Quote of the day

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

- Molly Ringle, 2010 Bulwer-Lytton winner, HT MR

My goal this week....

...is to use the word "invidious" in a sentence without sounding like an utter plonker.

Before my time?

As long as I'm exhuming old writings, might as well put up a bit of prose...back from high school. You can see that well before Obama, I was concerned about energy independence (of course, since this was not long after the oil embargo, so was everybody else in the USA at the time).
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Smelly feet

Smelly feet are one of the few resources in the United States that are as yet unexploited.

The essence of smelly feet should be collected, concentrated, and bottled. In the bottled state, the scent would be a formidable non-lethal self-defense - we would be as safe in our persons as the skunk is. Crime in our cities would be quickly extinguished. Naturally, the scent would have to be used judiciously, or the law-abiding citizens might flee into the country as well.

Because some of the gases released by our feet are flammable, if those gases can be captured, they might provide a new fuel source. Wouldn't it be worth exploring whether our foot odor could make us independent of the Arabs?

So harness foot odor for a better world!

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On more mature reflection, the energy content of stinky feet is probably inadequate for our nation's needs. Also, the scent might not be "non-lethal", judging by my wife's after a long day at work in pantyhose.

Word of the week

Hypergamy

A good quote goes with this one, too:

Consult, for example, Ring Lardner’s humorous story “I Can’t Breathe”—the private journal of an eighteen year old girl who wants to marry a different young man every week. If surveyed on her preferred number of “sex partners,” she would presumably respond one; this does not mean she has any idea who it is.

F.Roger Devlin

Waiting impatiently for that fress feeling? Stinks?

This has got to be the solution for YOU! (I don't know how GUYS manage to live without it)


Click here for Engrish.com

Accentchuate the positive...

As much fun as it is to bash Strunk&White, it leaves people who really want a guideline to good writing stranded. This post spackles that gap.

Bashing Strunk&White

What better way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their pernicious little volume than to give it the smackdown it deserves?

As the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language summarizes,

So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten rules.

Word of the week - synecdoche

When a part is used to represent the whole.

For example, "This rancher can raise 50 hands for the cattle drive", when the rancher can actually raise 50 men that have hands.

"This baron can raise 50 swords for the king" might also be called synecdoche, although some would consider it more properly "metonomy".

Never trust a live Jedi

It always amuses me when something as frivolous as Star Wars is treated with mock seriousness. This item does a marvelous job of that.

So much for that newspaper theory. In "Another Roadside Attraction", Marx Marvelous chooses his name to be the most loathsome possible, and

What do they most loathe? The answer I arrived at was Communism and homosexuality. Communists and homosexuals are the targets of the majority of the normal male's fear-honed barbs. Thus you can see how I in my rebellion selected the given name of 'Marx'. The surname was more difficult. Obviously, I couldn't ccall myself Marx Homosexual or Marx Queer or even Marx Fag. But I remembered having read in a syndicated newspaper column that the one word no red-blooded he-man would ever ever utter was 'marvelous.'

Since I am the epitome of the red-blooded he-man, don't trust syndicated newspaper columns any more than you would trust a Jedi!

Common Writing mistakes...

... are humorously summarized here.

They are self-illustrative: "Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors."

Hat tip: Volokh

Quote of the Day

Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the patterns of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion. Contrariwise, the unceasing rush and turmoil of human existence came not from mathematical necessities of time but from the frantic urgency implicit in human sexual bipolarity.

Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land"

"Young housewives having figures that will turn you on"

A serious scientific journal learns the dangers of meddling in things they do not understand.

Quote of the day

I'm sick of the insipid bourgeois neuroticism in current, careerist American poetry. Bring back the psychotics!
--Camille Paglia, via Language Log

Definition of the week

Maverick: somebody who makes decisions independently of peers.

Said to be an eponym based on a rancher that refused to brand his cattle - since everybody else did brand their cattle, this let him claim any unbranded cattle in the area.

Definition of the week

Borda count - a voting system that allows voters to indicate their preferences among multiple candidates. This system is actually used in a few obscure places (click on the link for the full Wikipedia article).

Of course, it is only useful when more than 2 candidates are viable.

Definition of the week

Crux (Latin for "cross", "gallow", or "t-shape") is a term applied by palaeographers, textual critics, bibliographers, and literary scholars to a point of significant corruption in a literary text. More serious than a simple slip of the pen or typographical error, a crux (probably deriving from Latin crux interpretum = "crossroad of interpreters") is difficult or impossible to interpret and resolve. Cruxes occur in a wide range of pre-modern (ancient, medieval, and Renaissance) texts, printed and manuscript.

Definition of the week

risible

adj : arousing or provoking laughter;[syn: amusing, comic, comical,funny, laughable, mirthful]

This one is often used in arguments when mocking somebody else's point of view

Definition of the week

Epicaricacy: Yes, this is just another word for schadenfreude, the joy at the discomfort of another.

Kind of unusual for the German word to be better known in English!

"The car stopped on a dime, which unfortunately was in a pedestrian's pocket."

Definition of the week: Paraprosdokian

A figure of speech where the last part alters the listener's understanding of the first part. The link has some amusing examples.