The Fundamentals of Style

Wednesday's Idea: The list

2006-08-09T10:41:00.000-04:00

Now and again you'll see a journalist attempt this: the expansive list that defines a given universe by the breadth of its contents.

A couple of weeks ago, Stacy Schiff had a decent piece in the New Yorker about Wikipedia, a vast universe if ever there was one. (And, in our humble opinion, mostly rubbish. But we're the last of the credentialists, apparently.)

Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about prostitution in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can.

This is difficult. The task is not, as some assume, to choose the ten items with the very least in common; doing so would fail to give a reader any stiff sense of unity or character. It is rather to concoct a string of items that, though disparate, is capable of suggesting some pattern while simultaneously remaining diverse.

(Note from the English major: For a good example, see the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story “Big Mama’s Funeral.”)

Tuesday's Bonus: The Declaration of Style

2006-08-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

Sabrina Tavernise had a wonderful and devasting piece in this morning's Times about a Lebanese man picking up the pieces of his life after an airstrike killed his wife, daughter, and granddaughter.

It begins: "After a bomb hits, the remains of a life are modest."

It's tricky territory, writing with that kind of certainty. So easily dost the ground beneath you erupt into an earthen soapbox. The best ones are simple, quiet and austere. Like this one.

And bonus: Why, Post, Why? We're not categorically opposed to puns, but for the love of God, make them clever.

Tuesday's Passage: Attack of the Killer Sundaes

2006-08-08T10:47:00.000-04:00

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Monday's Word: Theomania

2006-08-07T10:52:00.000-04:00

We'll own up to this one immediately: We think it might have been included on one of the umpteen "word of the day" emails we get between us, but no one can remember exactly when. But it's too good to pass up:

Theomania: The belief that one is god.

Needless to say, there are more than a few theomaniacs here in Washington.

Friday's Voice: Animate London

2006-08-04T11:29:00.000-04:00

Another old favorite, this one from the beginning of Book the Third of Dickens' last novel, Our Mutual Friend.

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night- creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City-- which call Saint Mary Axe--it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul's seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

Thursday's Bonus: In Rowling We Trust

2006-08-03T15:06:00.000-04:00

We admit it: We worship at the church of J. K. Rowling too. So we appreciated Segal's lede this morning on her visit to New York:

"J.K. Rowling does not resemble a traditional deity."

No, we suppose she doesn't, yet.

Thursday's Usage: Beknighted

2006-08-03T10:51:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting one, in part because it's not, technically speaking, a real word. At least, no dictionary that we could locate in under five minutes turned it up. But we're of the fervent belief that if a series of letters gets a point across, and that point is reasonably similar among a majority of the people who take it in, then it might as well be a word, the dusty authorities be damned.

There is a word, "benighted," which is in the dictionary. Literally, it is the coming of darkness; figuratively, unenlightened. (The Times editorial page used it this morning in reference to the "benighted science standards" of the anti-evolution Kansas school board.)

If "beknighted" ever does become a word, it will probably owe its existence to people who misspelled "benighted." But what an opportunity! To us, it means a person who has knighted himself, or a topic that holds itself in a hallowed light.

May we have this one, oh editors, guardians of the gate of language? The barbarians are knocking.

Wednesday's Term: Categories Two

2006-08-02T10:53:00.000-04:00

The way we see, there are two types of people in the world: those who read this web site, and those who don't. It's a lonely existence, but we all knew it was coming...

The "two types of people in the world" gimmick is undoubtedly overplayed, but when the author devises a good one -- and one that places people in categories based on a figurative quality rather than on some action -- it works, and works well.

Times columnist David Brooks had a good one over the weekend:

In the world of public policy, there are ecologists and engineers. The ecologists believe human beings are formed amid a web of relationships. Behavior is shaped by the weave of expectations and motivations that we pick up from the people around us every day.

Again, we would like to the article, but it would only be shipping you into the oblivion of the firewall.

We seem to recall that physicist Freeman Dyson had a famous one, resurrected from the purgatory of our eleventh grade memories by that impish knave, Google:

In everything we undertake, either on earth or in the sky, we have a choice of two styles, which I call the gray and the green. 'I'he distinction between the gray and the green is not sharp. Only at the extremes of the spectrum can we say without qualification, this is green and that is gray. The difference between green and gray is better explained by examples than by definitions. Factories are gray, gardens are green. Physics is gray, biology is green. Plutonium is gray, horse manure is green. Bureaucracy is gray, pioneer communities are green. Self-reproducing machines are gray, trees and children are green. Human technology is gray, God's technology is green. Clones are gray, clades are green. Army field manuals are gray, poems are green.

From "Disturbing the Universe."

As always, this technique survives on the force of example.

Tuesday's Bonus: Down with the lingo

2006-08-01T10:47:00.000-04:00

We all have parents, so we clearly remember those agonizing moments when they attempted to co-opt the slang of the hour -- usually about two years behind the vogue. But we're "down with that," as it were. Journalists regularly commit the same sin.

But the Post's Peter Carlson had a decent go at it this weekend.

His daddy was doing time for armed robbery, and Jacob Ferguson grew up on the streets of New York, sleeping on sidewalks, squatting in abandoned buildings, stealing cars, selling heroin and ripping off suburban kids who came into the big city to score dope.

Article here.

Stuever had a good piece on MTV with a mindblowingly stupid lede, so most of us didn't read it. But the parenthetical remark in the second paragraph almost atoned for that unatonable invocation of JT.

MTV turns 25 today, which is still a few months younger than Justin Timberlake.

The typical way to go from that sentence would be to bemoan -- in snarkabratory fashion -- what MTV has become since it first transfixed some lucky cable-ready teenagers on Aug. 1, 1981. (Those of us first labeled "the MTV Generation" would now like to apologize to all the parents with basic cable who hired us as babysitters in those days. You should know this: Your small children went unsupervised, unless they happened to pass between our eyeballs and Adam Ant's.)

Article here.

Tuesday's Quote: Chances to deceive

2006-08-01T10:38:00.000-04:00

"It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive." -Mark Twain

(Note: It is no small irony that the eminently quotable Mark Twain didn't say half the things that are attributed to him. There is a very good website that parses out those he actually said and those he didn't -- or at least never wrote down for us to find.)

Bonus: The Quiet Lede

2006-07-31T11:22:00.000-04:00

We enjoyed this overture from today's Post:

They've turned on the air conditioning inside the new National Museum of the Marine Corps, and they've hung fighter planes from the massive girders that poke above the skyline as you drive along Interstate 95 past Quantico. Although it won't open to the public until Nov. 10, the shell of the building and the distinctive 210-foot mast and sail-like glass structure that tops it-- are already attracting notice from passersby. Inside, it's still very much a work zone.

Somehow, Kennicott has managed to acheive that quietude of style that only very good writers can summon. Full article here.

Monday's Word: Bacchanalia

2006-07-31T11:12:00.000-04:00

We've come across this one a few times recently. Derived from a Roman festival in honor of the God of Partying, Bacchus, this now can refer to any riotous or drunken festival.

And while we're on the subject of toga parties, try this one on for size: Trimalchio. He was a fictional (we think) Roman who was known for throwing lavish parties. We seem to recall reading somewhere that Scott Fitzgerald was considering calling Gatsby "Trimalchio in West Egg," but was talked out of it.

So maybe editors are occasionally useful.

Bonus: For the Love of God, Hunter

2006-07-28T12:55:00.000-04:00

Look's like the Post accidentally published a transcript of critic Steve Hunter's whiny procrastinatory banter instead of his actual article:

Hmmm, review first, or inappropriate rant? Let's decide by the sound principle of random drift in the universe. Out comes the coin, flip goes the dime and . . . review first. That's really best. You can read from here, skip the rant part and feel well serviced by today's newspapers.

Article here.

You know, there's allowing for voice, and then there's letting your reporters screw around at the expense of quality.

Friday's Voice: Franny arrives

2006-07-28T11:03:00.000-04:00

The opening overture to Franny and Zooey, from the Master.

"Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend-- the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries."

Thursday's Usage: Charlatan

2006-07-27T10:38:00.000-04:00

One of these days we'll get a post up before 10:30. Hope springs eternal.

Charlatan: A person making sophisticated claims or professing religious doctrines that are fraudulent.

We trust your imagination can carry you forward with this one.

(Note from the cynic: Anyone noticing a trend here? "Pageantry," "Posturing" and "Charlatan"? I thought I had cornered the market on cynicism here.)

The First Fundamental Law of Style

2006-07-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

"Brevity is the Soul of Wit," right? (Of course, if the author of that well-loved aphorism really meant it, he or she would have simply said, "wit is short.")

As we've said many times (once), you can find style anywhere. Include the Times TV Listings, as Slate notes today.

And it's true, probably. But herein we'd like to offer up a modest little maxim. In anticipation of future such vanities, we'll call this the First Fundamental Law of Style.

The First Fundamental Law of Style: The tighter the piece, the more liable it is to be butchered by editors.

Mostly it's just mathematics. The fewer the words, the larger the burden each of them shoulders. But the under-100 words crowd is a Petri dish for styles that could never sustain themselves in the 8-inch world.

Wednesday's Bonus: We'll Remember You As You Were, Woody

2006-07-26T10:46:00.000-04:00

David Segal has a good lede in the Post this morning in a piece on Woody Allen.

But easy on the glib gun, Seattle. At least we got a kick out of this one.

Wednesday's Term: The Perils of Onomatopoeia

2006-07-26T10:31:00.000-04:00

In case anyone played hooky for the entirety of grades seven through twelve, onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it is describing (often very poorly). Think animal sounds.

We bring this up because we’re concerned about a growing trend in the priggish ghettos of journalism toward including these eyesores as stylistic fix. We’ve already called out two Posties on this in the past few days for similar crimes.

(Note from the cynic: Perhaps, having been rejected for that gig at NPR, they’re bringing that reportorial ambient noise to their prose.)

Don't do it. Please. It's stupid.

Tuesday's Bonus: There will come soft rains

2006-07-25T10:53:00.000-04:00

A wonderful lede this morning from the San Francisco Chronicle's David Perlman:

"It was a clear, cold summer afternoon on the Chryse Plain of Mars 30 years ago today, and well before a humid dawn here in California, when a three-footed spacecraft named Viking 1 settled gingerly onto a rock-strewn patch of rust-red Martian sand."

Full article.

Some good and some bad from the Post this morning as well. Since the optimist is on duty today, we'll start with the good, from Sara Kehaulani Goo on the front page:

"Here's how the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is playing out on the Internet's latest window into the human experience, YouTube.com: Videos of young girls driving around smoking and joking about Hezbollah, next to shaky footage of grieving men toting dead bodies through rubble as sirens wail."

Full Article here.

It isn't flashy or obnoxious, but it's well constructed and coolly elegant, well-suited for a somber subject. Kudos to Sara.

Onto the Style page. Libby Copeland on surprise administrative visits:

"Sur- priiise ! Condi went to Beirut!"

We've been to parties with people who talk like that. We didn't stay long. Plus, exclamation points almost never work. If ever.

Tuesday's Quote: Hemingway on symbolism

2006-07-25T10:46:00.000-04:00

An old favorite:

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

Ernest Hemingway, master of symbolism. (He forgot to add: "The burns on the old man's hands are just stigmata, no more and no less.")

(Note from the English major: But we understand his frustration.)

Bonus: The frenzied lede

2006-07-24T12:08:00.000-04:00

Bill Booth over at the Post has a good example today of the "frenzied lede" -- that is, a cyclone of words and images that either converge on a point (as they do here, mostly) or deteriorate into gibberish. Full article here. (P.S. -- Billy, the "Arrrr!" is laaaaame).

First, the costume report: There were, interestingly, more blood-splattered, brain-eating zombies this year. Blame the economy? The pirates and the ninjas are still apparently at war, though the Jack Sparrow puffy shirt look ("Arrrrr!") appears to be winning out over basic samurai-assassin black. Of course, lots of attendees in Star Wars Clone Trooper regalia, goose-schlepping through the cavernous convention hall here, clutching goody bags. Plenty of Spidermen and Spiderboys. A few Transformers. Hairy Harry Potters. An excellent African American Batman -- and many naughty Japanese schoolgirls ("Arrrr!").

Monday's Word: Priggish

2006-07-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

Came across this one in a John Tierney column over the weekend in the Times. We'd link to it, but they now put the columns behind the firewall.

Priggish: Extraordinary or exaggerated rectitude and conformity.

As usual, we like this one because, even though we hadn't heard it before, we knew exactly what it meant.

Friday's Voice: You Camp Here Often?

2006-07-21T10:41:00.000-04:00

Hard to go wrong with Slate. Here's a gem, from Seth Stevenson:

"Summer camp isn't really for the campers. Bless their hearts, they're mostly just hoping to get back home with no broken bones or major emotional traumas. No, camp is for the counselors, who, after all, are there by choice, get paid, frequently snog the other counselors, and basically ride a serotonin high all summer long."

Article here.

(Note from the black-hearted editor: Yes, Slate is great and all, but after a while the mellifluous snark starts to sound the same in every article. We wonder whether all copy gets put through the same Voice-inator...)

Bonus today from the Post's Dana Milbank:

"President Bush was benefiting from the soft bigotry of low expectations when he addressed the NAACP convention yesterday. But that wasn't quite enough to get him through." Full article. (Note: the "soft bigotry" phrase belongs to Bush's speechwriter, as Dana points out later on.)

If only there were more of him...(Dana, that is).

Bonus: The perfect lede

2006-07-20T10:21:00.000-04:00

You know it when you see it: the perfect lede. This one, from the Philadelphia Inquirer, knocked us cold:

"Emily Jackson, 48, mother of two, wore a crisp, cream-colored pantsuit, a diamond-pendant necklace, and a diamond-pendant bracelet. Her body rested in a steel, copper-colored casket."

Article here.

Thursday's Usage: Posturing

2006-07-20T10:09:00.000-04:00

Literally, to assume a pose. Often used as a general synonym for "grandstanding." This word is particularly useful here in Washington.

Wednesday's Bonus: Stuever, again

2006-07-19T10:57:00.000-04:00

Truth is, we love this guy. And we promise he doesn't work for us.

Though truth be told, the lede to this morning's piece on Brad Pitt came within an inch of that terrible thing that happens when journalists, many of whom lack those snarskish neurons that give us social skills, try to get creative and end up sounding cute--and a little dense.

But Hank hits his stride in the second paragraph:

"Soon he and Angelina Jolie won't even live on Earth, they'll just dangle above it, in a nursery-equipped Gulfstream IV, sort of the way Brandon Routh's Superman prefers to just float, in the stratosphere, listening acutely, compassionately, for trouble down there, and when he hears it, zoom , down he goes. We were always told that this is what the citizens of the future would do: They would have no fixed address. They would go where needed, constantly, selflessly."

Full article here.

Wednesday's Idea: Odd Bedfellows

2006-07-19T10:28:00.000-04:00

Since our days as delinquent English majors trying to eek out as many words as possible out of a sub-par thesis, we've always loved doubling up adjectives. The "(adj) and (adj) (noun)" form is a wonderful means of distinguishing a thing, even if our editors grumble about it and cut one of the words after we go home.

For the most part, we think two adjectives is enough to give a reader a fairly clear image. We can well imagine the lifeguard's "plump and sunburned face." Any extra description will lag behind the image that has instantly congealed in our minds.

(An interruption from the poet: "[her] plump and sunburned face" is perfectly iambic -- that is, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Readers can detect this regardless of whether they recognize it or know what to call it. Anyone who says meter is only for poets is sadly mistaken.)

Let's take it up a notch. That example involves two visual, literal adjectives. But let's jury-rig the form by replacing the second adjective with a figurative one: "Her plump and tortured face."

Universes expand before us. Suddenly the description is two-dimensional, and yet we have suggested, by mere juxtaposition of a common form, that they are two edges of the same sword.

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges has this to say on the subject, in his phenomenal short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote":

"This effective combination of two adjectives, one moral and the other physical, reminded me of a line from Shakespeare which we discussed one afternoon:

"Where" a malignant and turbaned Turk..."

Nor does this have to be limited to adjectives. Now we turn to songwriter Curtis Mayfield, in "Freddie's Dead":

"We can deal with rockets and dreams, but reality, what does it mean?"

We'll forgive Curtis that dose of existential angst thanks to that wonderfully evocation pairing of "rockets" and "dreams."

The examples may come from fiction and songs, but this should not be limited to those genres.

Tuesday's Quote: A Note from Miles

2006-07-18T10:59:00.000-04:00

"I'll play it and tell you what it is later."
-Miles Davis

Bonus: The worst sentence in the history of literature

2006-07-17T10:40:00.000-04:00

One of us, who shall remain doubly anonymous, was reading the lead editorial of "The Georgetowner" over the weekend when he discovered a sentence that is truly spectacular in its badness. The rest of us tore apart our files searching for a sentence that could outdo it, and failed.

The topic of the editorial was the profoundly unfunny murders that have taken place in King George's village. It reads: "There was a kind of seepage of sadness that turned into a stream."

Maybe there are better uses of our time than taking potshots at a mediocre vessel for advertising bucks, particularly when the subject is so grave. But this one is simply too good to be true. It has none on of the stuff that normally makes a sentence bad: no technical errors, awkward repetitions, misplaced modifiers. It is not the work of a lackluster writer over-armed with a thesaurus. It aspires to great profundity and fails completely. It is a kind of semi-coherent glossolalia that a less-than-astute reader—say, the kind of person who reads The Georgetowner—might mistake for eloquence.

And that makes it great.

Monday's Word: Glossolalia

2006-07-17T10:29:00.000-04:00

Glossolalia: Speaking in tongues, or any gibberish associated with a trance or religious epiphany.

Okay, so we said we weren't going to be choosing words meant to confound, but this one was too good to pass up. Plus, we feel justified in that, like our friend "ululation," this one contains a hint to its meaning in the suffix, which sounds suspiciously like "lala." We've yet to recruit a particularly well-qualified etymologist to join the team, but it appears that this is a coincidence. All the better.

Friday's Voice: Old MacDonald in the Crosshairs

2006-07-14T10:43:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the fish just jump into the boat. While the front page of the New York Times doesn't exactly read like a Fitzgerald novel, this bit by Eric Lipton, from Wednesday's paper, probably wrote itself. Still, we enjoyed it. Kudos to Eric.

WASHINGTON, July 11 — It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

Full article here.

Thursday's Usage: Exorcise

2006-07-12T18:05:00.000-04:00

Exorcise: To expel a demon or evil spirit by supernatural means.

We're going to go out on a limb here and say that most exorcisms outside the summer blockbuster circuit are pure pageantry. Thus, we can use the word to conjure up images of a person attempting to rid themselves of some problem by ineffectual means: "Steven thumped the top of the T.V. in hopes of exorcising the buzz in the left stereo."

Wednesday's Term: Synesthesia

2006-07-12T10:38:00.000-04:00

Synesthesia is both a psychological condition and a literary device. In science, it refers to any joining of two distinct senses -- associating tastes with shapes, smells with sounds, etc. Approximately one in 2000 people are synesthesiacs.

In the literary world this device is used, most often in poetry, to breathe life into a object by describing it with nongermane senses, or to ellucidate a character's thoughts and attitudes. Our Book Worm tells us that the best example he can think of is Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, who "smells" certain attributes about his sister, Caddy, as well as many of his surroundings.

Tuesday's Passage: Menand on voice

2006-07-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

A loud-mouthed friend remarked to one of us yesterday that we have already used the words "evanescent" and "ephemeral" to describe voice, and as a result the site is already in danger of becoming "elusory before it's [sic] time."

Point taken, we suppose, but "three's a trend," as we say in the business, so we thought we would go ahead and offer up this nugget of wisdom, from the New Yorker's resident language geek, Louis Menand. After this we promise to drop off it.

A note on Menand: We have mixed feelings about him among our ranks, and while we generally recommend his stuff, he does occasionally give off the impression of having jury-rigged a personal soapbox out of the advance uncorrected proofs he gets in the mail. Also, we're not sure how to say his last name.

This bit is from his takedown of the bestseller "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" in the June 28, 2004 issue of the magazine, titled "Bad Comma." You can read the entire piece here.

"One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call 'voice.' Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the 'voice.' There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t."

Monday's word: Ululation

2006-07-10T02:13:00.000-04:00

Ululation (n): A howl or sorrowful cry.

We like this word because, even if readers were less than diligent in filling out their vocab worksheets in the eleventh grade, they can still probably divine its meaning. The word seems vaguely onomatopoetic but also contains a little clue as it its sound. "Ulate," as in "undulating," suggests a Tarzan-like rise and fall in pitch. The connotation is undeniably barbaric.

Friday's Voice: The perils of geekdom

2006-07-07T10:16:00.000-04:00

One of us briefly dated an obsessively well-lettered girl in college who informed us that writing fiction had become a futile vocation now that all possible tones and voices had been used up. We beg to differ. Voice is an ephemeral thing, and the only really winning thing we have to say about it is that you know it when you see it. Here's a clip from old favorite. Our crack team of lawyers at FoS tell us these two paragraphs fall within the guidelines of Fair Use. Here's hoping:

From "Dead-Letter Day," a December 10, 2002 feature in the Washington Post by Hank Stuever.

"Geekdom used to be so lonely, and that's why kids -- and grown- ups -- wrote letters to comic books. It was possible to walk to school via the longer (and safer) path and eat your lunch alone and think you were the only person in the world who was drawing panels of the Justice League of America on the back of your history folder.

"Beginning about 45 years ago, hard-core fans started to send in letters on sheets of notebook paper. They would praise superheroes, but also take umbrage with story arcs or abuses of mutant powers, or point out tiny inconsistencies in the canon, or decry supergaffes. They would mail these letters to New York, where comic books were created in office buildings with addresses on Madison Avenue, or the more skyscrapery-sounding Avenue of the Americas."

Thursday's Usage: Pageantry

2006-07-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

Many of us associate this word with a Yuletide recasting of the birth of Jesus. But a "pageant" can loosely refer to any choreographed ceremony, often with extravagant decorations. Time to dust off that figurative license. In addition to being a colorful term for the plethora of pomp that surrounds us, we can snidely use the word "pageantry" to describe any process that purports to be legitimate but in fact is predetermined. Like, say, certain elections...

Wednesday's Term: Antagonym

2006-07-05T12:15:00.000-04:00

For our inaugural post we'll introduce a term/idea, which will be standard fair for Wednesdays. This one came from a T.A. one of us had in college.

Antagonym: A word with two meanings that contradict one another.

Some of our favorite examples:
-Anxious: apprehensive v. eagerly anticipating
-Fast: immobile ("standing fast") v. moving quickly
-Last: most previous v. final iteration v. enduring
-Sanction: to authorize (verb) v. a penalty (noun)
-Still: immobile v. persisting
-Then: days of yore v. subsequently

While a bit obtuse, thinking about antagonyms stretches our minds in ways that are useful when selecting words.