The Passive Voice Is To Be Avoided At All Costs

Perhaps this isn't a common experience, but I certainly grew up hearing from myriad sources, ranging from teachers to inspirational-quotes-for-writers type lists* that anyone wishing to write effectively absolutely must avoid the passive voice.  Scratch out all your to-be's, forget about "was".   Such mainstays of the English language will doom your style to a lifetime of stodgy mediocrity without hope of respite!

Of course, it's not so simple as that.  Teachers, I have come to believe, instil this message in a desperate last gamble to get recalcitrant students to actually think about writing rather than doing the bare minimum so they can move on to whatever else catches their interest.  Despite my own passion for language, I succumbed to this just as often as any jock or hardcore gamer.  Love writing? Sure!  Love writing for English class? If you believe that, I've got a unicorn to sell you.

I can't blame them for that.  It's ridiculously easy to succumb to temptation and write the same basic sentence structure over and over, and, technically, it isn't wrong; it expresses a coherent thought in a properly structured manner that allows for easy interpretation.  However, it's boring.  Every sentence sounds the same.  It's the verbal equivalent of one of those cookie-cutter suburbs where every single house is exactly like every other house, except maybe mirrored or painted a different colour.  Functional, sure - interesting, no.  The viewer rapidly loses interest.

If the viewer is, say, a teacher, and can't just stop reading, they soon find themselves under the influence of a rising urge to leap out a window to escape the mind-numbing boredom.  It's not just that the sentences are all alike; it's that -and this is where the writerly-advice people who aren't teachers step in - that likeness arises from a structure that sets the reader back a pace.

It's important, here, to reflect upon the fact that names (usually) signify something about the object or concept named.  Sentences like "the car was washed by Jason and his little sister"  and "the moors were silvery green shaded with purple sage, stretching into the distance until rising fog obscured them" force the reader to take a step back.  In other words, they make you take a passive role.  You're the observer.  You have to take time to think about the subject of the sentence, rather than the action - the sentence isn't about Jason and his sister washing the car.  It's about the car.

The crux of the matter is that passive voice isn't bad.  It's passive.  And sometimes that's okay.  Despite the Western world's focus on constantly running around doing things, it's healthy to take time to look at the scenery, sit and watch the rain, or otherwise just be.  Similarly, in writing, it doesn't have to be all action, all the time.  That starts to sound exactly the same too, and action loses its excitement.  Also, some sentences just work better in passive voice.

It's the whole verbal contortionism thing.  If you have to convolute that poor sentence into some unholy pretzel of words to avoid the passive voice, then please don't bother.  Otherwise, use your discretion.  If you want to slow the pace, set a scene, create a peaceful mood, feel free to use the passive voice, not to the exclusion of all else, but certainly not solely as a last resort if there's no other way to make the sentence work.  Conversely, if you're aiming to speed up the writing, build tension, or write a fast-paced action scene...yeah, go ahead and avoid the passive voice as much as possible.

* For greater authenticity, insert the expletive of your choice.

What's In a Comma?

A phrase, by any other mark,
would parse as well!

Convoluted attempts at any form of verse aside, I know I've talked about commas before.  Specifically, I got on a spiel about the pros and cons of the notorious Oxford comma, and left it at that.   I blame it on that whole frustrating deal where I keep having faith in humanity, thinking you lot can be trusted with basic punctuation - but no.  I just can't leave you alone for five minutes, or you'll come up with something like THIS:

"Employees must use proper hygiene - come in clean clothes, freshly showered with deodorant."

Let's just take a moment to digest this one.  "Come in clean clothes, freshly showered with deodorant."  According to this sign - displayed at the restaurant where I work on weekends - cooks and waitstaff must wear clothes that are a) clean and b) freshly showered with deodorant.  Even if this wasn't self-contradictory (if you shower something in deodorant, it's no longer clean!  It's covered in friggen' deodorant!) it would make absolutely no sense.  Clothes don't sweat.

What sweats? People sweat.  Well, okay, lots of mammals sweat, but they don't wear clothes or work at restaurants.  Okay, so employees must come to work freshly showered - this makes sense, but - freshly showered in deodorant.  That's disgusting just to think about!  Have you ever gotten that stuff in your mouth?  Ughhh.   And it would cake and scale and itch and...

Deep breaths.  Okay.  I'm all right.

Where were we?  Commas!  Right.  Commas.  All of this - see the above - could have been prevented with a single comma!  See the space between "showered" and "with?"  Just slip a comma in there, and we're good to go, free of bizarre implications.  You must come to work in clean clothes; you must be freshly showered; and you must wear deodorant.

The fact that it was necessary to tell people this is another story, but at least the sentence structure works.  It's really amazing, what a difference one tiny mark can make.  The comma itself is tiny, but it entirely changes the meaning of the sentence; my boss and her husband get a pass, as they're ESL, and self-taught at that, but I know they request native English-speaking employees to double-check anything they write, and we're all college graduates.

This leads to yet another rule of thumb: if you're going to make use of an editor, make sure the editor's competent.  Oh, and, another: if you have any question about a sentence, read it aloud, and if it doesn't make sense, figure out why, change it, and try again.

Do YOU Get in the Fridge?

Sentences are funny.  Not all of them, obviously, nor even most, but rather the definition of sentences as a whole - namely, words put together to express a thought.  This can be a complicated thought with lots of dependent clauses and semicolons and assorted other linguistic shenanigans, or it can be as straightforward as "I like boats."  Either way, there it is; a thought, put to words, or words put to a thought, depending on which way your mental processes work.

The funny part is that while you've definitely taken a thought, and phrased it verbally, and written or spoken those words, it might not say what you want it to.  You can make a perfectly coherent sentence, the other person may hear or read it exactly right, and yet the meaning they get is entirely independent of what you were trying to say.

"Jason washed the car with his little sister" makes sense, in your brain, as a communication that your friend and his younger sibling cleaned the family automobile.  As soon as you say it, though, whoever you're talking to gives you a look as they try to figure out how Jason managed to use his little sister as a sponge without getting kicked in the face and, moreover, why.

In a really stellar personal example, I recently turned to my mother and, gesturing at our newly-acquired kitten, asked "Does he try to get into the fridge with you, too?"

"He might, if I ever got in the fridge!" she answered.  A thoughtful pause ensued before it sunk in that what I'd asked her was not what she'd answered, and commenced snickering helplessly.  The ridiculous thing is that I then proceeded to reword it several times, in various different ways, before landing on one that did not imply that I regularly crawl into kitchen appliances.

Properly-constructed sentences that say something completely off-base are the grown-up cousin of typing the wrong word, and even harder to catch.  In speaking, it's usually not too big a deal, but in writing, it's yet further proof (no pun intended) that double-checking your work is vital to not sticking your foot in your mouth.

If you have time, I'd recommend letting it sit for a few days to a week, then going back and re-reading your work.  To catch errors poses a far easier task if the minutiae aren't fresh on your mind - when you write something, you're transcribing words as your brain arranges them, so you know exactly what you mean.  Three days or a week later, you will have forgotten, and so the odd turns of phrase and the sentences that just don't say what they're supposed to will jump out at you.

If you can't afford time, but you can afford money, can I safely assume you'll hire me?  That would be awesome, you know.  I promise not to laugh if you accidentally inform me that you get in the fridge.

Never Trust a Prefix

One of my favourite aspects of language is the peculiar logic of it.  It's more like architecture than math; while lacking in algorithms and precise, right-or-wrong answers, it does rely on structure - you can build a house of materials ranging from paper to granite, but certain things have to be in place to keep it from falling into a formless heap and, with a base of knowledge and application of sense, you can pretty well figure out what various objects are for.  Language is the same way, with its parts of speech, marks of punctuation, prefixes and suffixes, and so on.

And then, for no apparent reason, it throws you a curveball.  It all makes sense, right up until you get something like "inflammable."  "In-" is a suffix usually meaning "not."  Someone who is insane isn't sane; they might be incoherent, too, because coherency, or intelligible diction, usually comes from a well-ordered mind.  So it seems that, if "flammable" means "readily set on fire," "inflammable" would mean "fireproof."

Except that it doesn't.  Why this is the case I have no idea.  It has, however, held a prominent place in  my awareness since the ripe old age of three, thanks to a family friend and neighbour.   Ray was, and presumably still is, a fantastic person - warm, kind, generous, hard-working, and funny.  She lived next door to us with her husband and two grandsons, aged eight and three, whom she and her husband had taken on after their daughter's mental illness took a turn for the worse.  Having another kid underfoot didn't really seem to bother her, so I spent a lot of time over there, convincing Stephan, the younger grandson, to eat insects.*

Mind Your To's and Two's

Like any self-respecting nerd, I spend a lot of time on the internet.  Since I'm not much of a gamer, a fair bit of this time passes in the noble pursuit of snickering derangedly at the World Wide Web's myriad proofs of what a varied and bizarre world this is.

In other words, I really like funny blogs.  One of my favourites is Cake Wrecks, even if it contributes to my constant desire to eat everything that holds still long enough.  It makes up for this by reliably making me laugh uproariously.  On the other hand, it also reliably kills any tender sprig of faith in humanity, or at least humanity's grasp of basic grammar, that might have sprouted over the week.  Of the repeat offenders, one of the worst is "too/to/two."

Tempting though it might be to say "it's an incompetent baker thing" and leave it at that, it isn't.  This confusion crops up everywhere.  People will advertise their businesses in crowded public spaces using the wrong freaking word!

At least part of the reason for this ubiquitous error, I lay at the door of spell check.  In most regards, it's a life-saver, or at least a dignity-saver and/or coherence-saver.  The exception, as I've previously mentioned, comes up when you type the wrong word.  It's a word! It's spelled right!  It just makes no sense, and spell check, not being actually sapient, can't tell.  The typist, who relies on spell check, in turn doesn't catch the mistake because it isn't red-underlined, annnnd there you go.

What on Earth is a Gife?!: Or, Why Fonts are Important

"Gife Begins in the Garden," proclaims the sign posted in a place of pride in the well-tended flowerbed of a woman whose paper I deliver.  In testament to my stellar observational skills, it somehow took me until yesterday to notice this, whereupon I stood there and stared at it for a good minute and a half while the busily whirring gears of my brain ground to a halt and made weird ka-chunk noises in an attempt to process this.

I couldn't help thinking of my mum's story of her first encounter with a nutria (a very large rodent of South American origins) in Portland; there she sat in her car, overcome with shocked indignation that someone had up and invented an animal and not told her!  That's about how I felt about this.  When had this mysterious word come into being?  Who could be held responsible? Most importantly, what on earth did it MEAN?!  The garden's owner holds some pretty extreme political and religious beliefs on the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.  Perhaps, I thought, it might be some form of jargon, not necessarily political or religious but gardening-related.

Either way, her car's place in the driveway was empty, and besides, its not exactly good form to knock on someone's door just to ask what a sign in their flowerbed means.  At last I resigned myself to mystery, picked up my newspaper bag, and moved on.

Idio(t)ms, Part II

"It's always the last place you look!"

No kidding, Dad.  Once I've found it, whatever "it" happens to be, why on earth would I keep looking for it?  Of course, that's not what the saying means; that's what it says, though.  In all honesty, I would have happily drifted through life never questioning that "it's always the last place you look" means "it's always the last place you think to look," with no need for clarification, if my mother hadn't pointed it out to me.

Evidently, her own dad really wound her up with this sometime in her seventh year of life or thereabouts.  Winding her up is pretty easy - we're talking about a woman whose capacity for indignation extends to the laws of physics.  The sources of her indignation, however, usually make sense, even if they're nothing that any human being anywhere can do a damn thing to change.

Why Are Thursdays?

"I could never get the hang of Thursdays," gripes one of the main characters of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Surprising though this may be, I've never had my house or planet levelled by bureaucrats, my best friend isn't an alien, and I don't always know where my towel is, because sometimes I hide things from myself for reasons that elude me.  I think maybe I do it to keep my life interesting.

Mr. Dent and I agree resoundingly on the subject of Thursdays, though.  There's probably some rational reason for their frequently frustrating, irritating, depressing, or just plain weird nature; four days into a five-day week, you're tired enough to err more often and for things to get to you more easily, but one more weekday remains between you and the light at the end of the tunnel.*

That's all fine and good. Rationality, yay!  Rationality, I maintain, doesn't really  begin to explain them, though.  Just as some people need God to reconcile themselves with the world, I need to believe that Thursdays are the world's way of telling people to take a long rock off a short pier.   Planning on having a productive and satisfying day on which you do not unwittingly dry your private parts with a large spider or discover that one of your customers apparently doesn't exist? Ha-ha, good luck, sucker!  It's THURSDAY.

Angst, Delicious Angst!

Once upon a time, someone whose opinion I valued highly told me "You'll be a very nice person, if you ever stop being so self-centred." She was right, on all counts; as an adolescent I, like many people my age, did tend to think about myself to excess - not in a positive light, necessarily, and indeed often negatively but there was this constant stream of thinking about myself.  And it needed to stop.  This is part of growing up.

However, to a self-loathing eighteen-year-old, this hurt like a...well, you know.  That sting still lingers.  For a long time, I think it made me even more self-centred because I spent so much time worrying about being self-centred.  Yeah.  Logical.  I know.

In this, as in many things, my girlfriend had some words of wisdom.  She didn't intend them to be about me, but rather about herself.

"Yeah, I'm self-centred.  I'm not selfish.  I just sort of worry about my own problems, because I know about them, because I'm there, but that doesn't mean I don't care about anyone else's or think I'm better than them."

Hope is a Fuel

The concept of hope, like the stylized heart symbol, crops up so often in Hallmark cards, inspirational posters, and mealy-mouthed platitudes that for a long time, I got really sick of it.  This stemmed in part from the frequency with which I'd seen people act like simply hoping was enough - as if resolve, determination, planning, and working your butt off are just sort of incidental.  Combined with a long streak of things seldom going well, and I'd pretty firmly adopted the opinion that hope is a load of bunk.

That's not to say I went swimming in the Slough of Despond of anything.  Well, I did, sort of, but that was mostly unrelated.  Oh no, I stuck to bitter pragmatism; get a goal in mind and work on it, and either you'll succeed or you won't.  Hope is for pansies!  The nice thing about being a fatalist, I told people, is that not only do you avoid disappointment, you even get a pleasant surprise now and then.

"Yeah," my girlfriend told me, "but it's a lot glummer along the way."

The Saga of Jack Long

Generally speaking, newspaper delivery is a fairly easy job - time-consuming, yes; potentially tedious, in a locale less breathtaking than mine, but easy enough for junior high students to do it.  My specific routes are trickier, since they include the majority of downtown Small City, OR, and thus a great many stairs, apartment buildings, bars, etc and so on.  It's illegal for anyone under 21 to do this route, which I guess nobody I deliver to is really aware of, since the general consensus on my age seems to be "he's about eighteen."

However, having had since April to learn it, I can very nearly do the route in my sleep.  Sure, sometimes people will add or drop, but that's par for the course and you just have to keep an eye on your delivery list.  I can say without bragging that I'm a damn good newsboy.

Annnnnnnnd then there's Jack Long*.  Jack Long's entry on my delivery list said he lived in Mint Chocolate Chip Apartments (the insides are mint green, with dark wood accents,) though it did say that MCCA could be found on block 15 when I know it's on block 14.  Still, small change.  Typos happen. MCCA has a reputation for weirdness, anyway - there's one customer whose door I'd slid the paper under every day since the office actually saw fit to notify me that she'd renewed her prescription, who insisted that someone stole it out from under her door.  I'm pretty sure one of the residents is a wizard.  That is all beside the point.

By Any Other Name

Names are odd.  So is the fact that I think names are odd, but so it goes.  Well, perhaps not odd, but certainly interesting - a lot of stories, from folklore to published novels, hold that names have power.  In my favourite series of novels, everyone in the world in which the books are set has a true name which they only tell to their closest friends, relatives and lovers.

Though best used in this series, it's a pretty common thread, and real life experience seems, to a degree, to bear it out.  People get tetchy about their names, even, or especially, the weird ones.  I'm fine with any variation on Christopher - Kit, Cat, Chris, etc - but heaven forbid you misspell Ashlygh, who says her name just like Ashley.  Furthermore, certain names seem to go with certain sorts of people.  My fiancee informed me about seven months ago that she and her brother use Chad as a synonym for "douchebag."  Having not really met a Chad, but seen lots and lots of references to Chad as a dipstick guido name, I agreed with her.

Since then I've met three Chads.  They've all been quite good company and thoroughly decent human beings, and not one of them wore orange skin or a popped collar.  Stranger yet, I've also met a Brian whose mere presence doesn't remind me why German has a word translating to "a face in need of punching."  As a matter of fact, I actually like the guy, and not just because he has a dog named Boo who looks almost exactly like George Harrison, except four-footed, somewhat hairier, and not dead.  Every other Brian/Bryan/Ryan I've met has redefined "pain in the butt."  Same goes for Angelas/Angelicas/Angies - right up until a friend of my mum's.

Relax - You're not Completely Screwed

I recently started up at another part-time job as waiter at a teriyaki restaurant.  While I've worked in food service before, this is my first time both as a waiter and at someplace that is neither a cafe nor a fast food joint.  Everything's going really well, except for the fact that I come up with extra on the register when closing out every evening because I, a college graduate in his mid-twenties, can't friggen' count.  As a matter of fact, things are going well enough that my awesome boss has decided to train me in the kitchen.

This came up sort of out of the blue.  We found ourselves conversing (a bit brokenly, as she's a Peruvian immigrant and the extent of my non-English linguistic skills is Terrible Pidgin French) during a lull at work and it came to light that she's looking for someone to train in the kitchens, aside from her two current cooks, so that she doesn't have to work seven days a week.  Genius that I am, I immediately volunteered. Hey, it's more hours!  And maybe even not in nine-hour blocks on Sundays!

Water

"Oh holy crap, there's water! Just sitting there, being water!"

My fiancee and her mother burst out laughing as we cruised down one of the main streets of her Illinois hometown.  If I'd been a normal human being, I probably would have turned beet-red, but since I'm some sort of alien I just patted myself on the back for having successfully, if inadvertently, amused people.  And it really was inadvertent.  After spending nineteen of my twenty-one years, including the entirety of the last decade, in New Mexico, the sight of a large pond just...being a large pond...came as a sort of revelation.

And then, a year and a half later, I moved to western Oregon.  Oregon is one of those fantastic places that includes pretty much every kind of ecosystem - there's the high deserts of the east, the rainforest, the coast, and so on, but this was Portland, roughly the greenest, trees-iest city known to man.  It's like living in Lothlorien or something, but with more hipsters.  My poor little desert brain is still reeling, and I like it that way.

Difference of Opinion

Today's rant du jour centers on the concept that, apparently contrary to popular belief, you're allowed to enjoy something obscure or unpopular without being a snob about it; conversely, you can not enjoy something that is popular without spoiling it for everyone else!  To take an easy and self-centered example, because I'm a generous soul, let's talk about weather.

So, how 'bout this rain we've been having lately?

I kid, I kid.  Mostly.  As a newspaper carrier, I get so much small talk about what the sky's been doing that I could, and frequently do, chatter inanely about meteorological shenanigans in my sleep.   Much of it consists of people kvetching about the rain and me listening and making sympathetic noises.  Alternately, when the clouds part, there's a lot of "Well, at least it isn't raining on you today!" to which I smile and make noises of agreement and sometimes, if the customer is one I talk with fairly frequently, and the weather's been not only clear but warm, make some wry comment about my readiness to trade heat for rain.

The Importance of Syntax

Every weekday, I deliver the shockingly abysmal local newspaper to most of downtown, including the big brick building housing the municipal offices, public health centre, etc.  The latter deals largely with check-ups and vaccines and, outside it, is this big folding table with literature in English and Spanish on a variety of issues ranging from diabetes to why it's a good idea to vaccinate your children (seriously, Precious will NOT get autism!  And if by some weird fluke she does, it's a hell of a lot better than dying!) to STIs.

This literature takes the form of pamphlets, posters, and the occasional small booklet.  For my own sanity, I ought not look at these things.  They're not as awful as I at first feared them to be - some folks obviously sprayed them with punctuation grapeshot, but that's about it and, sadly, that's far better than I've come to expect out of anything short of a professionally published book.*

Cults of Negativity

I've noticed something very odd about elderly women and signs.  It's hard not to, with my newspaper carrier job - both old ladies and signs are pretty ubiquitous and by extension, so are little old ladies with signs.  Some of the signs actually make me cackle: signs like the weathered wooden arrow pointing the way to Memory Loss Lane, or the notification hanging on an apartment door, when the tenant's taking a nap, which reads "Do not disturb the already disturbed.  The rest of your life is your choice."

Then there's the inspirational type signs, about believing in miracles and various religious figures' affection for whoever's reading the sign and so on.  Kittens clinging to branches, captioned "Hang in there!"  That sort of thing.

Internet

Earlier this spring, my family and I got a new modem. Like so much else in our big red Victorian house, the previous one could best be described as “ancient.” We may have inherited it from the previous owners; I'm not clear on that point, and it's a moot one anyway. However, I'll allow that if we did inherit it, so did they – probably from whoever built the house, back in 1873. The relevant point is that we're renovating. The place has been swarming with contractors for about a year, we've replaced the dishwasher, we've purchased a new washer and dryer, our old water heater has gone to the great basement in the sky, and the cats even do their business in a recently purchased litter box. Despite the fact that half the new appliances have worked worse than their predecessors, my dearly beloved grandfather decided it was the modem's turn.

We've had hardly a day of reliable internet ever since. This bites, because all three of us do a lot of business on the web, and Mum and I have friends and, in my case, a significant other thousands of miles away. I'll be tooling along applying for jobs, working on the blogs, etc and Mum downstairs paying bills and suddenly, splchhht!, no more internet. I think it's giving my poor girlfriend an ulcer. Mum's bank account is losing weight at an alarming rate, thanks to the ISP-tapeworm feeding off of it.

Mornings

Once upon a time, my mum – Texas Mum, that is – told me it was no wonder she'd been sick since, it turned out, she was full of puke. A few years previously, Dad explained that his antipathy toward France sprung from its being chock full of French people. By similar logic, I wouldn't mind mornings half so much if they didn't happen so friggen' early.

That's not even sarcastic! Mornings are beautiful. Sunrise has a different cast to it than sunset, the colours more silvery, the sky more akin to moonstone than opal as first light tiptoes over the land and dances glittering across the mouth of the Columbia river. On rainy mornings, the trees sing to each other in whispers and the frog in my neighbour's pond sings the amphibian blues. The air itself is bright with the scent of green, growing things and spicy-sweet with spring flowers and the burgeoning sunlight sets the red, blue and white cargo ships aglow. Early mist makes the distant hills of the Coastal Range look like the layered ivory of a cameo portrait and gulls flying high catch, on their long white wings, bright golden sunlight that has yet to reach lower altitudes.

It's Just a Story

"I mean, why bother getting so passionate about it?"  My classmate, Jasmine*, gave me the sort of look that usually indicates one has sprouted extra appendages.  "It's just a story. None of these people are real."

"Man, you get so into your fake stories.  Why don't you watch football, or somethin' real?"  Two years didn't change the look any, nor did seeing it on a different face.  It's a look I'd grown up with and, by the ripe old age of eighteen, I would have found its familiarity reassuring if it wasn't so blindingly frustrating.  These were nice people...okay, well, the co-worker was.  They just had different hobbies and interests and that's wonderful, since a homogeneous world would redefine bland.

This didn't make it any less frustrating.  How on earth did I explain to these people, casual acquaintances with whom I worked on a daily basis, why one of the most important things in my life isn't as silly as it sounds?  Perhaps more importantly, how could I do so without sounding like the sort of pompous nitwit whose explanations backfire horribly and make everyone involved feel like a tool?  At last, I've found an answer!

Irony of Ironies

Making fun of hipsters is even more old hat than hackneyed cliches.  Everybody does it - even, I'm sure, hipsters, whatever that means in the ever-expanding circle of satire.  Why yes, I've indulged in it on here, but even that glowing endorsement doesn't fully refresh the years of mockery.  Nonetheless, today I am here to talk about hipsters.  Sort of.  Please note that I said "talk about," not "make fun of;" first, because this is more a kvetch than a sarcasm, and second, because  I'm a skinny white guy who lives in Oregon, drinks a lot of coffee, and runs two blogs.  That's gotta be a few hundred Hipster Points right there, even if my knowledge of obscure indie bands desperately needs polishing.*

Crap, I promised not to make fun of hipsters, didn't I?  Yeah.  Okay, moving on!  Quite frankly, I have no problem with people wearing plaid, or skinny jeans - no, most people can't pull off the latter, no pun intended, but hey, it's none of my business.  Nor is gloating about their obscure tastes in music.  Definitely pretentious, but  pretension, unfortunately, seems to go hand in hand with youth and most hipsters aren't much older than thirty, and usually more toward their teens or early twenties.  By the time they hit forty, they're just music snobs.  Even the fake glasses and the blatant cultural appropriation...all right, so those are irritating as a persistent mosquito but hipsters, unfortunately, can hardly claim a monopoly on ridiculous posturing or cultural imperialism-fuelled insensitivity.

Nah, what bugs me is the so-called irony, and not even for the reasons you might think!  Sure, it's a terrible bastardization of the actual literary concept of irony but, since I'm not seeing it in writing and the self-awareness of a lot of the people using it catapults it straight into the realm of the absurd I just kind of leave it alone, like a janitor ignoring Cthulu meditating in the middle of the hallway.  Yeah, the janitor gets paid to clean the place and, yeah, Cthulu is really, immensely, incredibly not supposed to be there but there's basically nothing the janitor can DO about him and if they pay him too much thought they'll go completely nuts.

Where were we? Oh! Right.  Hipster faux-irony.  The profoundly frustrating thing about this is that I'm a nerd, which probably seems irrelevant until you consider what "nerd" really means.  I've never worn a pocket-protector in my life, my trousers are quite long enough, thank you, and I spend a good five hours outdoors every day hiking in a hilly town, toting a large sack of papers...buuuut I learned Elvish in high school and can wax eloquent on the cultural relevance of Sir Terry Pratchett's oeuvre, or the influences of Buddhism and multiculturalism in Ursula K. Le Guin's writings.  A nerd, at heart, is someone who cares passionately about things - even odd things, even obscure things, even things that are "just" stories.**

At first glance, this affinity for the peculiar and unknown seems to put nerds in league with hipsters.  However, much  like love and hate, life and death, dark and light, these two are opposites inextricably entwined.  A hipster finds something obscure and they wear a tee shirt with its logo or something.  Or they find something they know is weird or in bad taste or whatever, and do the same, or get a pin from it, or...you know what I mean.  They're self aware about it.  Nerds, while plenty of us don't lack self-awareness, do lack the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, look-how-smart-I-am-for-mocking-this mentality.  We aren't mocking our peculiar interests, not because we don't know they're peculiar but because this doesn't diminish or increase our love for them, it's just part of our love for them.

Even this digression would just be something that exists -  not something I particularly enjoy, but none of my business, either, were it not for the fact that it leads to accusations of hipster-dom (which I'd receive anyway, most likely; please see the "skinny white Oregonian with blogs" thing) and of over-thinking.  Neither of these is actually harmful, and the conviction that people passionate about stories and oddities overthink the world around them and/or have their heads in the clouds has probably been around since the dawn of our species. It's less a subculture thing than a culture thing.

These things may not be harmful, but they do get annoying.  Sure, they may be true, but didn't most folks learn in kindergarten that just because something is true, doesn't mean you have to say it?  Tact, people.  It may save your life.

After all, I wear the One Ring.  Don't mess with me.

*And by "polishing," I mean "existence."

**This, too, is destined for a post of its own.

Please, "Stop" With the "Quotations"

Generally speaking, things have names for a reason.  Take "things," for example - objects, persons, places, ideas - discrete chunks of...of whatever.  We have words which refer to them, and the collective term for these words is "nouns."  See? If you know a word is a noun, you know what you can and can't do with it in a sentence, where you might expect to see it used, whether or not you need to conjugate it, and so on.

"Noun," unfortunately, will not tell the uninitiated its definition just by sitting there being itself.  If an intelligent English-speaking person entirely unfamiliar with grammatical terms saw "noun" free of context, one could readily forgive them for thinking it some kind of weird flat-faced asthmatic dog.  This, fortunately, does not hold true of all terms - or even all grammatical ones!  I mean, even punctuation, supposedly one of this language's bastions of mystification, comes in varieties best termed "two by four-to-the-cranium obvious."

Or at least - cue ominous thunderclap - it damn well should.*  Yet people persist, curse their grandmother's eyes, in using quotation marks for emphasis.  That's quotation marks, folks!  What's their purpose?  Oh geeze, I wonder!  Could it POSSIBLY be RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME?  Noooo! Neverrrr!  That might actually make SENSE!  Let's use them to "emphasize" things, because that "really" doesn't make it sound like we're being "sarcastic" or using "scare quotes" now, does it!  I mean, it's not like "quote marks" exist to "denote" "quotations," i.e. things that other people said, or that you said at some other point in time and that the only reasons one would to this are to: a) give credit to the quote's originator and b) differentiate the quote from one's own current dialogue, namely what you are saying, right now, that you actually mean, right now.

I deliver the newspaper to a bowling alley.  The bowling alley has all these hand-printed, mercifully legible signs hung up on and around the front door.  Well, they're mercifully legible until you get to the horrific quotation mark abuse and give yourself a headache wondering why "alcoholic," or, for that matter, "outside," need scare quotes in "no "alcoholic" beverages "outside," please."  Also mystifying is why they allow "no "smoking" within "fifteen feet" of the "building.""  What does it mean?  At what dark shenanigans do these misplaced marks so ominously hint?  What untoward meanings of "fifteen feet" have yet to enter my apparently blessedly naive awareness?

For heaven's sake, people, please at the very least pay attention to the obvious.  It may not hit you over the brainbox with a board, but grammar cops the world over will be glad to do so, just let us put on the gardening gloves so we don't get splinters owe you a drink or two or ten just for sparing our brain cells the vain hours poring over your hidden meanings.

*Yes.  I mean "should."  Wilful stupidity counts as a crime in my books.

Don't Fear the Semicolon

I had planned on some sort of "Don't Fear the Reaper" reference but there's just no way to do that with three syllables, and even my Ridiculous Runaway Metaphors engines ran out of the energy required for something that monumentally stupid sometime during Wednesday afternoon.  The point remains the same, though; people are really weird about semicolons - I've actually read grammar books advising you to just avoid them!  And that, my friends, is crap of the highest degree.

Worse yet, it's insulting crap.  The theory, so far as I can tell, basically runs on the assumption that most people are such intellectual boobs they can't figure out any punctuation more advanced than a comma, and even that's iffy.  Going purely on circumstantial evidence, I can see where this idea arises; my college courses thronged with people - English majors, even! - who punctuated via grapeshot.  Hm, I have put down a bunch of words, now I shall randomly pepper it with little dots and squiggles!  Conversely, one guy in my Advanced Creative Writing course (...) who, in accordance with his decision that punctuation is for suckers and capitalization too tricky to remember, handed me a short story that might have been written by e e cummings after a few too many whiskeys.

Teachers apparently drill it into kids' heads pretty early on that run-on sentences should be avoided at all costs*.  This is true, and great, and I wish it stuck better because I've seen some godawful run-ons in university upperclassmen's work.  However, it would be even greater if these lessons included at very least the difference between a run-on sentence and a long or complicated, but properly constructed, one.

"Constructed" is the key word here.  Sentences, like architecture, fall apart if thrown together pell-mell; you must craft them, words chosen carefully like bricks, with cohesion serving as mortar to prevent a pile of rubble. A phrase is the shortest cohesive combination of words and can, in fact, serve as a full sentence, just as, let's say, a wall can be a useful construction all on its own.  It's just building materials arranged coherently in a line, with a beginning and end - a capital letter at the start and a period, question mark or exclamation point at the end.

You can't build a house out of walls alone, though; you've got to have, at the very least, a ceiling and a door.  This is where other forms of punctuation come in.    Most basic, of course, is the comma.  That's the ceiling and the door.  Then there's the dash and the ellipsis - which is, incidentally, three periods, not two or four.  Let's say the dash is a window; it works to open up the sentence and make it more interesting but if you put in too many the structure falls apart.  The ellipsis, on the other hand, is...I don't know enough about architecture to say, honestly, but it's something you need to use even less than the dash.  It's a pretty casual piece of punctuation and, save in citations, has little to no place in formal writing, and only a small niche even in more conversational styles like mine.

And then there's the semicolon.  That's an archway.  It looks trickier than it is, it gets old if used constantly, and it's immensely versatile.  Having a favourite punctuation mark definitely marks me as a weirdo, but I'll own to that, and proudly, and I will hereby announce that the semicolon is, in fact, hands-down my favourite punctuation mark.  I think in complicated sentences and thus rely heavily on punctuation and, holy crap, it comes in so handy!   One of the greatest tragedies of my early 20s came to pass when I realized that the cell phone I got to replace my poor, faithful Razr after my traitorous butt destroyed it (don't sit on a cell phone, mmmkay?) didn't have a semicolon.  Anywhere.  At all.  I still shudder at the memory.

Back to the semicolon itself!  What it is, basically, is a divider; stronger than a comma, less definitive than a period.  You can use it to present separate but related ideas, such as the previous, or to chop up a list wherein some of the items involve multiple words, thence making commas confusing.  Do you need a red, white and blue flag, garters, and a toad, as in a flag, garters, and toad all of which are red, white, and blue? Or do you need a red, white and blue flag; garters; and a toad?

Please note you don't use it to start a list.  If you're using punctuation to start a list, usually in a fairly formal setting, use a colon.  I'll talk about colons another time.  The punctuation kind, not the intestine kind. 

In conclusion, though, semicolons aren't scary.  They're useful and versatile and can, used in moderation, make your writing more interesting. 

*Like passive voice, save that, as above, passive voice actually does have its place, whereas, save in dialogue, run-on sentences really are verboten. 

It's, My Old Nemesis - The Comma Is Deliberate

I've already gone on about the peculiarity of idioms and spelling rules, and now I've got to admit that some grammatical rules are just plain stupid.  No better example exists than the conjugations of "it," which, unfortunately, seem pretty inevitable in writing and the guidelines of which are so baffling that I regularly confuse myself in attempting to explain them*.  Thus, for my own sake as much as anyone else's, let's start with the basics.

Okay, so, here we go: "it" is a pronoun, which stands in for a noun, freeing you from the necessity to repeat that noun every time you reference it.  See? Without pronouns, that would have been "repeat that noun every time you reference that noun." Pronouns are handy.

Now then, most pronouns have conjugations all their own, because they're special snowflakes and think they're verbs or something.  You've got "their," for something that belongs to multiple people - e.g., "Those are my neighbours, and that's their spaceship."  There's also "her," "his," and "my," for the possessions of your sister, your brother, and yourself.

This grants suffixes freedom to do their suffix thing.  They're, she's, he's, I'm - to append "to be" to most pronouns is an easy proposition.

It, on the other hand, doesn't conjugate like other pronouns.  It is just it.  Maybe that's because it only has two letters, but English usually doesn't let little things like logic stop it so honestly I have no idea.  Nonetheless, there it is - pun intended, if that's even a pun.

Anyway.

The thing to bear in mind is that "it"...okay.  I had some kind of logical key a second ago and then I realised that it was bass-ackwards and I'd gone and baffled myself with the conjugation of "it" again.  Sans further prevarication: "it's," despite the possessive form of pretty much every non-pronoun word in the English language forming with the addition of an " 's," means "it is."  It's is "it is."

"Its," on the nonexistant third hand, means "belonging to it."  I keep trying to come up with some sensible explanation for this, but I begin to doubt there is one.  "It" is just a stupid, stupid word, on idiotic par with people who keep trying to impose sense on its vagaries.  You just have to memorise it.

*I've mentioned my gift for spelling, right?  Well, I'm not the only one who's noticed; since early childhood, people pushed me to enter spelling bees while I, being part goat or something, resisted more the harder they pushed.  Mum finally succeeded sometime in my tenth year and I promptly got kicked off the first round for spelling the wrong version of "it."

Couldn't Have Couldn't Of

Phrases involving "________ have" crop up all the time.  Could have, should have, would have, and their ilk permeate English sentences, or at least they ought to.  However, all too often, the "have" somehow becomes an "of."  After my years of homeschooling, AKA undergoing extensive training as a grammar cop, I went to a public high school, thus for the first time encountering this particular error, which at the time shattered my poor innocent mind into a thousand tiny fragments.  What the...but...what, even...what were these people THINKING?*

Naive fool that I was, I thought the horror would abate with the passage of time - and, more stupidly yet, that this was some isolated incident.  Nope!  Not only does it still crop up, it does so a good 75% of the time "_______ have" should present itself.  Even worse, I've actually heard people PRONOUNCE it "______ of."

Of.  What the...!?  They don't even SOUND alike!**  Furthermore, "__________ of" makes no SENSE!  "I could of shaved the cat" means, literally, that "I could" belongs to "shave the cat."  It is Shave The Cat's pet I Could or something.  Please don't make me live in a world where strange activities keep domesticated abstract concepts.  My brain undergoes enough torture already.

"I could have shaved the cat," however, simply states that in the past you had the capability of rendering your pet feline hairless either because its coat had become inextricably tangled or because you're a sadomasochistic twit with too much time on their hands.   It's past-perfect of "could."  No, I don't know why past perfect is called "past perfect," but basically it's any past tense involving "have"  or "had" - "I have shaved the cat," as opposed to the regular past tense, "he clawed the bejeezus out of me."

Perhaps it's called past perfect because, unlike "could of," it actually makes sense.

*Answer: "They may not have been."  So far as I can tell, the best, or at least most widespread, high school survival method is to switch off your brain until the last bell rings.

**Well, sometimes they do, but I try really hard to pretend mumbling doesn't actually happen.

PSA: Spelling

Back in the day, spelling wasn't really a thing.  I mean, obviously, people spelled words - literate people at least, of course.  However, they pretty much spelled the words how they thought the words should be spelled, based upon sound, and since not everyone's going to interpret sound to letters the same as everyone else, each word got kind of tossed willy-nilly into a roiling free-for-all of spelling.

Then the rise of the printing press popularized the written word, and, gradually, the great minds of society came to the conclusion that they ought to standardize this crap.

I have no idea whom this fell to.  It was probably a committee, or rather, two committees, seeing as the United States has more or less completely arbitrary spelling differences with the rest of the world.  Colour? Color!  Grey? Gray!  For some reason, despite having moved to the States at the ripe old age of a year and a half, I grew up using the UK spelling; the US one still looks pretty peculiar to me so, just as a heads-up, if my "greys" and "colours" pop up a few times in the place of "gray" and "color," it's not that I can't spell, just that these things slip under my radar.  I'm working on it, though.

Fortunately, I can, in fact, spell!   "For heaven's sake," you sigh, "you're in your mid-twenties.  I should certainly hope you can spell!"  And you know what?  You're wrong!  Spelling isn't some of-course thing.  The odd thing isn't that some people can't spell, it's that some people can spell.  Much as we try to impose some logical standard on it, such as phonics, the fact remains that it's still pretty random and thus difficult to teach.  Three of the smartest people I know, two of whom are authors and one of whom is my mother, can't spell their way out of a wet paper bag.  Why on earth the Spelling Fairy saw fit to bless me, I have no idea, but I count myself lucky.

Since the Grammar Cop runs so strongly in my blood (man that's a peculiar mental picture,) this causes daily trials and tribulations as I strive to remind myself that it's none of my freakin' business, it's not hurting anything, and that there's little more condescending, irritating, or frustrating than unasked-for critique.  On one thing, though, I'm a bit of a stickler, and that's misspellings that turn one word into another, because that actually alters meaning and even if I know what they mean, I won't always be the person they're writing to.

I wouldn't even bother with this, but that spell check in this case can't do a thing.  You want to drink a root bear?  Spell check is fine with that!  You want to go beer hunting? Well, okay, but shooting them is more than a bit of a waste, and wearwolf...okay, so that one, spell check will catch.  I just love it because it's such a fantastic thing to imagine.  Every full moon, you turn into a dashing and cooperative live-wolf jacket!  It's lycanthropy for the hip modern fashionista.

Basically, if you can't spell, don't feel bad.  Just pay me to edit your work!

No, no, seriously.  It's okay, especially in informal comminiques such as emails, IMing and text (don't get me started on textspeak, though.  The poor abused keyboard will melt under the force of my searing visceral rage.)  However, in formal writing, it's a good idea not only to let spell check do its thing, but also to ask someone touched by the Spelling Fairy to make sure you aren't accidentally preparing a delicious beverage composed of vanilla ice cream and a thousand pounds of hungry hairy omnivore.

Pretentious Parlance on Preposition Placement

Like most people, my parents raised me on the notion that a preposition is one of the figures of speech you should never, ever end a sentence on.  However, as you can see, doing so has not caused me to spontaneously combust - while like any good grammar-cop I am, of course, impervious to flames, my keyboard isn't and typing with melted keys poses a huge pain in the butt.  Truth be told, this supposed tenet of English grammar is an antiquated myth, tracing back to an 18th-century Anglican priest named Robert Lowth.

Given the richness of English-language literature written previous to the 1700's, the marvel here is that it stuck. Much of the Western world at the time had been in love with the Roman Empire since the sixteenth century; perhaps Lowth's seemingly arbitrary rule resonated with them due to its closer kinship with Latin grammar, or maybe it simply clicked because "preposition" means, literally, position before and I guess punctuation isn't a good thing to be immediately before.  Poor punctuation.  Nobody loves you.

Over the course of three hundred years, even the most out-of-left-field rule, let alone one with that odd sort of irrational but present resonance, has plenty of time to become ingrained.  This one has done so.  What this means in application is that whether or not to end a sentence in a preposition poses a choice, not of grammar, but of style.  Are you writing in a conversational tone?  Or is your current project of a more formal nature?

If the former, please feel free to plunk that preposition down right at the end of the sentence, if that's what reads most naturally.  For example, I want you to picture someone who actually, in day-to-day conversation, would say "On what did you put my glasses?".  They're wearing a monocle, aren't they? And possibly a top hat, and maybe they're smoking a pipe.  If not, please amend your imagination, because the convolutions sentences undergo, when their most natural ending is a preposition but their writer adheres fervently to Lowth's rule, ought to be classified as some kind of stylistic contortionism.  That sort of thing just doesn't fit a comfortable, conversational tone at all, and that's a pretty mild example.  "Looked for the cat had not even been" doesn't just sound stuffy.  It sounds like fricken' Yoda.

On the other hand, in formal writing - or in writing dialogue for a very formal, proper character - knock yourself out with the contortionism.  This holds especially true for projects like cover letters and thesis papers, in which the reader's opinion of your grammar might hold direct influence over your future.  Which is more important, in the long run: writing a natural-sounding sentence, or joining the ranks of the employed?

...I thought so.

One condition, however, most definitely applies, both to prepositions at the ends of sentences and prepositions anywhere else.  It's also a good stylistic rule in general.  Don't use extraneous words.  "Where are you?" is an entirely reasonable question.  So is "She fell off the desk," assuming she had a valid reason to be up there.  Even if she didn't, she's the one in error, not the sentence.  Make those "Where are you at?" or "She fell off of the desk," though, and...well, if that sentence became a human being, it would be a lanky buck-toothed chinless chicken-necked zitty teenager at the wrong school's prom in a tux four inches too short.   Don't inflict that on it.  Nobody, not even a sentence, deserves that sort of embarrassment.

Delicious Spicy Badge of Honour

Yesterday, after various convoluted password shenanigans with the agency through which I'm dong it, I got my Roth IRA set up.  This took place at about quarter to nine AM, and I spent the rest of the day in this sort of smug rosy cloud, shadowed only by brief interludes of bewildered disappointment that my Real Adult Badge had yet to descend from heaven, borne by choirs of angels singing praises of my maturity and good sense.  Sometime around three o'clock, I decided not only that a cake might suffice but that eventually, I would forgive the universe for seeing fit to have said cake borne by a friend or relative rather than celestial beings joined in a divine harmony of song.

And that's about when it hit me.  No, not the cake, Einstein.  The cake was a lie.  I mean the epiphany - that maybe, if I found myself waiting for a gold star for adult accomplishments, it ought to come as I sign I hadn't earned it yet, sort of like one of those magical islands that can't be found unless you already know where it is, except that in this case it can't be found unless you're not looking for it.

So far as I can tell, that is the crux of adulthood, or at least one of them.  If I knew the plural of "crux," I'd have put that to begin with.

Anyway.  Yes.  Crux of adulthood.  It is this: adulthood is when you don't do things for an external reward, but rather because they need to be done.  This phrasing is deliberate - "you need to do them" implies that, say, you only need to put away the dishes if you're the one that washed them and left them out to dry.  Nope.  If you're in the kitchen and you've got an extra few minutes on your hands, you need to put away those dishes, because the dishes need to be put away.  I'd give my left buttock for a chance to go back and inform my nineteen-year-old self of this and then remind him sharply, maybe with a two-by-four over the incredibly hard cranium, that afterwards you don't go and brag to whoever you're living with that you put away the dishes.  That was impressive, at nine.  At nineteen, not so much.

Same goes for retirement funds.  Sure, it's a more grown-up thing than putting away the dishes, but the fact remains that it's nothing extraordinary.  It's just a thing that needs doing.  This doesn't mean it isn't worth celebrating - it does exhibit foresight, responsibility, and all that good stuff.  But it's not the kind of thing for which you get a pat on the back from anyone save yourself.

So, this morning, I made myself a Mexican mocha, and let me tell you, I make goooooooooood Mexican mochas. It's leagues better than any old badge.  Badges? You can't drink no stinkin' badges!  In the end, it's not that all the little milestones of adulthood and the steps along the way aren't rewarding.  It's just that the reward has to come from within, in the sense of satisfaction of responsibilities cared for, the accompanying security of mind, and, occasionally, a delicious drink.

"Confidence is Sexy!"

Finally, what you've all been waiting for - I write about something I've previously said I would!  What can I say, I'm awesome.  I kick butt.  And isn't that hot? I mean, after all, confidence is sexy.

Why yes, this is another one where I rip into common phrases that tick me off.  This one falls squarely into the "things that are intended as helpful but really, really backfire" category, for several reasons.  First and most obviously, for a phrase that's supposed to boost people's opinions of themselves, it does a really great job of insulting them instead.  Bashful? Shy?  Insecure? Self-doubting? Outright self-loathing?  Boo!  Not only are you too fat/too scrawny/too nerdy/not smart enough/other-source-of-insecurity-goes-here - your lack of confidence makes you unattractive!  Man, doesn't that just make your self-esteem soar?

Yes, I know it doesn't say "only confidence is sexy," and that would help, but that insecurities don't work on logic; they work on everyone's internal awkward seventh-grader who keeps pointing out all the reasons they never got invited to parties.  The internal awkward seventh-grader doesn't give a flip about semantics.  The internal awkward seventh-grader just hears another reason to go about life wearing, over their head, a paper bag with eye-holes cut in the front.

Secondly, because I guess I'm tackling this in some semblance of order, is aforementioned impossibility of expressing a socially acceptable opinion of yourself. "Confidence is sexy" tells the un-confident that this lack renders them unattractive; confident people, on the other hand, frequently get called out for arrogance, even if they're of the sunny "I'm awesome and so are you unless proven otherwise!" disposition.

Thirdly, it makes out (no pun intended) that sexiness is this all-pervasive goal that everyone is working toward and is, if not the only, at least a prime reason to strive toward self-improvement.  There are so many things wrong with this.  It's the supposedly adult version of Disney princess flicks, where romance is the ultimate goal, never mind that nothing guarantees romantic success, so it's wise to learn to enjoy your own company and nurture platonic friendships; never mind the fulfilment to be found in creativity; don't even think about the satisfaction of hard work well done or the infinite realms of learning; certainly refuse to acknowledge that there are people who, for one reason or another, aren't even INTERESTED in sex or romance, whether on a temporary or permanent basis.

Oh, and the whole inherent sexism aspect?  Where it's still socially acceptable for a total stranger to holler at a woman walking down the sidewalk about her looks?  Where the worst things you can call a woman are focused on either her appearance or her sexuality? Where women are constantly judged on their looks, and constantly told to be simultaneously humble (so they won't be arrogant ball-breakers) and confident (so they'll be sexy)?

Yeah.  Let's ignore that, too.  Confidence is sexy, y'all!*

*Thus concluding my monthly allotment of y'all's.

On Diction and Responsibility

Let's get this established: I love my family. I really do.  They're wonderful, smart people with excellent senses of humour finely honed by twenty some-odd years of interacting with me without completely losing their marbles (aside from my grandmother who quite literally lost her marbles, as in mislaid her collection of pretty little glass balls.)  In what I tell myself is some grand scheme of petty underhanded vengeance but in reality just stems from the fact that they're human and so am I, they occasionally annoy the crap out of me.  

Frequently, these things are linguistic; my default states of being are, a) Thinking About Words, and, b) Indignant, so it only makes sense that they should intersect.  I'm not talking about the communication gaps inherent in not only familial but also all human relationships - that's a subject for a time when my brain and I are actually on speaking terms, which we aren't at the moment.  I haven't let it have enough coffee.

What I'm thinking of right now, aside from my biological mum's overuse of "tidy" (find another word occasionally! you sound like a British housekeeper!), is my adoptive mum's habit of saying that something she'd told me or Dad to do "didn't happen."  This is, of course, grammatically correct.  It's not very stylistically shiny, being in passive voice, but would be technically acceptable even in writing, far less casual conversation.  

It's more a personal thing, I suppose.  If someone didn't do something they didn't do, fine.  Say they didn't do it.  If they get defensive, tell them to cut that crap out right now because being expected to take responsibility for one's actions or lack thereof is a terrible thing to have a snit about.  Saying it didn't happen, though, vacates that responsibility, in the process robbing that person of agency.  Pretty much anything they say is going to sound weak and self-pitying because you can't apologise or say you'll do it or fix it or whatever without self-referencing and maybe I'm just paranoid but the whole thing comes off really passive-aggressive, for all it's not intended as such.  

While I don't like having it pointed out that I've screwed up, I'd much rather be told that I screwed up and can thus own up to the mistake, apologize for it, and go about setting things to rights than have it made out that control of my action and inaction, as well as necessary tasks, lies in the hands of some arbitrary outside force.  Any thoughts on the matter?

Oxford Comma

Last year, I got whacked in the head and spent three months in a comma.  This time, I'm aiming for a semicolon (nobody ever wants to spend any time at all in colons. That's what they get for sharing a name with an organ full of excrement.)

As you might have guessed, the theme of today's rant  is the importance of m's!  Except that it isn't.  It's commas; specifically, the Oxford comma, that subject of grammarian debate.  Supposedly, it's one of those stylistic choices.  You aren't 100% required to have it.  Neither, ideally, will anyone gripe if you DO.  Please note the "ideally;" you won't believe the number of high school English papers I got back looking like murder implements because some lunatic of an instructor had slaughtered all the poor innocent Oxford commas with a red pen.

An Open Letter

Dear Twit,

You.  Yes.  You.  Yesterday, in the Employment Department office, with a ten-month-old kid which, judging by how much it's fussing, you haven't fed or cleaned in a while.

Yeah, you.  You read that right; you are a twit...well, no, actually, I know several more appropriate words for you, but they're not the sorts of words that a sensible individual with hopes for employment puts on his professional blog, so we're gonna go with 'twit.' You are a twit for many, many reasons, and tragically enough, it seems no one has informed you of this!  That is a grave oversight indeed, and one I am here to remedy.

First of all, I can only assume you are some relation of this child.  I mean, you look like it, insofar as  I (who think babies look a bit like golems fashioned, from mashed potatoes, to look like a larval form of Winston Churchill) can tell.  You're of an age to be its mother or perhaps its much-older sister; possibly, you're its aunt.

Mirror, Mirror on the Bull***t

The other day, a conversation with a close friend turned to her professor's reaction to her statement that she is, at the moment, a middling artist.  She's a game design major; it's actually relevant, and, moreover, it's true.  She has a better grasp of anatomy and composition than many of her classmates, and best of all there's actual concept behind her art; on the other hand, she has a lot of room for improvement, and that's a-ok.  She's in her twenties, drawing has never been a major focus of her life, and even those for whom it is will, in fact, always have room for improvement.  

That's the thing about life.  You keep changing til you die, unless you really dig in your heels, and even that will change you.  Moreover, in specific, learned skills, dissatisfaction is an impetus, perhaps the impetus.  Some people think they're bad at ______ right now, and some of them really are!  Some of them think they're all right at _________ right now.  Either way, the common factor for people who improve at _______ is that their answer to this is to take it as a challenge to learn, practice, grow and experiment.

That is very much the context in which she couched "I'm a middling artist, at the moment."  See?  Even the phrase 'at the moment' is a cue, here!  How, you ask, did her professor take this? After all, it's a professor's job to teach their students, both the skills set forth on the syllabus and, tacitly but perhaps most importantly of all, those of critical thinking, self-assessment, awareness of context, and determination.  A professor should be glad to see such honest introspection paired with motivation to improve.

So, of course, this professor wigged out at her about being down on herself, the perils of negative self-talk, and the fact that pessimism will get you nowhere.  Hours later, when we talked, this was still getting under her skin and, annoyance being a communicable disease, proceeded to get under mine.  Since we're reasonable people and not intellectual masochists at all, we proceeded to pick apart the whys and wherefores, and this is what we decided.

There is basically no way to win at self-assessment, socially speaking.  It's kind of disappointing*, but it's true.  People bandy about the phrase "confidence is sexy,"** but a display of confidence, especially from a woman - the sector of society most pressured to be sexy, which is in itself major ranting material, because I have opinions on everything ever - will get you branded arrogant (and being, or wanting to be, sexy will earn you the name of slut, just as abstinence from or disinterest in sexiness will have people calling you a prude.)  For guys, it's a bit less fraught but you still run a real risk of people thinking you're a puffed-up macho pain in the butt.

Conversely...well, look at my friend's conversation with her professor.  The modern US educational system places such emphasis on self-esteem over respect - for self or others - and on standardized testing over critical thinking or practised skill that an honest "I'm all right, but I could be better and am working hard on getting that way" nets not praise for honesty and concrete, helpful questions on how the other individual plans upon improvement, but instead worry over their self-image.  

Terms such as "fair," "middling," and "average" have become perceived not as terms of forthright assessment but of negative judgement and as such, conversely, actually hinder improvement by, depending on context and individual, leading either to actually abysmal self-assessment or to over-inflated ego, neither of which provides motivation for improvement.  This leads to humility contests, where the self-esteem scale is bent right around on itself and starts eating its own tail and, since auto-cannibalism provides pretty lousy sustenance, starts fishing for compliments.  The thing about that is that all the energy expended upon passive-aggression could instead be funnelled into actual self-improvement, ideally with some left over for giving and receiving constructive criticism from others in the same or similar fields.

It's a bit horrifying that anything so key as honesty and moderation should carry such insulting connotations.  I don't really have a strong cincher or a call to action on this one.  It's more a cross between grumbling and, hackneyed as this sounds, raising awareness.  Hey, people - if there's something you care about, and you're both aware that you can improve and working on doing so, good on you.  If you know you're good at something, awesome!  Own up to that.  Own up to having room for improvement, too.  You're awesome and anyone who gives you crap for either is the one with the problem.

*For a value of kind of disappointing ranging from what it says on the tin to blindingly frustrating.

**Rant coming soon, to a word-nerd blog near you!

You Should

In trying to come up with examples, the other day, of where “should” should be used (harr harr,) I missed the blatantly obvious. This is fairly typical of me and should be taken as a prime example of my mind-boggling competency. I know, I know, it's kind of intimidating, but try not to let my perfection frighten you.

After all that about “should” being a moralistic, judgmental word precision-engineered to make people feel like eight-year-olds caught wetting the bed, I somehow failed to think that, oh yeah, sometimes you really need a word like that! You really shouldn't beat your spouse. You shouldn't swindle people, you shouldn't be condescending, you shouldn't be a bigot. You should be polite, generous, empathic and kind. You should tip your editor generously, of course, and you shouldn't write a will specifying that your mortal remains be taxidermied in a sexy pose and left in your nemesis's* bathtub (but it would be freakin' hilarious if you did.)

In short, “should” has its place in situations where the consequence of doing or not doing whatever is in question is of an ethical nature.

A Minor Complaint

From time to time, I really, really wish I had a normal, sane, human temperature scale.  Generally speaking, it's really nice to run warm.  You seldom have to bother with heavy coats, thick scarves, gloves, mittens, etc and you can wig out the normals by going for a walk in forty-degree, windy weather in a tee shirt.  Far be it from me to thumb my nose at convenience, lazy creature that I am, but there's "running warm" and then there's "it's sixty-five degrees in here and if I was home alone I'd be making breakfast in the nude, and we all know what a dumb idea that is."

Seriously, whose bright idea was this? What did I do wrong, in some past life, to deserve this, huh?  Is there a polar bear somewhere who just can't get warm, no matter what he does?

Maybe this is why I know several people with Renoids, and most of my friends run really cold.   I accidentally stole their biological furnaces.  I didn't mean to, I swear! I'd give them back, (well, most of them - what can I say, I'm greedy,) if I had any idea how, because this is getting ridiculous.

You Should Stop That

The time has come, o denizens of the internet, to gather around for (surprise, surprise!) another exciting round of Cat's Linguistic Pet Peeves: Connotations Edition. Yes, I promise I feed it regularly, clean up after it and take it out for walks.  No, I'm not implying you need to do the same - though really, like a wandering cat, it could use as many welcoming homes as possible.

The peeve in question is the word "should," or rather its connotations.  It has its place, I'm sure; save for those whose sole purpose is hatred, most words do.  Given this tongue's plentiful synonyms, however, few terms have cause to crop up as often as "should."   At first glance, this doesn't seem much of an issue.  I'm not only a self-admitted grammar cop, but also a proud style vigilante,* but since I haven't quite lost touch with reality, the fact that not everyone has any requirement whatsoever to constantly consult their mental thesaurus remains firmly rooted in my mind.

The thing about all these synonyms, though, is that - as I've mentioned previously - they all have connotations, meaning that each serves a slightly different function, and "should" is one of those slightly nebulous ones whose common thread is that, unlike "need," "ought," or "want," it implies no concrete, motivational force for the person in question to perform whatever the deed might happen to be.  The only inherent impact that comes with it is guilt.  It's a passive-aggressive word; it's a word people use to make the person about whom it's being used, be this the speaker/writer or someone else, feel bad.  

May All Your Dreams Come True, God Help You

Once upon a thirty seconds ago, I thought I'd call this "Idio(t)ms II."  Immediately thereafter, my brain informed me in no uncertain terms that this particular kvetch deserves its very own title.  I hope it feels special.

"May all your dreams come true" really does merit a special place, not because I hate it - I don't - but because it's so freaking hilarious.  Please don't bother to tell me it refers to dreams as in goals, hopes* and ambitions; I know that.  It's just that it doesn't say that and I, to a degree taking after my mother's literalist bent, can't help snickering every time I encounter that turn of phrase.

May all your dreams come true!  Yeah, sure.  I really want a housemate to somehow get bacon grease and guacamole on every cubic inch of the kitchen, and I, without a chance to partake of whatever deliciousness they've concocted, have to clean it all up.  With a toothbrush.

That's just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.  Horrible bacon-and-guacamole incidents could not only happen in the real world, but do so without disastrous consequence, unless you count me royally chewing someone out for being an inconsiderate, oblivious pain in the butt disastrous which, if I've ever told you off, you might.  Regardless of  my verbal-flaying skills, however, we're not talking injury, death, psychological trauma (well, maybe,) or extensive property damage.

A Public Announcement

"Cat, I'm bored."

For a greeting, it has a lot of room for improvement.  For example, there's the total lack of....well, of actual greeting; no acknowledgement of the other person as an individual, no inquiry as to how their day has been or what you've been up to.  Nonetheless, my friend Krystal* used it every single time she started a conversation with me, be it over instant messenger, upon running into one another after a university class, or on one of our somewhat rare weekend forays to a bar or club.

"Cat, I'm bored."

The thing is, as friends, we knew one another well enough to forego the ritualistic hello-how-are-you, and as a person with a spine I'm quite capable of conversationally fending for myself, so, whatever this may say about me, it wasn't the self-centeredness that frustrated me to the point of, finally, allowing contact between us to fade.  Nope, it was the boredom.

Words, Words and More Words!

I have a confession.  The secret is a dark and dank one, which pains me greatly to admit.  Nonetheless, admit I must, least it haunt me to my very grave.

O my dearly beloved internet, I...am a hipster.

Yep, you read that right.  Me, yours truly, the guy who said something yesterday about hipster irony being an attempt to excuse simultaneous pretension and bad taste.  That guy.  Yeah.  I'm a hipster.  Double standards rock, huh?

The Theory of Linguistic Evolution by Natural Selection

A few days ago, my mother emailed me this BBC article on the ongoing malcontent between linguistic purists yearning to keep words true to their classical meanings, and the unwashed masses who use words - which are, after all, symbols - in new and rapidly changing ways.  The Internet, of course, has only accelerated these changes, and thus increased the fervor of the debate.

While this is hardly the first such article I've seen, it has left me a bit taken aback.  Do people really use "bemused" to mean "slightly amused?"  The article tells me it's a skunked term, or one over which there is such confusion that edited publications refrain from using it.  In my opinion, that's really sad.  English is kind of a screwed-up language, what with its kleptomaniacal habits ranging from causal pickpocketing of other Western European languages (some French terms just have that je ne sais quoi absent from more prosaic tongues, you know?) to armed robbery on the high seas.  The silver lining to this cloud of linguistic piracy is the incredible richness of terms - of synonyms, antonyms, connotations, nuances of thought and meaning, and as a lover of words, to see that wither is like watching a limb that could be healed instead wither from disuse.

The Birds and the Bees

Since it's late April, I'm willing to bet that, even in the more northerly portions of the Northern Hemisphere, spring is, as they say, in the air.  Yards, medians and meadows are redolent with the scent of flowers, warmth unfurls across the land, light breezes play through budding trees and birds sing out their joy to the rain-washed blue sky.

Oh wait, no, they don't.  The birds, in fact, sing out their personal ads to the rain-washed blue skies - unless you live in a wet climate, in which the skies are grey, or a desert, where they're not anything-washed and you've felt like you're living in a broiler oven for six weeks already.  No matter where you are, that flower-scented air is making itself felt in sneezes, runny noses, red and watering eyes, and asthma attacks.  In some places, this doesn't even come with the benefit of smelling flowers! I've lived in cities where all you smell is, well, city, even if you're standing right next to a median full of daffodils.

Follow Your Passion. Maybe.

Universities, high schools, and maybe even middle schools (Mom - adoptive mom, the one who lives in Dallas - homeschooled me until ninth grade) absolutely love having career assemblies.  In high school, they'll round you all up and herd you, kicking and screaming, or at least kvetching and moaning, into some musty, linoleum-floored room and talk at you for an hour.  In university, they'll just put up signs informing you that there is to be someone talking, for an hour, in a musty, linoleum-floored room, and you'll go because your conscience will inform you that you're at college to increase your chance for a good job so you'd better do all you can, dagnabbit.  Maybe this time you'll actually garner something of use!

At least, this was my train of thought, and you know what? I was dead wrong.  People had told me, for years, that college would be different.  I'd like it better because people would want to be there.  Sure enough, it was different.  People did want to be there! They wanted to be there because they hand out free snacks at these things!

Stupid Smart-People Tricks II

Once upon a time, my grandparents lived in Santa Cruz, California, in a house whose big kitchen windows looked west over the nearby ocean.  Grandpa, at the time working a civil service job requiring a daily commute, rose early to go to work.  Grandma just rose early because she was a morning person.  Thinking about this always leaves me slightly bemused.  I'm not entirely sure I believe in morning people.  So far as I'm concerned, they're like nutrias* or something.

Regardless, my grandmother, the mythical creature, voluntarily got up when Grandpa did and, by the time he'd driven off in a state of robotic stupor, functioning on automatic and/or caffeine, she'd brewed herself some nice hot tea to enjoy while she cleaned the kitchen, made herself breakfast, got ready for her own job, and presumably solved world hunger, found the meaning of life, and fed Schroedinger's cat as well.

Confusion

While I forget the name, bad blogger that I am, I do recall from my wild college days that there is a theory of linguistics (or maybe anthropology - I never claimed to have a good memory) stating that language shapes culture, rather than vice-versa.  This theory didn't turn out to hold a lot of water, but that someone conceived it to begin with demonstrates how central a place language takes in how we relate to the world.  One might say that language is a bridge; without it, the world still exists, and so do we.  We  might even relate to the world, but not as efficiently, quickly, or conveniently.  Of course, the world will still effect us because, let's say, the people on that side of the river all have hover-cars or something.*

Logically speaking, one wants better access to a highly frequented destination. Cities build better and bigger roads and bridges and, in an ideal world at least, fund more safe and efficient public transport.  Language, or at least the English language, grows synonyms, as if bridges grew like mushrooms.**

Stupid Smart-People Tricks

I have a scar on my thumb from a peanut butter sandwich.

No, seriously, I do, and I don't mean that I have a scar from the knife I used to cut the bread, or that I dropped the jar of jam and cut my hand on a glass shard, or - okay, so I'm out of normal, reasonable, this-might-conceivably-happen-in-a-world-that-makes-sense ways to injure yourself making a PBJ.

Idio(t)ms

Like spelling, idioms are just kind of fundamentally bizarre.  Unlike spelling, they're bizarre by definition: Merriam-Webster tells us an idiom is "a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words."  Now, this isn't to say they're entirely nonsensical.  It's just that most of them originate from some quirk of language so antiquated or context-specific that they might as well be entirely nonsensical.

As a result, they're frequently the butt of both hilarity and ire for people learning a new language.  If you tell a non-Francophone that someone is breaking your feet, they're more likely to be seriously concerned for your safety and the other person's sanity than they are to sympathise with you over that person being kind of irritating.  I can only imagine what English, possibly the most convoluted language in the world, is like for folks picking it up in adulthood.    I mean, my family and I have enough issues with English idioms, and we're all native speakers, college graduates, and proud bookworms.

Take "getting on like a house afire."  PLEASE take it!  It makes no freaking sense, and I'll have you know I take nonsense personally.  A couple of years ago, my girlfriend's house burned down in the middle of winter, and, to understate wildly, it was not a fun experience.  It was scary, inconvenient, expensive, frustrating, confusing, depressing, and involved far more of my girlfriend running around in two feet of snow in her bathrobe than is even remotely ideal.  

Why Would You Do That!?

Spelling is bizarre.  Scratch that, spelling is nonsensical.  Until about a century and a half ago, the English tongue didn't even have standard rules of spelling but then, as Terry Pratchett exposits in Good Omens, someone decided there Ought To Be Rules.  So rules there are, and, like most rules imposed to regulate social standards rather than prevent harm, they don't always make a lot of sense.

As a result, I count myself fortunate in having an instinct for spelling but refrain from pestering my loved ones with corrections.  If someone wishes to pay me to proofread, excellent!  That's what I'm here for.  Unsolicited critique, on the other hand - well, let's say I learned my lesson from spending roughly half of high school as a notorious know-it-all.

Lest You Think Me Snobbish

Regular cops have to defend themselves from stereotypes of donut and coffee-guzzling laziness, Taser-happy sadism and casual racism.  Grammar police get to field cries of  "stuck-up!" and "know-it-all!" from the great unwashed masses, and I have yet to figure out why.  I mean, just because we're inarguably better than you doesn't mean that we're snobs!

The thing is, though, we aren't, and I have no problem with that.  Can you imagine the pressure attendant upon any obligation to be perfect?  I'd turn to diamond, thus exponentially increasing my financial worth and completely killing my ability to type.  Furthermore, I'm pretty sure there's some internet law declaring that any post made to correct another person's spelling or grammar will itself contain some really egregious error (aside from the obvious "giving unsolicited criticism," which is a good way to ensure nobody will like you.)

If I went around grammar-policing online, I guarantee you it would take me about two seconds to spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" backward.  My tendency to type backwards when I'm tired (and I'm usually tired) is but the beginning of a laundry list of foibles illustrating that yours truly is, despite his internet persona of godlike perfection, only human after all.*

The Case of the Missing Comma

With the approach of my birthday in a few month's time, I've gone through the annual motions, such as "attempt to figure out if I've actually accomplished anything this year," "compile list of foods I've been craving," and "let my family know what I actually do want, aside from food and world peace."  It's honestly a pretty modest list, and has been so for years.  It has never, for example, included twenty-three cats.

Mind you, I like cats - it's just that I could never eat twenty-three at once!

No, no, seriously.  I love cats; I find them beautiful and funny and I vastly enjoy their company.  The two I live with prove an unending source of delight.  I just have no desire for more than, say, three.

This brings us to the importance of commas.

Generate a Random Question!

As I'm sure anyone using Blogger as a platform knows, the "Extended Info" portion of your profile offers several questions that, while not vital to one's function as a blogger, nonetheless bear some relevancy.  What are your favourite books?  Movies?  Music?  Good things to tell the internet, right?  Actual, conversation starter-ish things!

Imagine, then, my bemusement upon discovering that beneath those lurks the answer to a mystery which has plagued me since precisely never.  Namely, what happens when the oh-so-hilariously-out of the blue mainstay of tenth grade humour, "don't make me release the flying monkeys!", grows up and gets a job.  Fool that I am, what little thought I'd paid the question assumed that it went quietly to its grave along with Hot Topic pants and the deep-seated conviction that you're always right.

Newsflash: you aren't.  Especially if you're me.  Especially if you're me, and thence were, until this very morning, blithely certain that people - mature, adult people! People who design major blogging platforms! - outgrow the "randomness is hilarious" delusion.

There it lurks, at the bottom of Extended Info, the box labeled "Random Question."  A side note tells you you must save your profile to get a new question (you'd think they'd have some sort of widget to let it know if you haven't had any question before, and adjust the wording accordingly, perhaps with disproportionate excitement,) and you have to click a little check-box underneath, before saving, to tell it that you really do want to generate a new question.  Or a first question, as the case may be.  They make you work for your arbitrary nonsense.