One of my odd hobbies is picking up grammar advice books and seeing how long it takes me to get angry.

This book didn’t bring me to towering heights of rage.  In fact, in my skimming, the advice all seemed pretty solid and, more importantly, advice i agreed with.  The only thing that bothered me was the “devotional” format.  It’s a cute idea — a different bit of grammar advice for every day of the week.  But, personally, i’d rather my grammar advice be sensibly organized rather than presented in a quasi-religious format.

Not something i’ll be buying for my collection, but not bad to flip thru’.

Perhaps if i hadn’t missed my copy editing class on wednesday (thanks to some salsa bent on homicidal revenge), i would have realized that march 4th was National Grammar Day.  I would have at least liked the opportunity to rant about it, tho’ Arnold Zwicky did an excellent job last year.  I especially like this bit:

Finally, a point that has come up in informal discussions at Stanford about the regulation of language.  Paul Kiparsky has noted on several occasions that while in some European countries the prescribing of language forms for certain public purposes is the job of official bodies, which normally include language scholars (as well as literary figures), this sort of regulation has been PRIVATIZED in English-speaking countries: it’s managed by commercial publishers, newspaper and magazine editors, and a whole industry of free-lance advisers, only a few of whom know much about either the nature of language or the structure and history of English.  Such an arrangement resonates with American free-enterprise ideals and also with the widespread American disdain for “experts” and “intellectuals”.

In a different vein, here’s an amusing 4-part noir pastiche by John McIntyre, “mild-mannered copy editor for [...] The Baltimore Sun.”  One of my favorite phrases is “the bottom fell out of the paragraph game” (from part 1).  Yeah, that’s what happened to my 1st zine — just another victim when the bottom fell out.

1. Down those mean sentences I walk alone:  “I was sitting at my desk in the old Intelligencer-Argus building the day she walked in. It was late afternoon on a rainy day, and my hand had strayed more than once toward the dictionary in the bottom desk drawer. I heard footsteps approaching, and when I looked up, there she was. She was — lissome.”
2. “What are we going to do now?” she asked: “I reached for his collar and pulled him upright in his chair. An Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart.”
3. The Fat Man chuckles: “I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.”
4. The rule you don’t break: “I was pensive on the drive back to the Brockenbrough bungalow. Editing’s a mug’s game. The words strain and crack; sometimes they break under the burden, the tension. They slip and slide and perish — won’t stay still. You go out on a raid on the inarticulate, and not everybody comes back. The public doesn’t like to see it but wants it done. That leaves it to me.”

Perhaps ironically, for a hardcore descriptivist such as myself, i did spend wednesday morning proofreading.

I’ve been having a slight … disagreement lately with my cell phone service provider over just what service, exactly, is specified in my (so-called) “service” plan.  Thus, no cell phone photos lately over on my Flickr, which has been making me sad for the past week or so.

Today i realized that more than making me sad, this sudden lack of an outlet for my (crappy cell phone) photos has also kept me from really feeling like taking photos.  Something extraordinarily cool came across my desk at work, and my 1st instinct was to take a photo.

Then i remembered, Oh, right, my phone can’t send photos to Flickr anymore.

Then i realized, Hey, stupid, that doesn’t mean you can’t still take a picture.

I was a little stunned to realize how integral Flickr photo-sharing has become to my phototaking.  But, then again, i think that i do actually write a little more now that i’ve been funneling my output into zines.  And i always write more poetry when i’m surrounded by poet friends who share their work with me and are eager to read and comment upon my work.

Maybe i actually do need an audience, a support group, a community.  Maybe, as introverted as i am, i’m just not good solo.  Maybe i’m not the hermit-artist i thought.

With Corflu only 2 months away, i’ve been feeling the urge to put out another zine.  It’s been 6 months since i put out Cipher 1 (8 months if you don’t mind counting the 2 months where it was finished and i couldn’t manage to drag myself to a photocopier to make some usable printing flats), so it’s a nice time — and a nice motivation — to get Cipher 2 published.

But the only way that will happen is if i can use all of february to do the layout, since that’s the part that always takes the longest because it’s what i’m worst at.  And the only way i’ll be doing layout in february …

Is if i spend all of january writing and editing.

Oh, dear.

I looked thru’ my drafts and ideas the other day and everything just felt so stale and dull.  And while i do tend to have ideas that i like while, say, i’m walking to work in the morning, i can never quite reclaim those ideas later in the day when i’m sitting in front of a computer or my paper notebook.

The biggest problem, as always, is that whenever i’m sitting in front of blank paper or a blank computer screen, my brain always feels as blank as the screen or paper.  It’s like pulling out the carrier to take a cat to the vet.

I think i’ll try to challenge myself this month:  Whether or not it results in Cipher 2, i need to look my blank paper problem in the face and stare it down.  I’m going to try to write or edit something a little bit every day.

I hope.

My most recent hangman word was pilcrow.

From  Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1971):

pil•crow \’pil,kro\ n -s [prob. alter. of ME pylcrafte, modif. of LL paragraphus -- more at PARAGRAPH] : a paragraph mark ¶

(Note that the “o” in the pronunciation above should have a bar over it, but i’m not sure how to reproduce that using symbols available to me on my computer.)

Which means that pilcrow is probably an alteration of the Middle English pylcrafte, which was a modification of the Late Latin paragraphus.  The Oxford English Dictionary does have citations starting at 1440 and including the following years: ?c1460, 1580, 1602, 1658, 1688, 1897, 1969, 1993.

From The Elements of Typographic Style (Bringhurst, Robert.  Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, 2002.):

An old scribal mark used at the beginning of a paragraph or main text section.  It is still used by typographers for that very purpose, and occasionally as a reference mark.  Well-designed faces offer pilcrows with some character [...] in preference to the over-used standard, ¶.

My office has a long-standing, ongoing hangman game. It’s a really fun way for an office full of language geeks to play around with words. And i do love working in an office full of other people who are as excited as i am when i find a really great language gem. So often once a hangman word has been solved we’ll stand there admiring it saying, literally, “Oooooh, that’s a good one!”

Our game was started almost a decade ago and the rules are simple: don’t duplicate a word, don’t misspell your word, and don’t care at all if you actually “hang” your “man.” We don’t play competitively — we don’t even keep any kind of score. Altho’ there have been a few times where it’s turned into a game of contact hangman when 2 people lunge for the board to put up the last letter at the same time. I’ve hip-checked coworkers a time or 2 because i’d suddenly realized what the word was and wanted to solve it before they did.

My favorite office hangman story is about the word “syzygy.” I used it the 1st year i was working here, but the person who was keeping track of the words at the time forgot to put it on the master list. So, about a year-and-a-half later, i used it again. The 1st time i used it we went thru’ almost all 26 letters of the alphabet before it was solved. The 2nd time i used it, the 1st coworker who wandered past the board decided to be a smartass and led off with “y.” D’oh! I dutifully filled it in so that the board looked like this: “_y_y_y” And i also added an note: “Curse you, Coworker V!!!” Another coworker wandered past, laughed hysterically, and added 3 guesses and a note: “szg”, “Thank you, Coworker V!”