Uncomfortable Plot Summaries
HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.
(via @johndiesattheen)
Cher is on Twitter
Ok, I imagine this may not be breaking news to some, but did you know Cher is on Twitter and is incomprehensible?
I discovered this via The Oatmeal:
Thoughts on parentheticals and quotation marks
For a long time I applied the same logic to quotation marks and parentheses. If a parenthetical fell within the confines of a sentence, I placed the period after the final parenthesis (which is the logic I also applied to quotation marks). From a consistency standpoint, this still makes sense to me, but then I started to think about the aesthetics of the “periods always inside quotation marks crowd.” (I have to admit, it kind of makes sense to me.)
bananas
Reading this paragraph from an article on how retail stores prime shoppers to make particular choices, I couldn’t help feel I was being primed for a subconscious lesson in grammar.
Let’s take for example Whole Foods, a market chain priding itself on selling the highest quality, freshest, and most environmentally sound produce. No one could argue that their selection of organic food and take-away meals are whole, hearty, and totally delicious. But how much thought have you given to how they’re actually presenting their wares? Have you considered the carefully planning that’s goes into every detail that meets the eye?
What has happened to online writing? Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall, both political writers I admire, often post with grammatical errors. Have we decided this medium doesn’t require the rigor of print? Are the errors part of the message? What bananas should I buy?
the serial comma, a visual explanation
The utility of the serial comma has always made sense to me, the comments against it don’t.
(thanks, Kelsey)
Thinking of you, Clusterflock!
The London Riots
Word.
Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.
Palin can write
McWhorter on the Palin emails:
To get a sense, it helps to see a few of these emails. Because email is written speech, it’s easy to miss artfulness in them. Yet, take this Palin passage: “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.”
The spelling is flawless—and unlikely to be completely a product of spell-check, which misses errors and often creates others. More to the point, she has an embedded clause (“locking up tax rates”) nested into a main one, with another clause “as Glenn suggests” nested within the embedded one. That’s good old-fashioned grammar school “syntax.” I have known plenty of people with B.A.s who could barely pull it off properly at gunpoint, and several others who would only bother to at gunpoint.
He then goes on to explain why she is facile with the written word and how it speaks to the current, failing models for educational writing.
from the spam
Architecture is a visual art, along with the buildings speak by themselves.
from the comments
Those assholes spelled Fuck wrong. Great example for the kids, guys.
56 worst analogies of high school students
33. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
42. Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.
from the comments
Anyone who says “Chuck and I” needs his peter bitten off, regardless of the relative safety of the turtle.
FuckYeahNouns.
An act of public punctuation
Not my work, but appreciated nonetheless.
from the spam
One thing I like about reading an article like this is there aren’t any spelling or grammatical errors!
first time I’ve seen awhile used ‘officially’
I sell the iphone 4ghd in good conditions. it is the 33giggybite modil
I am sell me phone of i. it is the biggest one out it hav the 33 giggybites in it. i want to sell so i go back home to my country so i leave this USA cause it no do me no good! this phone is not great condition of bad so this why i sell for cash price of 600. pleese no give me a small price. i my wife three son and seven of the daughters wan go back home so i need big big price. it is brokn from the jails so to use on cincinatti’s bells servers. i use on that servers and it move maybe lots of slow and it no work for the www internets some of the times for me when i alook on craigslist at the pictures that the womans put on for sell themselfs. i no the phon cost lots but i only ask the 600. i think you for look at my ad here.
Tom Sale–Louisiana State Fair
(permission granted by Pinky’s mom)
from the spam
I definitely like your internet site but you need to take a look at the spelling on quite a few of your articles. Some of them are filled with punctuation mistakes and I believe it is very problematic to tell the truth nonetheless I definitely will come back again.
from the comments
Did I tell any of you about my Australian T-Shirt design? It was going to have a guy playing a didgeridoo and a guy standing there and it was going to be unclear if the the didgeridoo noise was coming from the instrument or the other guy’s arse and it was going to say “What Did Geri Doo?”
Also, that’s how I remember how to spell Didgeridoo.
Here’s one fucked-up sentence now.
From today’s Dayton Daily News:
General Electric Co. on Monday is to announce at the University of Dayton details of a $51 million center to develop advanced electric power systems for aircraft, ships and hybrid automobiles, people familiar with the announcement said.
‘Spect I should be happy that GE might announce plans to invest in our town, but this sentence pissed me off to twitterpated extremes. I needed to vent, so I came here.
today’s usage lesson
Impacted
The word impacted is a fucking adjective. It is not a fucking verb.
Correct:
Carol’s impacted earwax affected her hearing.
Incorrect:
The sluggish economy impacted sales.
Impacted. Get it fucking right.
Internet dating, 8
27-year-old female receives this instant message from a 30-year-old male located sixty miles outside her metropolitan area:
can i tounge your ass really fast somtime. i want a woman who likes that
An excerpt of his profile:
Well, many people have been searching all there lives for one certain thing, which is love. To me love is when you wake up in the morning thinking about that certain someone, go throughout you day thinking about that someone, and then go to bed thinking about that someone. Love, is when you miss a person when you just been away from them for ever 5 minutes. Love is when you are with that person and you’ve never felt happier in your entire life.
A HEART is meant to be open, not closed. Id rather be single then to settle for less then the realist & best, then to be miserable with someone that half asses love I confess. I’m not ashamed to speak from the heart and don’t know why so many people are afraid too. I guess people aren’t use to being true to themselves …& ITS SUCH A WASTE OF LIFE NOT TO BE REAL TO YOURSELF AND NOT LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY TO EVERYONE ELSE. [...]
I’M EASING GOING AND RELAXING TO BE AROUND. I’M A VERY PASSIONATE PERSON! I WANT TO MEET A WOMAN THAT’S FIT AND IF THERE’S A CONNECTION WE WOULD TRY TO TAKE IT SLOW AS POSSIBLE. I’M BASICALLY WANTING A BEST FRIEND IN A WOMAN AND FOR HER TO BE OPEN TO A LONG TERM RELATIONSHIP. I WANT HER TO BE GOOD COMPANY AND FUN NO MATTER WHAT SHES DOING. ALSO, IF SHE LIKES FITNESS THAT’S GREAT BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN STAYING HEALTHY. MOST OF ALL I WANT A WOMAN THAT IS HAPPY ABOUT HER LIFE AND IS COMFORTABLE WITH HERSELF. IN HER SKIN, AND CONFIDENT SO WE CAN BE HAPPY TOGETHER IN A LONG LASTING RELATIONSHIP. I PREFER WOMAN WHO ARE COMFORTABLE WITH THEMSELVES AND IN THEIR OWN SKIN, WHICH IS MORE ATTRACTIVE AND MORE COMFORTABLE FOR A MAN TO BE AROUND.
There might be some poetry in there.
proofreading at the New Yorker
An interview with Mary Norris, the copy editor at The New Yorker, about, among other things, job descriptions and the stylistic preferences of the magazine.
The job descriptions at The New Yorker are different from those at book publishing houses and other magazines. We have a copy desk, and the job of the copy editor is to do the first pass on a piece, when the manuscript is “set up,” that is, set in type for general distribution. At this stage, the copy editor makes minimal changes, in spelling and punctuation, to conform to New Yorker style. You may have noticed that we spell “theatre” the British way, reversing the “er” to “re,” and double consonants before suffixes (“travelled,” rather than “traveled”); we use the diaeresis in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect”; we prefer the serial comma; we spell out round numbers, even big ones. The copy editor does not make any interpretive changes.
(via the browser)
from the spam
A small glass of red wine is soothing after a snack.
&
Well it’s great to see that someone is using proper grammar.
