Over on an MLB blog (but it could have been anywhere) someone used the common abbreviation “ppl” for “people,” and it invoked in my head the voice of my high school English teacher ranting about spelling things out.
Mr. Wilson also did not care for the i.e. and e.g. abbreviations of the Latin id est and exempli gratia, respectively. He preferred the less pretentious that is and for example.
And let’s face it, many people misuse i.e. when they actually do mean for example.
As Homer Simpson so eloquently puts it, “D’oh!!”
It seems to be an iron-clad irony of writing that the number of proofreads required to find all errors in your writing is:
PR = N + 1
Where ‘N’ is the actual number performed. This rule appears to apply regardless of the actual value of ‘N’.
This is an account of one of those perfect events when all the stars align, and things go your way. That doesn’t happen very often (at least for me), so it’s worth remembering. And recording.
So throw on a Bruce Springsteen album (yes, ‘album,’ damnit), grab a beer (or whatever) and join me in a little trip down Memorex Lane.
[cue wavy time fade effects…]
The previous article contains a bit of doggerel I wrote as an informal writing assignment on a current events/blogging site I inhabited for a while a few years back. One of the other regulars sometimes held online “parties” complete with musical playlists (suggested YouTube and other musical links) and multiple, simultaneous conversations. Basically a kick off article followed by a very long, branching tree of comments.
We all had to refresh the article a lot to see the new comments, but it was fun. Especially as the evening wore on and some of us got a bit tipsy. (All from the safety of our homes, I point out. Virtual online parties: no one drives home!)
Anyway, in the course of one such evening, the “poem” below popped out of my mind. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN was just beginning its testing, and the “it’ll destroy us all” fervor was at its peak.
A few years ago, I spent some time blogging and commenting on another site that wasn’t really a blogging site, per se.
It was supposed to be a news-related site, and all blog posts were meant to be about current events (which could include book and movie reviews among other topics). Naturally long-time users found a lot of latitude in what constituted current events. One of the reasons I dropped off was the poor signal/noise ratio, but the main reason was the sense of restriction imposed by the current events policy.
One of the big regulars was a guy who liked to stage writing exercises for those interested. He would offer a topic and we would all dash off a blog article related to that topic. Below is my contribution to one such exercise. The topic was to write a piece from the point of view of our car. I’m no poet, but I thought this turned out rather well.
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Logos con carne 