A cactus and a vampire walk into a bar. The bartender can’t decide who’s the bigger prick.
***
Q.: What do you call a zombie with rod and reel?
A.: Hooked.
Filed under 2016, Monday morning writing joke
Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style
By DAN BILEFSKY
LONDON — One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying
The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age
David Crystal
The conspicuous omission of the period in text messages and in instant messaging on social media, he says, is a product of the punctuation-free staccato sentences favored by millennials — and increasingly their elders — a trend fueled by the freewheeling style of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter
“We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” Professor Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, said in an interview after he expounded on his view recently at the Hay Festival in Wales
“In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop,” he added “So why use it?”
In fact, the understated period — the punctuation equivalent of stagehands who dress in black to be less conspicuous — may have suddenly taken on meanings all its own
Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, whose books include “Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation,” the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, syntactic snark, insincerity, even aggression
If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit, six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to include a period when you respond “Fine.” to show annoyance
“Fine” or “Fine!,” in contrast, could denote acquiescence or blithe acceptance
“The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts,” Professor Crystal said “In the 1990s the internet created an ethos of linguistic free love where breaking the rules was encouraged and punctuation was one of the ways this could be done”
Social media sites have only intensified that sense of liberation
Professor Crystal’s observations on the fate of the period are driven in part by frequent visits to high schools across Britain, where he analyzes students’ text messages
Researchers at Binghamton University in New York and Rutgers University in New Jersey have also recently noted the period’s new semantic force
They asked 126 undergraduate students to review 16 exchanges, some in text messages, some in handwritten notes, that had one-word affirmative responses (Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup) Some had periods, while others did not
Those text message with periods were rated as less sincere, the study found, whereas it made no difference in the notes penned by hand
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter and the reading of messages on a cellphone or hand-held device has repurposed the punctuation mark
“It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” he said “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period’ It’s a mark It can be aggressive It can be emphatic It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’
Can ardent fans of punctuation take heart in any part of the period’s decline? Perhaps.
The shunning of the period, Professor Crystal said, has paradoxically been accompanied by spasms of overpunctuation
“If someone texts, ‘Are you coming to the party?’ the response,” he noted, was increasingly, “Yes, fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!”
But, of course, that exuberance would never be tolerated in a classroom
At the same time, he said he found that British teenagers were increasingly eschewing emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they had been adopted by their parents and were therefore considered “uncool”
Now all we need to know is, what’s next to go? The question mark
Parts is parts and even your innards are made of plastic. You have to ask yourself: “How recyclable am I these days?”
Filed under 2016, photo by David E. Booker, Photo Finish Friday
A thousand eyes long /
this river of ice and time /
we adventure in love.
Filed under 2016, haiku, Haiku to You Thursday
Some may be easier to avoid than others. For more tips, go to www.lawritersgroup.com.
Filed under 2016, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
P.I. Graham R. Gumshoe paused to consider his options; and punctuation;
Filed under 2016, cartoon by author, CarToonsday
Last words of A. Nonymous
Here lies the brokenhearted.
After a love spat, he departed.
Shuffled off this mortal coil.
Now he lies beneath this soil.
A struggling writer he once was,
but you never heard of him because….
Filed under 2016, Monday morning writing joke, poetry by author
It is time, once again, for New words to live by. This is a word or phrase not currently in use in the U.S. English lexicon, but might need to be considered. Other words, such as obsurd, crumpify, subsus, flib, congressed, and others, can be found by clicking on the tags below. Today’s New Word is a compounding of two nouns into a new word. Without further waiting, hypocrassy (hypocrisy + crass) is the new word for this month.
OLD WORDS
Hypocrisy, n. 1. A person pretending to have moral or religious beliefs, principles, or a virtuous nature that he or she does not possess. In other words, a pretense toward something virtuous. 2. An instance or act of hypocrisy.
Crass, n. 1. Devoid of delicacy, sensitivity, or refinement. Also known as gross, stupid, obtuse.
NEW WORD
Hypocrassy, n. 1. A person pretending to have moral or religious beliefs, principles, and is devoid of delicacy, sensitivity, or refinement. In other words, he or she will repeat a lie even when told it is a lie or knows it is a lie in an effort to make the lie the “known truth.” Also, a group of supposedly virtuous people all promoting the same lack of moral or religious judgment.
Example:
A certain U.S. presidential candidate who continues saying he’s going to build a wall along the Mexican border and is going to make the Mexicans pay for it, and that the wall will keep undocumented immigrants out of the United States. And because he is, a judge of Mexican decent can’t officiate at a trial that involves one of the candidate’s many failed enterprises.
Filed under 2016, new word, New words to live by
James Patterson Would Like You to Read
By Troy Patterson
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/james-patterson-would-like-you-to-read?mbid=rss
Author James Patterson would like you to read.
Patterson became the best-selling novelist of the twenty-first century on the strength of his superlative skills as an adman—his knack for the art of the sale, his gift for managing creative talent. Relying on a retinue of co-authors, he is the chief executive of an unsleeping pulp mill perpetually boosting capacity. He has placed nineteen books on the Times’ best-seller lists since January. He has three hundred and twenty-five million books in print and an annual income of something like ninety million dollars. He has a new pitch.
One recent afternoon, Patterson summoned this interviewer (no relation) to an expense-account joint in midtown. He inhabited his corner banquette with no airs, drank his Diet Coke with mild thirst, and spoke with a lot of Hudson Valley in his voice. Patterson was born sixty-nine years ago in Newburgh, New York—the town across from Beacon on the wrong side of the river—and his accent did something untranscribable when he mentioned his filing drawers. The drawers are in the home office at his winter palace, in Palm Beach. Very deep, they hold a hundred and seventeen fresh manuscripts, slender but all good to go.
Patterson has enticed Hachette Book Group to grant him reign over a new imprint called BookShots. Each volume runs twenty-five to thirty thousand words, or a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and fifty pages, or somewhere between one full “Double Indemnity” and two-thirds a “Gatsby.” Tolstoy is a full meal; Turgenev is a fabulous dessert; a BookShot is a bag of Funyuns. “We have this convention of the novel that you have to know everything about the frigging characters,” Patterson said. “Like: What? You know, a lot of people don’t know their spouses that well.”
Patterson “grew up being a little literary snob” who matured into knowing his limits. “At a certain point, it occurred to me I couldn’t write ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ but at that point I read ‘The Day of the Jackal.’ “ This he could maybe manage. He settled on a practical poetics: “Action reveals character even more than ‘bullshit, bullshit, bullshit’ in our heads.” BookShots is the natural extension of this philosophy. Why muck around with interiority? Why must a mass-market paperback aspire to the thickness of a foam travel pillow? Why not test the demand for low-commitment narratives priced at five dollars a hit? “I’m certainly not trying to break any new ground in terms of the structure of the novel,” Patterson said. “I just find that less seems to be more.”
One of the first BookShots—published this week, precisely a year after Patterson presented the concept—is “Cross Kill.” An installment of Patterson’s Alex Cross series, it is one of the few productions to flow from his solitary pen. Controlled prose, confirmed audience, a first printing of five hundred thousand copies, great. And Patterson plainly relishes collaborating with reporters on a true-crime horror show, titled “Filthy Rich,” about the highly affluent sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. But most often he farms out the word processing to co-authors, who receive detailed outlines and send back work that ranges in quality from vibrant schlock to hectic dreck. He’s also curating a BookShots Flames series for readers who crave to imagine the love shared by, say, an Appletini-tippling city gal and a rodeo cowboy named Tanner. “I came up with title for that one,” Patterson said. The title for that one is “Learning to Ride.”
When I asked what inspired BookShots, Patterson said, “I was kinda blocked,” using the word in an awesome caricature of the opposite of its usual sense. He published seventeen books in 2015. Only seventeen! With all his ideas and his infrastructure? With so many pots potentially boiling in his institutional kitchen?! Hachette is scheduled to published twenty-three BookShots in 2016, plus fifteen other Patterson titles. These numbers are open to upward revision.
“My hope is that it increases the habit of reading,” Patterson said. He is sincere in this goal, which aligns both with his philanthropic support of literacy and his personal gripes about the electorate’s analytic skills. “We have this country of nincompoops now.” It is discouraging, for instance, to see the populace swayed by political promises of mass deportations: “Like thirty million cops come to their homes and walk them across the Rio Grande? I mean, stop it already.” (I wondered if the author still golfs at the Trump course in West Palm. “Yeah, I do sometimes,” he said. “I go there to golf, not to vote.”) “You go to Sweden”—a country of ten million people—“and they have books that sell a million copies there. Gas stations sell books. It’s good for people.”
When I wondered about Patterson’s commercial hopes for the new project, he evaded the question quite suavely. “You know, I remember a long time ago—uh, who’s the ‘Star Wars’ guy?” George Lucas? “Yeah, I met him a really long time ago, and we were talking about his idea of success, and he said, ‘My thing is, I just keep pushing the rock up the steep hill, and as long as I feel like I keep going up the hill it’s good.’ You know, same thing.”
“You do what you can do,” Patterson said. “I’m not an empire builder.”
Filed under 2016, book publishing, books
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