An elegy is a poem, typically one memorializing and praising the dead or (loosely) one with a mournful and gloomy contemplative tone; it may also be a piece of music…
An elegy is a poem, typically one memorializing and praising the dead or (loosely) one with a mournful and gloomy contemplative tone; it may also be a piece of music of similar topic and tone. A eulogy is a speech, formal and elegant in form, in praise of someone recently dead.
So, I guess it’s a eulogy I need to write.
UPDATE: Final product.
I had a sales manager actually send me an e-mail that contained the following phrase (on something that has nothing to do with geology): … articulate a cohesive picture of…
I had a sales manager actually send me an e-mail that contained the following phrase (on something that has nothing to do with geology):
… articulate a cohesive picture of our tectonic platform and roadmap with respect to the various solution sets …
I think he was being paid by the word. Or the syllable.
Of course, this guy also uses “front-end” as a verb, hyphenates “follow-up” as a verb, and loves the verb “leverage” for “make use of.”
Mom asked if I could give Nona’s elegy at the service next Tuesday. I like to write, and am pretty good at being wordy as need be. But it’s ……
Mom asked if I could give Nona’s elegy at the service next Tuesday.
I like to write, and am pretty good at being wordy as need be. But it’s … not an easy task, obviously. Encompassing a tribute to one woman’s life into the given parameters (one page, single spaced, per the parish’s guidelines) would be difficult enough. Doing her justice is nearly impossible.
I’ll let you know what I come up with.
A list of linguistic coincidences — words that mean the same things in completely unrelated languages….
A list of linguistic coincidences — words that mean the same things in completely unrelated languages.
By just tweaking a few historical facts, here’s a “fun” map of a North America that is no longer just two nations (three if you count Mexico), but a good…
By just tweaking a few historical facts, here’s a “fun” map of a North America that is no longer just two nations (three if you count Mexico), but a good dozen-and-a-half.
Good grist for an alternate history novel, at the very least.
Kottke quotes from a William Gibson interview in which he says: If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that…
Kottke quotes from a William Gibson interview in which he says:
If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they’d not only show you the door, they’d probably call security.
I have to wonder if that’s not always true. Any of the items that Gibson mentioned would be the subject of a full-blown novel — with each of the items taking up nearly full-time the attention of all world leaders and top scientists and the like.
But imagine a writer in 1947 going in with a proposal about a novel set in 1977. Would an editor consider it too improbably busy to include the launch of Voyagers 1 and 2, the first nodes of ARPAnet (later the Internet) going online, the first test of the stealth fighter, the opening of Star Wars, the first space shuttle test flights, the eradication of smallpox, and the Tenerife 747 disaster (amongst many other 1977 events)?
And those are strictly 1977. Gibson’s scenario encompasses items in the news for the last 5-7 years — encompass all the items from 1971-77, and you’d have a panoply of events each of which would make for a world-focus-encompassing novel.
Heck, anyone who came up with a list as complicated as that 1977 events list and tried to sandwich that into a novel would be greeted with a lot of red ink, I suspect.
By definition, any novel is going to be a narrow view of events. Nothing short of an immediate planetary disaster of diplomatic crisis is going to keep any more than a few folks focused on one thing for more than a few days. It’s always a shock to me to read one of those “year in review” sorts of items because some of the events described seem like that can’t have happened just in the last year — last January can feel like last decade.
Things are always busier than they seem. Just as a sculptor chips away everything except the subject being portrayed, a novelist perforce shaves away all but the critical events, simplifying the world to make events match the message seeking portrayal. It’s always an abstraction, I suspect, because life — macro and micro — is always more complicated than even the best novelist can make it (or would want to).
… in Japan. (via kottke)…
I’m not sure who uses pocket calendars any more … but is there a better design than “absurdly small type” arranged in twelve blocks of thirty-odd numbers? Here are some…
I’m not sure who uses pocket calendars any more … but is there a better design than “absurdly small type” arranged in twelve blocks of thirty-odd numbers? Here are some tries.
I was seriously considering, at the last moment, doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year. I had an idea, some scenes in mind, the interest — and then 1…
I was seriously considering, at the last moment, doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year. I had an idea, some scenes in mind, the interest — and then 1 November came and hit me over the head with a 4×12.
But then I ran across a reference to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), which seems much simpler (at least for me): a blog post every day in the month of November.
I can do that! I thought. Indeed, it’s usually harder to find a day of the week I don’t post. Except — I’m already blown, as I didn’t post anything on Saturday the 2nd. Gah!
Oh, well.
Another one from Terry: This comes from Stephen Leigh, who in September posted this assignment that he gives his writing students. What color is fear? Bright, actinic blue, blinding and…
Another one from Terry:
This comes from Stephen Leigh, who in September posted this assignment that he gives his writing students.
What color is fear? Bright, actinic blue, blinding and sharp.
What sound does affection make? A soft whisper.
What texture does Autumn have? Crisp and delicate.
What shape does a conversation make? An elipse, like a slot car track.
What fabric is a kitten made of? Cashmere.
What noise is made by curiosity? A bloodhound’s whuffing sound.
What is the smell of knowledge? Musty old paper, leather, fabric, and the ozone of fluorescent lighting.
How do you punctuate life? Question marks, followed by exclamation points, parentheses, elipses, and, eventually, semi-colons, before a full stop.
What does death taste like? Dry dust, lightly chilled.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, what kind of tree is it? Fallen.
Why do we swear? More importantly, why does it upset some people? How has swearing changed over the years, and do rules (legal or social) about it make any sense? …
Why do we swear? More importantly, why does it upset some people? How has swearing changed over the years, and do rules (legal or social) about it make any sense?
When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation’s leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles — linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political.
Very interesting article by Steve Pinker. (Warning: contains dirty words)
(via GeekPress)
Yes, it’s time once more for that feature here where I try desperately to catch up with all the browser tabs I’ve refused to close for the past few days…
Yes, it’s time once more for that feature here where I try desperately to catch up with all the browser tabs I’ve refused to close for the past few days until I can blog about them.
Then you should probably have attended National Punctuation Day celebrations, back on September 24th. National Punctuation Day, the holiday that reminds America that a “semicolon is not a surgical procedure,”…
Then you should probably have attended National Punctuation Day celebrations, back on September 24th.
National Punctuation Day, the holiday that reminds America that a “semicolon is not a surgical procedure,” celebrates its fourth anniversary September 24. But what started as a clever idea to remind corporations and professional people of the importance of proper punctuation has turned into an everyday mission to help school children learn the punctuation skills they need to be successful in life.
You might, I note parenthetically, mark your calendars for next year.
(via Dave N.)
Random stuff I scribbled down to blog about while on my trip: Self-contained Taser shells! It’s taserrific! For whatever reason, I’ve been encountering the term “bespoke” more and more often…
Random stuff I scribbled down to blog about while on my trip:
Busy day, so let’s throw out some quick linky love. Who was St Pamphilus? (Not to be confused with St Pamphilus of Caesarea) Chinese nuclear tests, secret spy missions in…
Busy day, so let’s throw out some quick linky love.
Four new entries in the OED for this month: attrit chaise lounge entheogen puh-leeze There’s also new revisions to existing entries, in the range proter-purposive. Coolness….
Four new entries in the OED for this month:
There’s also new revisions to existing entries, in the range proter-purposive.
Coolness.
It’s the 25th anniversary of the smile emoticon. 🙂 Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a…
It’s the 25th anniversary of the smile emoticon. 🙂
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.
[…] Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways.”
The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile — or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman’s smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.
I’ve participated in endless online debates over whether emoticons are useful, essential elements of online communication, or if they are an abomination in the eyes of God (and Strunk & White). Opponents note that written communication got along fine for centuries without emoticons, through careful word choice. Proponents note that overall volume of written communication has gone up through e-mail and texting, while time available to do it has gone down.
I use them, in casual communication. I don’t in more formal communication, nor in actual “writing.”
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language — to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.
“What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” Nass said.
In some ways, he added, they also give people “the ability not to think as hard about the words they’re using.”
To my mind, a bigger issue with emoticons are the ambiguity of some forms. Everyone has a decent idea of what 🙂 and 🙁 are (we’ll leave aside the profound question of whether a hyphen is a necessary nose marker or not). But once you get into other areas, it gets dicier — especially since ISO hasn’t weighed in on official meanings. Biggest question mark in my mind is: is 😛 a sign of queasy “bleah” unhappiness over a situation, or looney tongue-sticking-out fun? I’ve seen it used both ways, and the interpretation into more graphic icons in programs like Yahoo Instant Messenger doesn’t clarify it any.
Not sure where to live, but interested in democracy? Lacking Wikipedia to learn about prospective nations to move to? You can make some intelligent guesses based on the country’s full,…
Not sure where to live, but interested in democracy? Lacking Wikipedia to learn about prospective nations to move to? You can make some intelligent guesses based on the country’s full, official name.
Places that include “people,” “arab,” “islamic,” “socialist” or (ironically) “democratic” in their name probably rank pretty poorly, democracy-wise. On the other hand “commonwealth” and (also ironically) “principality” is a pretty good sign of a democratic nation.
(via Neatorama)
Who was St Cosmas? Run your favorite web page through the Dialectizer and see how it reads in Redneck, Jive, Cockney, etc. (via Randy) Because what the world needs…
Who was St Cosmas?
I’ve fallen in love. This is great. (via GeekPress)…
