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.