What a work of man is peace, how seasoned in rubble, how
impacted in penalties…
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Some writers might dismiss the concept of story structure as contrived of stiflingly un-artistic conventions, a set of gimmicks reserved for mere “genre” fiction, i.e. stories with (allegedly) little importance.
You want a story with weight and seriousness? Violate the rules!
Others might obsess about their stories adhering to the proper pattern, as if they are filling out a form. What page is the Inciting Incident supposed to occur? Where’s my guidebook?
There is a middle ground, my friends.
DOXY
A mistress, paramour, or prostitute.
The word’s ultimate origin is uncertain but the Oxford English Dictionary suggests a connection with dock meaning ‘buttocks’ or ‘tail’. As a verb dock originally meant to cut off a tail, a sense that we still preserve when we talk of docking a horse’s or dog’s tail. (The more general idea of cutting or reducing, as when we talk of docking someone’s pay is a later extension of this idea.)
– Wordsworth Dictionary of Obscenity and Taboo
A language without conjunctions would be very simplistic — no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
J. J. Evans said, “Dino-MITE!”
The Chicxulub asteroid said, “Dino might not.”
Among conjunctions and the French, “or” is gold.
From a Scientific American Mind article by Jamil Zaki: “What, Me Care? A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S.“:
… Americans have abandoned reading in droves. The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50 percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
I’ve had to add a third option to my “Overheard Wit & Wisdom” series, because a bit of dialogue I heard the other day fits in neither of those categories, but still deserves passing on.
Participants: A young Latin guy in business casual sitting in the “reserved for seniors and handicapped” seats, and an old white guy wearing a tattered blue-jean jacket, just stepping onto the DC Metro Red Line.
Young guy [standing up]: “Sir, would you like this seat?”
Old dude [staring at the opposite wall]: “I’ll sit down when I’m dead.”
Young guy shrugs and sits back down.
This week, we go about as archaic as we can go….
ancilia (Latin). Twelve archaic bronze shields kept in the sanctuary of MARS in the Roman Forum. Tradition remembered that one shield had fallen from the sky on 1 March and a divinely instructed blacksmith had made the further eleven. An aristocratic group, the Salii, used the shields in the yearly OCTOBER HORSE festival, which is probably one of the oldest in the Roman calendar.
– Continuum Dictionary of Religion
From W. H. Auden’s review of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Return of the King, in the 22 January 1956 edition of the New York Times:
I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect.
A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien’s forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light “escapist” reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.