to watch out for spelling eros

It’s 1:30 AM and I am grading papers—writing is glamorous!   Then along comes this:

I was invited back in the future.

I want to write an entire piece composed of sentences like that.

The Well-Tempered Exclamation Point: Examples Of Fine Internet Style

Because ‘blizzard’ clearly can’t convey the extent of snow and wind that confronts us.

‘Blizzard’ is such an awesome word—the punch of the ‘b,’ the white-out fuzz of the double ‘z’…  Blizzards were the best parts of the Little House series, when they got to play word games by the potbellied stove and had to go between buildings by rope.  Also: starvation!  Blizzards will kick your a**! We have Blizzard of 1888 to thank for buried utility cables in New York City:

English teachers of America, where did we go wrong?  How can anyone pass up an opportunity to say ‘blizzard’?  Say it today!

(AccuWeather quote via)

I’m mostly glad to be writing fiction in English because it’s enriched by many influences and unusually willing or able to absorb new ones (no Académie française, flexible syntax).  Then there’s this, from Tim Parks in the New York Review Of Books Blog:

we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go toward it than away from it.

Parks has some interesting thoughts on the consequences of this on what’s being written.

How much do you consider your audience when writing?  My only attempts at novels so far have foundered too early to say whether audience considerations played any role in their failure.  When writing stories, I’m conscious of techniques or subject other writers would have used in similar situations, but my attention is primarily consumed with sculpting my idea into English, and pulling the short story form to fit it.  I’ve only idly considered how my prose would be rendered in translation.

To a degree, those of us writing in English are still cashing in on the legacy of the British Empire, the American effort in World War Two, and DARPA.

Oh paper of record, how you keep us on our proverbial toes.  I’m a day late on this, but Stanley Fish’s close reading of the Supreme Court opinions is the smartest thing I’ve read about the Citizens United case.  And Gail Collins… we love Gail Collins, especially in full attack mode on the federal budget shenanigans:

Before the budget document even went out, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York had issued a scathing press release attacking plans to eliminate $5 million in grants to manufacturers of worsted wool.

“I will fight to make sure this proposal never sees the light of day,” said Schumer, who claimed that dropping the grants could ruin “Rochester’s iconic Hickey Freeman,” a men’s clothing company. It turned out that Hickey Freeman gets a different wool-manufacturer break entirely. Rochester is saved!

My own favorite target for extinction is a $9 million annual appropriation for museums and educational programs that highlight the “shared culture and tradition” of Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and “children and families of Massachusetts.”

In other words, whaling.

This was originally the idea of Ted Kennedy and two colleagues from Alaska and Hawaii. Perhaps they had all just finished rereading “Moby-Dick” in a Senate book club.

Arr!  Man the braces!  However, in the same edition as Fish’s piece, the editors let this modifier dangle (since corrected):

Not the place for accidental humor.  English class is the place for accidental humor.  This is the example I use:

Before you feed meat to your dog, be sure to chop it up into little pieces.

- Marc Ambinder

What would our political situation be like, what kind of leaders would we elect, if parliamentary-style debate was par for the course?  Obama speaks to the House GOP retreat:

and takes questions:

CSPAN coverage (video) here.

Listening to Garry Wills talk with Terry Gross about his new book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, it occurred to me how quaint the words “mobilize” and “demobilize” have come to sound—dusty, steam-powered, telegraphed to generals on horseback from pre-autobahn Berlin and Paris before the first Coco cut the first little black dress.  Quaint because here in the U.S. we have never truly demobilized from World War Two (the National Guard is called up, but the security apparatus never stands down).  This is of course not news, and as Wills says, it’s largely a settled affair.  It still unnerves me to see it reflected in our language.

Blinded By Delight?

Apartment Therapy Media describes itself as “the ultimate online destination for all things home” with a a reach of over 3 million unique visitors per month. It was also recently hailed as the #1 Design Blog by The Times of London. Having seen Jesse Lu’s recent call-out of AT on Everyday Object and considering its regrettable campaign of championing Knitta, Please [ed: !?!?] in 2006, 2008 and 2009, I wanted to take a comprehensive look at how this important site has treated race and class, [and point out] a history of problematic posts.

Via abbyjean: one grand home, a nuanced post on a fraught topic.

I think what often makes instances of insensitivity so difficult to discuss is that those giving offense are insensitive in the most literal sense—unable to perceive what might trouble others about their comments.  And often the offending significance isn’t in the words themselves so much as in how we understand them in combination.  Words are rarely ‘just the facts,’ especially when describing people.  One could point to an offending statement and say, “I didn’t say anything that isn’t true.”  But the devil is in what’s unsaid.

In the example that struck me most, one word throws off the meaning of the entire post:

I recently bought a couch from a lovely Indian couple off of Craigslist. The couch is perfect except for the fact that the couch smells like curry. What would be the most cost effective thing for me to do to get rid of the smell?

Never mind the grating “off of.”  The first sentence on its own is problematic mostly because it’s in a public forum.  Mentioning that the couple was Indian implies that the writer and reader both are not Indian.  That carries a further assumption: that the reader needs to have it emphasized that the Indian couple were “lovely”; that otherwise “Indian” might be understood as an aspersion.  Were the sentence spoken or written in private, from one non-Indian to another, I don’t think these implications would hold.  The adjectives would be neutralized; the speaker/writer’s words would be read less as calibrations to attitudes assumed of his/her audience than as description.  But in its public context the sentence implies a shared set of associations precisely by responding to what it doesn’t state.

The second two sentences without the first would be unremarkable.  Curry is a distinctive odor; if your dwelling doesn’t otherwise smell of it, it’s reasonable to want to keep it that way.  But the mention of “Indian” in the first sentence makes the entire post into a restatement of a generalization (“Indians smell like curry”)—again—precisely because the post doesn’t feel the need to state the generalization.  A further generalization is implied: that it’s not usual (read: normal) to smell like curry.  I can just hear my older relatives saying, “Well, it’s not.”  Which for my family is true.  But the words’ significance, their larger “aboutness,” as we sometimes say in the lit biz, depends on who’s speaking/writing, and who’s reading/listening.  On a web site with three million page views/month they have a different significance and reach than when said between, say, two relatives.

I don’t mean that we should rejoice (in this case) in second-hand cooking smells.  In fact in the evening I often write in my kitchen rather than in my study because of the garlic and booming conversation from downstairs.  But by reproducing its reader’s question verbatim and with no commentary except “we love curry,” AT not only affirms clichés about its subjects but makes assumptions about its readers.  Which is particularly disappointing; design is supposedly about attention to every detail, and about such attention making life more rewarding.  That shouldn’t exclude anyone.

…they can write things like Anthony Lane’s delightful piece on Grace Kelly:

A home movie exists of the children at play, on a beach—perhaps at the family vacation home in Ocean City, New Jersey. The children, in bathing costumes, are still small, and each is summoned forth to face the camera and salute, as if being a Kelly were a form of active service. When in Rome, you can see the movie for yourself; just wander down the Via del Corso and duck into the Fondazione Memmo, where an exhibition entitled “Gli Anni di Grace Kelly, Principessa di Monaco” is showing till the end of February.

“When in Rome” is classic Lane.  He knows that we know the figure of speech is threadbare.  But he intends it literally.  The conceit that we just might happen through Rome shows up the cliché’s absurdity—as if we know how to behave when in Rome, or what the Romans do.  Lane also has fun with the sober conventions of exhibitions and exhibition reviews, mashing up details with the kind of language travelogues use to let us know they’re having oh-so-much fun with no effort at all—just “wander” here and “duck in” there and it’ll be splendid, darling, splendid.  He’s like a verbal bullfighter, flourishing his allusion, leading us where he wills.