the rest of us amateur enthusiasts, the grammatical gauntlet has been thrown down in the form of a "Constrained Writing Contest" sponsored by the PAW Magazine. Here are the details from their website:

Try your hand at constrained writing and you could win a trio of DVDs for word lovers: “Spellbound,” “Wordplay,” and “Word Wars”!

Lipograms (banning a particular letter), palindromes (reading the same backward and forward), alliteratives (each word starts with the same letter), anagrams (rearranging the letters in a sentence, for example, to create a new sentence) — whatever your puzzle passion, send your example by March 1 to paw@princeton.edu or to “Constrained Writing,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 194 Nassau St., Suite 38, Princeton, NJ, 08542. We plan to post submissions and announce the winner in the April 7 issue.

We hope, dear readers, that you'll throw your highbrow hat into this recherche ring. In other words, bring it on!

William Safire, 1929-2009

2010-01-25T11:34:00.000-05:00

We know this is old news, but given that this is such a language-focused blog, we couldn't let the great William Safire's passing go without comment. I myself count his "Fumblerules" among those books that most influenced my own interest in all things grammatical. If you who haven't had the opportunity to read much, or any, of his wonderful On Language column, he has written several books compiling years of them, including some that are out of print. He will be missed.

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.
(The rest of the article is at the link in the title.)

The Fumblerules of Grammar

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years.
As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms:

Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
Don't use no double negatives.
Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.
Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.
Do not put statements in the negative form.
Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
No sentence fragments.
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
Eschew dialect, irregardless.
And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
Hyphenate between sy-
llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
Write all adverbial forms correct.
Don't use contractions in formal writing.
Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
Always pick on the correct idiom.
"Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"
The adverb always follows the verb.
Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

The Palindrome as Art

2010-01-22T21:31:00.000-05:00

The following poem was written by James A. Lindon and first published in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language in 1967. It and some of the other examples below are taken from fun-with-words.com, which is linked in the title.

Doppelgänger

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush –
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever –
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching
Night after night.
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone –
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him, for the first time
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

Much more after the jump...

We're all familiar with palindromes. Sequences that read identically letter by letter from beginning to end or end to beginning.

Sometimes they're about transportation: race car; a Toyota. Or world leaders: able was I ere I saw Elba; a man, a plan, a canal, Panama! Often they make no sense at all, at best.

It's very difficult to generate more than trivial semantics or rudimentary aesthetics. But the palindrome concept also takes other forms, and greater chunking leads to increasingly interesting, meaningful, and artistic uses of language:

Blessed are they that believe that they are blessed.
Escher, drawing hands, drew hands drawing Escher.

Word-unit palindromes are somewhat reflexive, but because their elemental unit, the word, has intrinsic meaning, combining those building blocks opens up dimensions of expression all but unachievable by letter-palindromes. Because form is central to word palindromes, they tend to take on a poetical quality, particularly the better ones. That leads to the most interesting form of palindrome, the line-unit palindrome poem. As an astute reader of Liquid Ridiculous, you have no doubt recognized that Doppelgänger is just such a poem.

Unlike letter and word palindromes, whose meaning or artistic value is shoehorned into the form, line palindromes have enough structural freedom that the form and substance can complement and enhance one another. Doppelgänger literally translates as "double goer," and so the poem does. Structurally, of course, the last line follows the first no more than the first line follows the last, coming and going simultaneously. But unlike a letter or word palindrome, the poem presents multiple meanings going in both directions.

The story the poem tells is both linear and circular. There is also a progression of events that seems to continue forward even as the poem reverses itself halfway through. The narrator is aware of the stranger's doings, yet timidity or some other force prevents him from acting. In each half the stranger moves closer to his obscure goal. The poem, despite ending where it begins, takes a man who previously only watched from a distance and brings him to the object of his nightly vigil, and it reduces a man to a seemingly helpless bystander as another goes into his house with his wife.

A doppelgänger is also a ghostly, sinister double of a person, and the poem trades on that meaning as well. Near the crossover point, the identities of the narrator and the stranger blur. In the second stanza, the person hiding and crouching seems to be the wrong one for that half of the poem. Before the turn, the narrator is hiding and watching the woman, even though at the beginning he was entering the house with his wife. After the turn the stranger seems to be moving about, ultimately to the house, while the narrator is hiding in the bushes, yet in that half the stranger is the one crouching and watching. The ambiguity of identity introduced in the middle suggests a different interpretation of what the action means: there is but one man, watching himself, and in turn watching his (imaginary?) counterpart watching him. We have returned, in a sense, to Escher drawing hands drawing Escher.

Academic mumbo-jumbo

2010-01-19T17:36:00.001-05:00

(special thanks to JS for sending this one along)

This abstract of a lecture (at a prestigious academic institution, mind you) might as well be in a foreign language. Any thoughts on what it might mean? Names have been omitted to protect the overly intellectual.

"For a symptomatology of the image"

The liberation of the image as a specific epistemic object, unbound from its traditional mimetic function, has gone hand in hand with the postulation of something like an autonomous "reign of pictures". While the newly found "image sciences" ask about the specific differences of images, ____ will explore a different model of thinking. Describing some of the possible "symptoms of the iconic" (replacing the old question "What is an image" by "Where and when is an image?"), the image will serve as an exemplary object for outlining a different episteme (symptomatological, conjectural and thus essentially precarious) of what singularity means.
...
During his Visiting Fellowship at ____, he will be working on the question "Can the subaltern testify?"

"blank" rhymes with . . . ?

2010-01-19T15:29:00.000-05:00

After a nearly five-year hiatus, LiquidRidiculous is back with a never-before seen post. We hope you'll enjoy, and leave a comment.

~TomSwifty

-------------------------

Give a listen to the audio pronunciation of "blank" at M-W.com. Note the short "a" in the middle. Now have a gander over at the same thing for "plank". Note the length of the "a." Do they sound the same? If you have a cunning ear for phonetics, you'll agree that the answer is no. If you don't, trust me; I have such an ear. Of course, both words have the same written pronunciation - officially they have the short "a" of blank.

The difference is subtle. Subtle enough that most people don't notice. Subtle enough that the potentates at M-W.com didn't notice. If you aren't listening carefully for it, you'll hear whichever one you normally say. It can lead to some extraordinary IM conversations for people as, uh . . . unique as us.

T: well, blank and black do rhyme
D: uh... no they don't
T: um, what?
D: blank and black? the vowels don't sound the same at all!
T: what are you talking about? they both have a short 'a'!
D: are you insane?!? the 'a' in blank sounds like 'weigh'
T: "blaynk"!?
D: yeah
T: i can't tell if you're kidding or not
D: i've never been more serious

This proved to be a paradigm collision that could only be resolved by actual human speech (ie, the telephone).

Synantonyms...?

2005-07-25T11:29:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, there was a conversation. One person pontificated, somewhat ironically, that she was a taker, not a giver. She attempted to clarify her statement by saying that her sister was a caregiver, and she a caretaker. Hilarity ensued, as hilarity is wont to do.

Time passed, as time is also wont to do.

There was then another conversation, wherein this tale was told to the purveyor of a certain blog, and all present recognized the blogworthiness of the anecdote.

Brains were racked for any other example of a pair of antonyms (giver-taker) which, by the addition of a prefix, suffix, or compounding word (care), became a pair of synonyms. The best pair that could be found was "sinkhole" and "swimming hole", which are not actually synonyms, but certainly are much more similar than "sink" and "swim."

And so we ask you, o faithful readers, our muses, we beseech thee tell us, is this an example of a class of words, either of antonyms or of synonymizing augmenters, or is this a random linguistic accident of the sort produced by thousands of monkeys with thousands of typewriters?

Thanks to Tali for the idea, and for your forbearance as we take artistic liberties with the tale.

Have we gone far enough?

2005-06-29T15:50:00.000-04:00

Political correctness is old news, but there's one area of our culture that we haven't purged of latent and tacit racism: completely benign idioms.

Consider:

If we get our finances in order, we'll finally be out of the Native American and back in the African American.
Well that's really the pot calling the kettle African American, isn't it?
I was always impressed that Ansel Adams could capture so much depth and emotion in his African American & Caucasian photographs.
The President today signed the comprehensive civil rights legislation into law during a ceremony in the Caucasian House Rose Garden.
I'm dreaming of a Caucasian Christmas...
In the Middle Ages, two-thirds of Europe's population was wiped out by the African American plague.
When camping, be sure to pack away all of your garbage so as not to attract the attention of hungry African American bears and grizzlies.
That acne cream really takes care of those unsightly african-americanheads and caucasianheads.
Joe didn't get into the frat he wanted because one of the members African-Americanballed him.
After being accused of having communist sympathies, Mort was African-Americanlisted and couldn't get another screenwriting job.
Surely, one of the most brilliant sales pitches in all of literature was Tom Sawyer's convincing his peers to pay him for the privilege of Caucasianwashing the fence.
Once they had the incriminating pictures, they were able to african-americanmail him for millions.

Did we leave out any good ones?

You keep using those words... I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

2005-06-20T15:54:00.000-04:00

Thanks to friend and regular comment contributor Keith for this bit of deft wordplay. Ah, the joy of English, where verbs are homonyms of nouns and adjectives, and helping verbs can be main verbs, and adjectives can concatenate themselves onto nouns as prefices or suffices, and they all have a gay old time.

The mad frog was hopping around the man.
The madman was hopping around the frog.
The man was mad frogging around the hop.
Around the frog, the man was hopping mad.

The moron says what?

2005-06-06T13:41:00.000-04:00

Is there a word for the opposite of "schadenfreude," where instead of perverse joy you feel sadness for the misfortune of others? I suppose, perhaps, "compassion," but it would probably sound better in German. In the interest of completeleness, "compassion" in German is, according to the Babelfish online translator, "mitleid." Or, using the same device but constructing the German in a manner parallel to the English translation of "schadenfreude" (harming joy), it would be "schadensorge" (harming sorrow). But that's probably a very foul bastardization of the German.

I feel mitleid and schadensorge when I see sentences such as "The clown stuck his penis in somebody's eye, having decided between the midget and I." or "The clown stuck his penis in whomever was standing closest, and of course it had to be a midget ." In a way, they are the saddest of all grammatical errors, because they are on some level the consequence of the perpetrator trying desperately hard not to make a grammatical error. Since people regularly (and incorrectly) use "me and" or "and me" as part of the subject of a sentence, they are constantly reminded, at least, one can hope, in grammar school, that they should use "and I." Likewise, "whom" (and its -ever derivative) is severely underused. It's rather a mark of sophistication to use it properly.

So when a person uses these underutilized turns of grammatical phrase, but they use them incorrectly in the place where the other, more common expressions would actually be right, it brings a tear to the linguistic humanist's eye. It's like a puppy who's so excited when you come home that he unknowningly and incontinently tinkles on the floor, and you get angry and scold him, but he can't even understand what he did wrong in the first place. And so the cycle repeats, and, embittered by the cruel and unjust world, the puppy turns to drugs and finally a life of crime, until he has to be put down. That poor puppy. And all because you don't understand grammatical cases. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Linguistic Pet Peeves

2005-04-24T15:03:00.000-04:00

This is just a list of those phrases that people say, usually without thinking about what they really mean, that I find irksome. If you use them, it by no means means that you're a bad person, it merely proves that nobody really thinks about everything they say.

"I'm going to let you go." People use this often to end a telephone conversation, and taken literally it's sort of a nice gesture. Unfortunately, most of the time that it's said, it's said disingenuously - you don't "let someone go" because you know they have something to which they should attend, but because you have something to which to attend, but you instinctively don't want to be the one responsible for ending this stimulating conversation.
"Let me know." I use this all the time, and I hate it. It's a bizarre, polite euphemism for "tell me." Please, good sir, I do beseech thee, permit this poor supplicant the awareness of that which you have to impart. Just answer my damn question!
"Amazing." The rampant overuse of this word is an example of meaninglessness. For many people, calling something "amazing" is no more descriptive than giving it a thumbs up. It has lost its actual meaning of describing a thing that amazed the speaker. Was that book really amazing? Did it actually amaze and astonish you? Were you dumbfounded? Or do you simply lack the vocabularly or at least the assiduousness to praise it in a more precise manner? I would wager, in most cases, that it's the latter.
"Standing on line." This I believe to be a Northeastern (aka, Yankee) turn of phrase. This, to me, is an alternate form of "in line." Are there lines painted on the ground in certain parts of the country to facilitate enqueueing? I've been around a bit, and I've never seen them. I've waited, people seriatim, in a lot of places, and I've never seen a guide marker underfoot. The line is an imaginary one, formed by the people waiting. I can't see how anybody is "on" that line. But they sure seem like they're "in" it, inasmuch as they're the constituents of it.

I'm sure our devoted readership has other such phrases that it deplores, rationally or otherwise. As always, please share, and we'll include.

get outta here

2005-04-19T01:28:00.000-04:00

There are many colorful ways of telling someone to bugger off, or of announcing one's own imminent exodus. Here are a few. As always, we welcome submissions.

Make like a tree and leave.
Make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here.
Make like a fetus and head out.
Make like the Catholic Church and get the fuck out of here.
Make like an exorcist and get the hell out of here.
Make like Siamese twins and split . . . and then one of you die.

Juvenile Brinkmanship

2005-04-18T22:07:00.000-04:00

It seems the proclivity to engage in arms races develops in us from a tender young age. Consider the following two examples.

1. From a psychology textbook, courtesy of our friend in Columbia's psych department:

We study exchanges like these, between David and Josh, two young children, in a section of my textbook on the development of "prosocial behavior."

David: I'm a missile robot who can shoot missiles out of my fingers. I can shoot them out of everywhere - even out of my legs. I'm a missile robot.
Josh: (tauntingly) No, you're a fart robot.
David: (protestingly) No, I'm a missile robot.
Josh: No, you're a fart robot.
David: (hurt, almost in tears) No, Josh!
Josh: (recognizing that David is upset) And I'm a poo-poo robot.
David: (in good spirits again) I'm a pee-pee robot.

What kind of robot are you?

----

2. During Sunday school recently, I went into a neighboring 2nd-grade classroom to get a few markers, and the students were doing a Passover art project. Two boys close to where I was standing were drawing the Angel of Death, and here is the brief exchange I overheard (names have been assigned arbitrarily; any resemblance to their actual names is purely coincidental):

Moishe: My Angel of Death has a scythe to kill people!
Shmuli: Oh yeah, my Angel of Death has a pitchfork!
Moishe: Mine has a scythe and a pitchfork!
Shmuli: Well, mine is spiky.

Unfortunately, I didn't hear what was surely a thrilling conclusion to this Angel of Death arms race.

What does your Angel of Death look like?

gizoogle my noogle

2005-04-18T00:13:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to report that http://www.gizoogle.com/ has a "translizzle" feature. I tested it with a bit of verse by our good friend Erasmus Darwin, the 19th century botanist, biologist, and poet. He's Charles Darwin, of Beagle fame,'s grandfather. The first passage is his text; the second, the translizzle. Though it is by no means the most ridiculous example one can imagine, it is everthemore (isn't that better than "nevertheless"?) delightful. It picks up steam toward the end.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Translizzle:
Organic life beneath tha shoreless waves
Was bizzorn n nursed in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spherical glass,
Move on tha mizzay or pierce tha watery mass;
These, as successive generizzles bloom,
New powa acquire n larga limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetizzles doggy stylin'
frontin' realms of fin n feet n wing.

We encourage you to generate your own translizzles. As always, we will post those that are worthy.

In that vein, our good friend Rav Rockin Mullet has offered two shining examples of what he calls a “jewish gangsta haiku”.

hanukkah haiku:
me gotsd a dreidle
I made dat shiz out of cliz –
shit got dry – fuck dat!

passover haiku:
you may gotsd dem ho’s
and you may gotsd a fly crib
but we fuck you up – ten plagues, biatch*!

[*NOTE: the Haiku Authority of America (“HAM”) has agreed that “biatch” may be interpreted as one or two syllables, depending on who be holding a mu-fuggin gun to their heads. Thank you for your understanding and unconditional support for our greater mission (biatch!).]

"only" a word?

2005-04-14T01:37:00.000-04:00

Ah, the power of a single word. Consider:

The clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
Standard.
Only the clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
At least no one else did.
The only clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
Of course, you send one clown, and it has to be the pervert.
The clown only stuck his penis in the midget's eye.
Well, at least he didn't do anything else with it.
The clown stuck only his penis in the midget's eye.
Anything more would just have added insult to injury.
The clown stuck his only penis in the midget's eye.
Enough said. (My personal favorite.)
The clown stuck his penis only in the midget's eye.
Depending on how you parse (and intone) this, it can mean that the clown didn't stick anyone else's penis in the midget's eye; or, he didn't stick it anywhere other than the midget's eye...
The clown stuck his penis in only the midget's eye.
At least he didn't stick it in anyone else's eye...
The clown stuck his penis in the only midget's eye.
Sure, single out the midget. They always get the short end of the...uh...stick.
The clown stuck his penis in the midget's only eye.
That's just sad.
The clown stuck his penis in the midget's eye only.
What's the big deal? It was just his eye.

thanks to our loyal readers for additions and corrections

fish fish fish fish fish

2005-04-14T00:59:00.000-04:00

It's a well known linguists' paradigm -- the seemingly nonsensical string of words that can actually be parsed as a grammatical sentence.
Fish fish fish fish fish.
In other words, flounders that groupers eat hunt flounders.
Still don't get it? Think about the phrase "games people play" -- it's elliptical (the expected "that" is omitted) for "games that people play." Same thing for "fish fish fish" -- it's an elliptical noun phrase serving as the subject of the longer sentence. But be careful -- it works best when the first "fish" is the object of the third "fish" within the inner phrase structure...

There are many fun examples of this phenomenon -- write in with more!
(for some reason, most of them involve animals...)

Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. ("Buffalo" can be a place, an animal, and a verb. Look it up! If you still can't parse it, let us know.)
Geese geese goose goose geese.
Sheep fish goose fish sheep. (Whether it's actually possible to "fish sheep" is an open question in my book.)
Fish Fishkill fish fish kill fish. (Fishkill, NY acts as an adjectival modifier.)
Buffalo geese Fishkill dogfish fish kill Buffalo sheep.
Help help help help help. (Thank you, Dracubeth, for that worthy submission!)

the possibilities are nigh endless....in whimsy and ludicry!

Have you ever noticed...

2005-04-11T23:12:00.000-04:00

...that if you stare at a word for too long too many times, it starts to look CRAAAAAZY? For example:

knowledgeable

mixed metaphors and idiotic idioms

2005-04-10T23:46:00.000-04:00

Like malapropisms, I suppose, but more haphazard and less genteel:

...whatever bloats your goat...
That's for cock sure!
The hand's on the other foot now!
shit or cut bait
fish or get off the pot
[more to come...]

Send in your own fractured phrases. We will post those that are worthy.

A timestamp of slovenliness

2005-04-10T23:15:00.000-04:00

Peruse the list of teams here: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/players. At first blush, they appear to be in alphabetical order. Then you find the anomaly of the Tennessee Titans between the Denver Broncos and Indianapolis Colts. Likewise the Oakland Raiders between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins. Then the ludicry of the Baltimore Ravens being the second team from the bottom, followed by the Houston Texans. A similar pattern of absurdities can be found in the NFC's column.

Those who know NFL history know where I'm going with this. This list hasn't been updated since 1994, when the Raiders and Rams were in Los Angeles, the Titans were the Houston Oilers, and the Jaguars, Panthers, Ravens and Texans didn't exist. It seems a ridiculous way to date oneself.

That would make a great band name!

2005-04-10T22:11:00.000-04:00

Or, in many cases, a great blog name. They're fairly similar. Here is an ever-expanding list of amusing or otherwise interesting band names that we've come up one way or another.

Liquid Ridiculous	Papal Crap	His Own Sock
Punctuational Clusterfuck	Never Sweat	Haggard Ken
The Haptic Explorers	Grinder in the Lid	Tastes Like Chicken
Bootleg Jesus	Sword Words	Chicago Pile Number One

Send us more, of your own creation! We will post those that are worthy.

Who are these people?

2005-04-09T01:08:00.000-04:00

I keep getting emails from senders with names like Gynecologist P. Joviality and Fricassee Q. Laxative, usually trying to sell me viagra or cialis or some other pill that promises to make my life more fulfilling. Because I'm never happier and more at peace than when I have a nuclear erection. Thanks, Gynecologist!
Who the fuck wrote the code to generate these cocktarded names? Do they actually believe that this is effective advertising and that people will read these inane, odious emails? (Irony: Clearly, I do. Regularly.)

Dear reader, if you have any insight, we beseech thee, COMMENT.

how to write good

2005-04-09T00:47:00.000-04:00

This is one of the most cogent and incisive "guides to writing" that I've ever read. Also in the top 5: George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". Go and study them.

(from Paul Graham's site)

A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.

I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes-- 23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting. But as an experiment I'll put it online. It is at least extremely dense.

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut ~~out~~ everything unneccessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

Sigh... oh so many sighs

2005-04-08T17:36:00.000-04:00

There's nothing sadder than people using "whomever" as the subject of a noun clause, like "We should drag out into the street and shoot whomever uses that loathsome construction." You can actually hear them being proud of themselves, but simultaneously earning the scorn of the knowledgeable.

I was in the Columbus, OH airport today and shook my head in predictable disappointment at a large ad in the terminal: Below a picture of a doctor concerned about the quality of a health insurance plan, the caption read, "Who can I count on?" Well, doc, you can count on I.

I received an Evite "From Jane (courtesy of Jesse)." Trouble is, it came from Jane's email account, and is an invitation to a party at Jesse's house. This should be "From Jesse (courtesy of Jane)."

...said Tom swiftly

2005-04-08T00:48:00.000-04:00

"Here's the real male goose," said Tom, producing the propaganda.
"I manufacture tabletops," said Tom counterproductively.
"I need a place to put my painting," said Tom easily.
"For such a skinny monarch, he sure makes a lot of noise," said Tom, thinking aloud.
"Why, 'e urinated on me cabin, guv'nuh!" said Tom epistemologically.
"I like hanging around other men," said Tom cogently.
"There's a trumpet stuck in my butt," said Tom astutely.
"I'm just as holy as the Pope," said Tom copiously.
"I like hot dogs," said Tom frankly.
"I just ate a bucket full of tacks," said Tom tactfully. (thank you, Michael, for that contribution)
"I think that mangy dog tricked me," Tom concurred.
"I'm gonna trick that mangy dog into making a deal with that giant magical tree creature," said Tom concurrently.
"The new pope should be a woman named Catherine," Tom pontificated.

Send us new Tom Swifties! We will post those that are worthy.