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21 de Febrero 2006
flagrant use of blog for preservation of language
there is no such thing as normalcy, not on any philisophical or practical scale, nor is there a place for this kind of mess in the English language. It is, to use another word widely (wildly?) misused supposed to be right but it is not correct. The truth is you can't run around changing the way words are used when it isn't for any good reason.
Sure, if it was funny sounding or clever or there was some double meaning... but not, especially not, if you are otherwise attempting to impress.
I don't claim to know it all. In fact I should confess that I am still not sure when to use laying and lying, or lay and lie... and it is disconcerting
but nobody paid me and my editor large sums of money to get it right-at least not yet. And when they do, you just better tell them not to pay me by the hour.
merciful heavens.
I am hacking my way through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and I wanted to stab myself in the leg with a salad fork when I found the aforementioned mistake. The book depends, absolutely, on his... well, to loosely quote Captain Amazing: "knowing that you know I knew you knew."
but it all falls apart: the theme that he is smart enough to write a brilliant book despite dropping out of college, the clever relationship he spent so much time building in the first funny few pages... it is what the book is about. (Sorry if you thought the book was a story of two brothers... I am just not buying that.)
It all comes crashing down with a simple editing foible.
So excuuuse me if I have lost respect so early in the book, but if you are out there Dave Eggers, and you care about the language, you will send me a little comment promising
"it won't happen again." Copy and paste it if you'd like, maybe you are one of those writers who secretly wants to take it all back but you pretend not to care. In any case, don't even apologize, just promise.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 8:23 AM
8 de Febrero 2006
for mary
did they mean to break the applicants in half, or to see if we could take the torque?
of course I might get in. of course it is the school I want to go to. but the interview didn't make me cry and now I want to know if it was supposed to. or maybe they are just playing the odds that if I don't cry at the interview, they can just wait until I get the rejection letter. either way it seems pretty cruel.
after it was all over, and I couldn't do anything more to win over admissions, there was mary.
after I drove my old friend to her house in the U district. there she was, this tiny warrior sitting in the car, face bent toward her hands and I know she was smiling when she told me "oh abigail you have so much to learnasdoI."
I went to the interview thinking it was for graduate school, but maybe it was for Mary...
just to hear her wisened little voice lilt across the words to answer the question.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 9:08 PM
3 de Febrero 2006
In Everett...
drinking hot chocolate with my sister, she is wearing only green clothes. So she must have learned how to match sometime in our childhood; where was I for that lesson?
Interview on Monday. I'll be the one who looks like one of the applicant's teenage tagalongs. But if I don't get in, everyone at home will chalk it up to God's sovereignty, rather than ask me why.
That is nice of them, isn't it?
Posted by crymytinyflood at 11:20 PM