A Tattoo on the Tongue

And here we have another bunch of quotations, which I semi-compulsively collect from here and there across the vast wasteland of the internet. Several are from the wonderful newsletter A Word a Day; many are not.

The title of this post, as you will discern momentarily, comes from the first quotation in the current batch, which struck my fancy.

“A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue.” —Attributed to William F. DeVault

“Writing is torture. Not writing is torture. The only thing that feels good is having written.” —C. B. Mosher

“Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.” —Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist (1825-1895)

“The hardest part is starting to write.” —Michael Crichton (1942–2008)

“To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” —Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“No writer is really part of a group sensibility. When you’re writing, you’re on your own.” —A. S. Byatt

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” —Confucius

“Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” —William Zinsser

“The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.” —Louis de Berniere, novelist (b. 1954)

“The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” —Mark Twain

“Faith is the unflagging determination to remain ignorant in the face of any and all evidence that you’re ignorant.” —Shaun Mason

“Habit with him was all the test of truth / It must be right: I’ve done it from my youth.” —George Crabbe, poet and naturalist (1754-1832)

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.” —Benjamin Franklin

“An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.” —Arab Proverb

“An interesting thing about writing is that you might write quite a lot before you realize what you’re doing.” —Alexander McCall-Smith

“God shouldn’t be put in charge of everything until we get to know Him a little better.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“Patriot: The person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” —Mark Twain

“The term ‘family reunion’ kind of implies you normally don’t have to keep in touch with these people, right?” —Jim Gaffigan

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.” —Oscar Wilde

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.” —Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

“Man: A creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.” —Mark Twain

Apostrophe Catastrophe

But of course! When “its” actually needs the apostrophe, that’s the one time it gets written without one! Shee-it.

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It Makes a Difference

From time to time I will encounter the bizarre attitude that, somehow, spelling, punctuation, usage, word choice—you know, all that technical, grammar-Nazi stuff—“doesn’t matter.” Translation: “I don’t understand such things, so the armor I put on is to say it doesn’t matter.” 

In fact, it does. 

As I have expressed to more than one client—and, once, to an alleged editor!—such supposed trivia may well go unnoticed by 98.6% of readers, but the flip side is that it will be noticed by 1.4% of readers. And simple mathematics tells us that the bigger the total number of readers, the greater that 1.4% will be in actual numbers of readers. That 1.4% could be 100,000 readers. (We should be so lucky.) 

More disturbing: You have no way of knowing who those 1.4% are. Nobody does. You have no way of knowing their personalities, their threshold of tolerance of sloppy (or nonexistent) editing. For every one who might just shake his or her head and plunge on ahead, you could have one or two who give up, close the book (real or virtual) or web page, and never come back. 

Simply because, as the meme has it, you don’t know the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit. And you don’t like “grammar Nazis,” so you shut down the person who could help you. 

I pause to reflect on these things because a few minutes ago I started to read an article that I had bookmarked earlier. The topic sounded interesting—writing a sales page for book promotion—and maybe the article contained some useful information; I’ll never know, because when I came to the second error in as many paragraphs, I stopped reading. Sure, I could simply have tut-tutted and kept going. Heaven knows I’ve done that more often than I’d care to count. But today I didn’t feel like it. The obvious sloppiness of the article caused me to doubt that its author really had anything worth saying. If she had, she would have taken a few minutes to proof the article, see that here she had used it’s when she wanted its, there she wanted the word’s noun and not the verb form, and so on. 

I would have been more forgiving had the article been a blog post about, I dunno, politics, or food, or movies, or any number of other things. But when your article purports to be educating about the finer points of writing and publishing, you had bloody well better proofread the damn thing before you publish it. 

Or find a grammar Nazi to do it for you. 

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Peter Palmer, the Amazing Spiderman

So yesterday I posted my little gripe about The Professional Media’s laxness when it comes to correctly rendering such things as proper nouns—using as an example the frequent references to Spiderman one sees in print and online, rather than the correct trademark, Spider-Man—and what that may say about the media’s inattention to other details they place before us.

Today’s e-mail, coincidentally, brings an offer to read—for free, even—a digital copy of the inaugural issue of Spider-Man, from March 1963. I’ve got it somewhere in the archives, on paper, as a reprint in a later Spider-Man “annual” (as mentioned yesterday, I didn’t come on board till Spider-Man number 16, which I mark as the genesis of my comic-book meekness), but having not looked at it in many years I thought it’d be worth a nostalgic peek. Did I mention it was free?

Worth the download it was indeed…but I was amused to discover that, in those early—and, I suspect, hurried—days, not even Stan Lee himself seemed to have a firm grasp on the character’s name. Here’s the cover:

Plainly, the intent seems to be to call the character Spider-Man, hyphenated. The name appears three times on the cover, each time punctuated the same. Very good.

Oh, but look:

There on page one, the name appears another three times…twice as Spider-Man, but then as Spiderman. This is getting slippery. 

Skipping on to page nine, we have Spidey’s name presented yet another three times (coincidence? I think not), and I’m going to say it’s given as Spiderman each time. (Bit of a coin-toss there in the second panel, but I’m guessing the hyphen is there to break Spiderman at the end of the line, not to indicate the letterer—or whoever ultimately made the decision—meant to have it Spider-Man.) 

 

By page two of the second Great Feature-Length Spider-Man Thriller, “Spider-Man vs. The Chameleon,” which includes a completely pointless fight with the Fantastic Four, whose presence here, I imagine, was to boost sales and nothing more, things seem to have settled down a bit: Peter Parker’s alter ego is being consistently rendered as Spider-Man. Alas, young Peter Parker himself is not faring so well, in that twice on the same page his creators seem to think his name is Peter Palmer. 

 

Alas. Even 50 years ago Spider-Man was being victimized by sloppy, hurried editing. And so was Spiderman. 

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If You Don’t Have a Phone, Call This Number

I occasionally lend my name to petitions on subjects that are of interest to me, and much of the time those that are directed to my congressional trio produce this result: 

I can think of no legitimate reason for my state’s junior senator to “require” me to supply a phone number “in order to communicate via email” (emphasis mine). To communicate via telephone, yes, that would make sense, but via e-mail? What do you need besides my, you know, e-mail address…which, along with my name and street address, have already been provided. 

The other two members of my congressional team seem to be able to function without asking me for my phone number. Maybe they realize that e-mail communication goes by, you know, e-mail. 

Because of the way things are in this country, and in this state, I can’t help but wonder if there’s an intimidation angle at work here. I express my opinion, but before Sen. Thune will accept it, I have to give him my telephone number. Geez, my telephone number! What the hell is he gonna do with my telephone number?? Better click cancel… 

I suppose I could call one of the numbers he provides in case I have “difficulty providing this information,” and ask why he needs me to provide said information. 

But what if he has Caller ID? 

Can I borrow your phone?

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Well, "Forever" Is a Pretty Long Time

Rule of thumb: If they put quotation marks around it, it’s the same as putting “not” in front of it.

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This Should Not Be Difficult

Full disclosure: I was a comic-book geek in my youth, and, I suppose, once a comic-book geek always a comic book geek. (I am a child of the so-called Silver Age, and trace my “active” years from 1964—The Amazing Spider-Man #16, “Duel With Daredevil!”—to 1975, when I hied off to college.) But I don’t think it’s simple geekery—nor the fact that I have spent my entire working career as an editor, a writer, a creative director, etc.—to be continually torqued off when The Media can’t be bothered to spell things correctly. 

Like this, from today’s HuffPost Daily Brief: 

Let us pause for a moment an consider the irony inherent in the fact that James Franco, who co-starred in the original three Spider-Man films, seems not to know how to correctly render the proper noun (and trademark). Or that his editor seems not to know how. Or that Huffington Post’s proofreaders seem not to. 

Assuming there are in fact editors and proofreaders there, which more than once I have had cause to doubt. 

I have long since become inured to such monstrosities as mailboxes bearing the legend The Anderson’s, or copy handed to me replete with “quotation” marks to “highlight” words the “author” considers “important” (though possibly the “author” is being “facetious,” as possibly I am here), or “infer” instead of “imply,” “whom” instead of “who,” and so on. These generally are the product of nonprofessionals, which entitles them to a significant amount of slack.

But it’s disheartening to realize that even in the “professional” realm—and at a time when advertising for the upcoming movie series reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, is relentless—nobody can be bothered to check it out, to look at a movie poster, a comic book, the internet, and say, “Oh, it’s not Spiderman; it’s Spider-Man. Well, that’s an easy fix!” 

Nope, no time for any of that sort of nonsense! 

Yes, you’re right: It’s just a comic-book character. And the majority of the world doesn’t know and doesn’t care one way or the other. 

However. 

It has been pointed out that God is in the details. And it seems unlikely that a media organization (and Huffington is far from alone in botching “Spider-Man”: As soon as the box-office figures start rolling in on Wednesday, we will see the name mangled in all sorts of print and electronic communiquÈs—will be sloppy only with the “little stuff.” 

If you can’t be bothered to check to make sure you’re getting the “little stuff” right, what would make me think you’re bothering to check to make sure you’re getting the “big stuff” right? 

Truth is, you’re in a business in which there’s no such thing as “little stuff” and “big stuff.” Not if you’re the least bit interested in credibility. 

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For Lovers of Irony

I know it’s not funny. And yet...Victoria’s Secret?

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Part of the Problem

Our letter carrier left this slip at our house the other day. Evidently someone had sent us a letter that required an additional 20 cents’ worth of postage.

It’s a good thing we know where the post office is, since, evidently, the post office does not. You could spend the rest of your days driving the streets of our fair city, you could comb through maps, atlases, and gazeteers, you could MapQuest, Google Map, and Google Earth until overcome by hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, and you would never find 320 S WND AVE. Indeed, you would never find WND AVE at all. There is no such thing.

You might, however, with a certain amount of detective work, stumble upon 320 S 2ND AVE, which is where the downtown post office (Downtown Station, in current parlance) resides. And where, 20 cents later, our daughter claimed our undelivered envelope.

It’s true that 2 and W sit awfully close together on the keyboard. And it’s true that in this era of budget cuts and over-reliance on electronic backstops, proofreading by actual breathing, thinking human beings is one of the first fatalities (at the hands of breathing but not thinking human beings, usually). But it is both true and deliciously ironic that mail sent to the address provided by the post office itself would be returned as undeliverable by, yep, the post office.

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Choose One

Call it self-serving, but I do believe that even in our technological age, editors—of the human variety—still matter. Why? Well, here’s yesterday’s Daily Briefing from USA Today:

I presume that any editor worth his or her salt would have paused at those last two headlines, and determined that one of them must go. But maybe not. There’s a lot of low-salt editors out there.

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Dear Groupon: What??!

My dad was a great guy, and he did a lot for me...but he most certainly did not “give birth” to me.

Appears somebody needs a Human Reproduction refresher course.

Daily Beast's Ethnic Slur

This is from this morning’s Daily Beast Cheat Sheet, a link to an article about the most recent Vatican scandal:

The immediate and obvious question: What the hell is that mamma mia doing there? It has nothing to do with the article, nothing to do with the Vatican scandal. Clearly some doofus at The Daily Beast had an intellectual epiphany that went something like this:

“Hey, the Vatican’s in Italy, right? And those crazy Eye-talians, they’re always saying stuff like Mamma mia and pastafazool and other goofy things, right? So let’s just throw in a completely superfluous and vaguely insulting Mamma mia to lead off this serious crime story, ’cause, I dunno, it’ll be fun.”

And some perhaps-even-more-moronic Daily Beast editor—if in fact there are any, which I often have had occasion to doubt—said, “Wow, what a great idea! That’ll be loads of laughs! Too bad we don’t have any pictures of some greaseball goombah biting the inside of his own hand--that would be hilarious! Well, we’ll go with this picture of one of those beanie things cardinals wear. Not very funny, but it’s all we have.”

Incidentally, the Washington Post article to which the Cheat Sheet item points manages to avoid any such frivolity, and the implied ethnic smear.

This Makes Perfect Sense to Me

Obviously, you can never be too careful, or too precise:

But I’d really like to pay at the store when I pick up my order. How do I do that?

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Curiosities

Here we have a few oddities that have caught my eye in the past few weeks.

First up, I was stopped in traffic the other day when I noticed the bumper of the car ahead of me:

 

Not sure how visible it is in the photo (shot through my filthy windshield), but if you look closely you will note that, yes, those are staples holding the car’s bumper together. Rusting staples, alas, but still a notch or two above the old standby, duct tape.

Regular readers of these posts will know that I will occasionally subject myself to an online survey, usually to amass points that I can spend on junk I don’t need. Also they can be kind of fun and, once in a great while, even interesting. Here’s a screenshot from a survey I took a little while back:

Not sure what to make of it. A bit of whimsy on the part of the survey designers? Or did the survey designers think the question was such that people would benefit from visual aids?


The other day I took a survey about vodka—something I seldom drink, so the survey went pretty quickly. It turned out to be one of those aforementioned rarities, a survey that is in fact interesting and from which I learned a few things:

1. People who drink vodka must not like the taste of vodka, since there seems to be an enormous number of flavored vodkas; 

2. People who wrote the survey either don’t know or care about past participles or, like a great many people, are afraid of the word “drunk”: A careful editor would have changed the category titles to “I have drunk it ...” Unless they have drank too much.

 From the same survey:

I have spent some little time trying to figure out what the survey designers thought was the difference between the two indicated questions. Granted, some editors would frown on the use of “I’d” as a contraction of “I would” (it’s not wrong, but I’ve worked with editors who eschew it since “I’d” also stands in for “I had”)...but somehow I doubt that there was a heated editorial meeting in which half of the staff argued for “I would” and half argued for “I’d” and in the end they decided to split the difference and use both, just so they could move on to the next item on the agenda

Which obviously was not the drank/drunk discussion.

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Pope, Maybe; Proofreader, Not So Much

This from the Daily Beast Cheat Sheet: Afternoon Edition for April 4, 2012:

At least, I can’t find “infalliable” in any of my dictionaries.

This assumes there actually are proofreaders on the scene, of course. Increasingly, based on my reading both online and in print, I think The Powers That Be have decided that proofreaders—the good ones, at least—are an unnecessary luxury.

They aren’t. Trust me on this one.

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A Word or Two

I see it’s been a little while since I recorded here some of the quotations I’m always semi-obsessively collecting from all over the internet. Time to redress that oversight:

Public opinion rarely considers the needs of the next generation or the history of the last. It is frequently hampered by myths and misinformation, by stereotypes and shibboleths, and by an inate resistance to innovation. —Theodore C. Sorensen, presidential advisor, lawyer, and writer (1928-2010)

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

To read fast is as bad as to eat in a hurry. —Vilhelm Ekelund, poet (1880-1949)

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. —Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, educator and author (1902-2001)

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day. —A. A. Milne author (1882-1956)

An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. —Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that. I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, “I’m in favor of privatization,” or, “I’m deeply in favor of public ownership.” I’m in favor of whatever works in the particular case. —John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be. —Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

If there is a God, I don’t think He would demand that anyone bow down or stand up to Him. —Rebecca West, author and journalist (1892-1983)

Habit with him was all the test of truth, / It must be right: I’ve done it from my youth. —George Crabbe, poet and naturalist (1754-1832)

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. —George Polya, professor of mathematics (1887-1985)

I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species. —Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold. —Zelda Fitzgerald, novelist (1900-1948)

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. —Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. —Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher (1905-1980)

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. —J.M. Barrie, novelist and playwright (1860-1937)

All men — whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans — have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies. —Norman Cousins, author, editor, journalist and professor (1915-1990)

Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it. —Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, moralist (1613-1680)

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves. —Gene Fowler, journalist and author (1890-1960)

Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect. —Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)

In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. —Peter Singer, philosopher, professor of bioethics (b. 1946)

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Lie With Dogs, Rise With Fleas

Not quite an hour ago, The Huffington Post ran an AP story that begins thus:

A flower company is the seventh advertiser to pull its ads from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s radio program in reaction to his derogatory comments about a law student who testified about birth control policy.

ProFlowers said Sunday on its Facebook page that it has suspended advertising on Limbaugh’s program because his comments about Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke “went beyond political discourse to a personal attack and do not reflect our values as a company. ”

The six other advertisers that say they have pulled ads from his show are mortgage lender Quicken Loans, mattress retailers Sleep Train and Sleep Number, software maker Citrix Systems Inc., online data backup service provider Carbonite and online legal document services company LegalZoom.

ProFlowers had said on Twitter that posts it received about Limbaugh’s remarks affected its advertising strategy. ProFlowers is an online flower delivery service.

(Read the entire article here.)

Interestingly, just moments before I came upon that article, I found this in my e-mail, from ProFlowers Customer Care, in response, I assume, to one of the petitions I had signed in the previous couple of days:

Thank you for your feedback. We spend our advertising dollars across a wide spectrum of media channels. The views and opinions of the media outlets and personalities we advertise with are not necessarily those of our company.

 

We simply wish to delight our customers with fresh and unique gifting products, and that will continue to happen to the best of our abilities.

 

Best Regards,

Yolanda D. 

Customer Care 

ProFlowers

It’s interesting to note that ProFlowers’ e-mail, which apparently was sent late last night (Saturday, March 3), has all of the familiar signs of a kiss-off: Oh, we advertise all over the place and don’t really pay any attention to any of it. We don’t know or care what’s being said in the media we support with our advertising dollars. We just like flowers!

Sometime between last night and this afternoon, it seems, someone at ProFlowers woke up to the fact that it really does matter where they advertise, it really does matter when they spend money to support odious, hate-filled rhetoric, it really true that we’re known by the company we keep. (Mom was right.)

Points for wising up, albeit late. Kudos to those advertisers who pulled their dollars away early on, though, rather than waiting till they got both eyes blackened.

It would be nice to think that Limbaugh has at last come to his Lonesome Rhodes moment, though I am too much the pessimist to really believe it. But perhaps some people, like ProFlowers, will now belatedly come to see what a truly hateful and hate-filled little man he is.

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And ONLY One!

For some reason, I find instructions like this to be funny:

Somehow the “Select one” instruction makes me wonder what other choices they think I might put down if they weren’t so specific. I guess, from their perspective, it’s best to not take chances.

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I'll BET He Was Surprised!

According to this news (or news-ish) item that appeared in the rotation on my Mail.com log-in screen, former Senator and former astronaut John Glenn recently was able to “speak live with the International Space Station” and found it “a great surprise.” And I bet I know why: Senator Glenn probably expected to speak with human beings aboard the International Space Station, and not with the station itself. Who wouldn’t be surprised?

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Comma Comment

Last night I was flipping through my son’s English book as we discussed his needing to select from it a poem for a class project. The book contained many of my favorites, including The Lamb, The Second Coming, Ozymandius (which I memorized when I was even younger than my son is now, for a class project), and several by good old Robert Frost, including this:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

New Hampshire, 1923

Recalling a discussion of the poem in an English class back in college, I shared with my son the subtextual meaning of “the woods,” and privately reflected, not for the first time, on the first line of the last stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Not long ago I fell into a Facebook “conversation” about the serial comma, aka the Oxford comma. I have always used it, finding it more logical and clear than the newspaper style, which omits the comma before “and” or “or”: Snap, Crackle, and Pop clearly refers to three entities; Snap, Crackle and Pop could refer to three, or to two (Snap + [Crackle and Pop]), depending on context.

With the serial-comma conversation fairly fresh in mind, I recalled my English professor’s comment on the punctuation of that line:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep says something quite different from The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

Frost isn’t saying the woods are lovely and dark and deep; he is saying they are lovely (because they are) dark and deep. Dark and deep is a single expression, as is lovely.

But if you don’t habitually employ the serial comma you may well lose that distinction, for its absence in the poem would go unnoticed. Lovely, dark and deep would be like Snap, Crackle and Pop—maybe two ideas, maybe three, and probably unnoticed.

Even by its absence, the serial comma does important work.

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