The Blue Candle Society

Sorry, everyone – I forgot national punctuation day when I posted on Tuesday, as you all no doubt noticed.  Of course, the problem with punctuation is that there isn’t all that much to say about it, beyond complaining about the misuse of apostrophes, and perhaps the overuse of exclamation points.  Beyond that, most people are fairly well in agreement on the issues.  Oh, sure, some people have an irrational prejudice against the humble semicolon.  I won’t have that here, though; the semicolon is awesome.  And yes, some folks don’t like the Oxford comma (or just don’t care about it), but these poor fools are simply misguided.

So I’ll just leave you with the punctuation page on cakewrecks.com

Posted in Grammar Gripery

This is an odd one.  As frequent readers know, I like to complain about the mis-use of cliches and idioms.  I thought I’d heard one this morning, by no less august of a wordsmith as Stephen King, who, during an interview about his new book said something to the effect of “not wanting to get up on my hobby horse” in his books.

“Aha!” I shouted, “Stephen King mis-used a cliche!  You don’t ‘get up on’ hobby horses.”

But then I started thinking.  Do you get onto hobby horses?  Exactly what the hell is a hobby horse (in a non-metaphorical sense)?  So I did a little research, and it turns out hobby horses are all sorts of things.  Originally, the phrase referred to an actual, concrete breed of horse.  Clearly, one could get on a horse like that (what else would you do with it?), but just as clearly that isn’t what people are thinking of when they talk about a hobby horse as a preoccupation.

The interesting thing is that despite the phrase “hobby horse” coming to mean various things you could hop aboard (velocipedes, merry-go-round horses, and, um, I suppose a “loose woman or strumpet”), and various things you couldn’t (dances, costumes, those little jobbers with a horse-head on the end of a stick) it seems a bit tricky to discern exactly which one of those secondary meanings led to what we now call a hobby.  That stick-horse thing sort of works, as one could see a child becoming preoccupied with it, but you don’t really “get up on” those, you only pretend to.

Now, to my view, Stephen basically conflated “hobby horse” and “high horse” – clearly, he was talking about not wanting to get all sneery and high-horsey in forcing his views through his characters.  But it sort of works to conflate the two meanings, doesn’t it?  I mean, if you have a tendency to scold people and overwhelm them about some particular point, then I suppose your hobby horse is sort of a high horse at the same time.

So I suppose we can give King a pass, since the main point of a cliche is to be useful, and his use of this one is.

Posted in Grammar Gripery, Metaphor!

Speaking of comics, In the word of modified comic strips, there is still nothing so pathos-laden and full of melancholy as Garfield Minus Garfield, but the combination of Bill Waterson and Frank Herbert in Calvin and Muad’Dib has certainly made a run for the profundity prize.  It is also good to see that someone has come up with a secondary purpose for all those great quotes.

Posted in General writing things

As frequent readers know, I like to occasionally delve into a bit of linguistic and grammatical history on this blog, in an attempt to class up the joint and help make my readers educated, productive members of society.  Of course, to do this, I need to search the internet for the most authoritative sources.  This week, one of those sources, Comics Curmudgeon, made that easier by providing not one, but two posts on the fascinating history of the negative concord in English and other languages (you need to scroll down to Hagar the Horrible on that second link if you are only interested in linguistic theory).

Posted in Grammar Gripery

We were all disappointed to find that Oreos are made of lies sandwiched between chocolate wafers, of course, but if you were anything like me, you took comfort in the fact that there were at least a few people left in the world who are pure of heart and honest as the day is long.  I speak, of course, of the humble librarian, caretaker of the books that we all hold so dear.  Well, hang on to your hat, because now there are revelations of librarians selling their sacred charges, books, for money.  Books, I say!  I wouldn’t mind a librarian making a little extra money selling, I don’t know, moonshine or unpasteurized cheese, but this crosses a line.

Also, they run the risk of really screwing up web searches for “naughty librarians”.

Posted in General writing things

So I’m a pantser.  Mind out of the gutter, people, I’m talking about the style of writing, the kind of writer opposed to “outliner” (as in “seat of the pants”).

Now, aside from the fact that being a pantser makes me sound vaguely like a pervert, I am content with pantsing, for the most part.  Writing my way into a plot is how I’ve always done it, after all.  Clearly, there are advantages and disadvantages to being either a pantser or an outliner.  Outliners are no doubt less likely to find themselves in literary cul de sacs, while pantsers are more used to throwing out large chunks of prose and doing things over if they do run into trouble.  Pantsers go where the muse leads, and write in a free-spirited, devil-may-care fashion, potentially discovering synergistic bits of wonderfulness, while outliners are less likely to end up with extraneous characters who have no real business in the book.

But one problem with being a pantser is that none of those “How to Write a Bestseller in 40 Days” books really work for us.  It is obviously easier to instruct someone on step by step writing if they already outline, or can figure out how to do so.  But it does a pantser no good, trying to follow steps that work for someone else.  Of course, we pantsers are tailor-made for the advice one gets in NaNoWriMo – “Just hurl words onto the page and see what happens!” and that sort of thing.  I pity the outliner who has to try to make sense of a bunch of random words they’ve forced themselves to spit out.

The whole business reminds me of the way things go in the cycling world, actually.  Cyclists are often told that the most efficient way to ride is in a lower gear with a higher cadance, and biomechanically, that is no doubt true, just as the most efficient way to write is likely to develop a careful plan ahead of time .  In both cases, I sometimes get the sense that well-meaning advice givers feel like I’m being contrarian.  But some people are just made to grind big gears and write with no particular plan.  We don’t mean anything by it, it’s just the way it is.

Posted in General writing things

For a minute there, I thought I owed that sprinkles guy an apology.

But no, it turns out that it is the ice cream that comes in cookie dough and mint flavors, not the sprinkles.

Posted in Uncategorized

I’m a bit late to this, but it seems like a good time to link to Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, since it is one of my favorite “Ten Rules” out there (which are legion).  Damned if I can find a proper link to the actual full article Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle, unfortunately.  Interestingly, despite adverbs being specifically called out in the title, they are pretty much absent from the rules, beyond the one about modifying dialogue tags (which is good, since Language Log has pointed out, as they are wont to do, that Leonard’s writing was pretty heavy on adverbs).

Posted in General writing things

As we’ve established, I write like a combination of Stephen King and Jane Austen.  But did you know I also share something important with Ray Bradbury and Dorothy Parker?  I think that may be an even better combination.  But really, this is just an excuse to link to the illustrated lyrics of the awesome song Me and Dorothy Parker, sung by the Flash Girls (lyrics by Alan Moore)

Posted in General writing things

So Doublestuf Oreos contain only 1.86 times the amount of stuf of a normal Oreo, not the 2.o times stuf that they claim.  Clearly, the only reason it took this long for the lid to be blown off this scandal, by a Queensbury, NY math class, is that everyone naturally assumed that the people responsible for the Oreo cookie would not lie about anything.  But alas, such is not the case.  There really are no heroes, these days.

Worse yet, Megastuf Oreos only contain 2.68 times the normal amount of stuf.  Like most people, I had assumed that each cookie contained one million times as much stuf as a normal Oreo, as befits it prefix, but that is even further off, apparently.

Posted in Uncategorized