Yesterday’s Doonesbury, Mark Slackmeyer interviewing an Oklahoma teacher on the radio:
Um… misspell?
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
Air spelling
May 14, 2018The way I write now
May 9, 2018Or: Arnauld le flâneur.
(Edward Gorey caught unawares.)
On 3/15/17 in “Lauren la flâneuse”:
[from Wikipedia] Flâneur … means “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer” [the person of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street]. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations.
Here flânerie refers not just to the act, but also to the reporting of the act — to a literary genre, of which I am an exponent.
Four more recent cartoons
January 28, 2018Four cartoons yesterday that present interesting challenges in understanding. Now a mixed set of four more — a Zits, a Zippy, a One Big Happy, and a Dilbert — that have accumulated in my posting queue.
??That is aliens for you.
November 21, 2017From Mike Pope on Facebook a few days ago, this excerpt from Ian Frazier’s “New York’s Majestic Passage in the Sky: Revamping the Bayonne Bridge to make space for megaships” in the 11/13/17 New Yorker:
(#1)
Mike wrote:
I can’t decide here whether this is weird. In the New Yorker, a sentence where I think I’d expect a contraction (“That’s xxx for you!”). Is this an editor bending the idiom to house style, or is this a not untypical variant?
Two things: the acceptability of the example (at best, it merits the stigma ?? of great dubiousness); and the circumstances that might have given rise to ??That is aliens for you (not at all clear, but advice on style and usage might be part of the story).
Exercises in commercial style
November 6, 2017Two recent pieces of p.r. ad-talk: one over the top with business jargon; one framed as a lifestyle or fashion ad. Both touting a preposterous product: a podcast about the “facets and opportunities” of death; a notebook of paper infused with the proprietary scent of a tech company.
The 5-paragraph essay
September 26, 2017The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from the 24th:
A potentially useful aid to writing, turned into a rigid framework, and so pretty much guaranteed to turn students against the task (not to mention the craft) of writing.
As for the strip, it’s bitterly pessimistic. About schooling, about learning, and about the state of writing in everyday life.
How’s that coming?
September 5, 2016A P.C. Vey cartoon in the latest (Sept. 5th) New Yorker:
Three things: the parallel between a steak on the grill and a book in progress; authorial anxiety over writing on something and completing it; and the pragmatics of the idioms in how’s it going? and how’s it coming?
Mirror image
July 18, 2015A David Sipress cartoon in the July 20th New Yorker:
Looking at text in a mirror is one way to reverse the image. But so is looking at it from the back side of a glass window, as here. The bar’s customer is just going along with the reversal.
You do wonder about the pronunciation of the reversed text. (There are people who’ve gotten pretty good at “talking backwards” — reversing the acoustic signal. The linguist Yuen Ren Chao used to do this as a kind of parlor trick.)
Zippy’s diary
July 17, 2015
Journalistic conventions
June 23, 2015Practice 1. Newspaper and magazine stories often have a human-interest lead-in, about a specific person or group involved in the story; that’s designed to engage the readers’ interest, before the real subject of the piece, the hard news or analysis, kicks in.
(I’m not sure how old this practice is, but it’s now very common, even though some critics find it objectionable.)
Practice 2. A convention of newspaper journalism is that on first appearance, someone is introduced with a full name and and a brief characterization (“john Smith, the victim of the crime”), but that later mentions will use Prefix + LN (or just LN), with no recharacterization (“Mr. Smith”, “Professor Smith”, “Smith”). This convention is designed for economy (“Omit Needless Words”), but it diverges from the usual practices of story-telling (also adopted by many writers of non-fiction), where people are re-introduced into the discourse if they have dropped from topicality,
The two practices taken together can make newspaper stories hard to follow. A case in point, from “The right choices: America’s bloated prison system has stopped growing. Now it must shrink” in The Economist of 6/20.
