introducing the sarcmark

Brilliant. Read on.

semi-educated losers

There's an interesting article on the Guardian website today by Emily Bell, who after digesting the latest Stephen Fry podcast, agrees with him that language pedants are a pain in the arse. This is difficult reading, in part, because I'm instinctively quite pedantic about incorrect usage. That said, I agree with both Fry and Bell for the most part, as the errors that upset me are largely straightforward - people writing 'loose' when they mean 'lose', putting their apostrophes in the wrong places; and I'm actually pretty relaxed about spellings and meanings evolving, as long as those meanings don't become muddied. That's just part of what language does.

Anyway - interesting piece. Here's Fry's two cents:

The worst of this bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs.

How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a 'doing word' out of a 'thing word' every chance he got. He 'tabled' the motion and 'chaired' the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.

michael crichton

Just heard that Michael Crichton, the thriller-writer and author of Jurassic Park has died; I take no pleasure in this - indeed I'm a secret fan of his glossy, imaginative, high-concept science novels ('Prey' being my favourite) - and nor do I think that his death is anything to joke about (unlike those bastards Brand and Ross, who are doubtless cracking rude jokes as I type); but I'm deeply impressed with this silly, clever, flippant update to Crichton's Wikipedia page, added today:

Death
Michael Crichton died November 5, 2008, from a rare Andromeda strain of cancer. After what initially appeared to be a hopeful run at remission as a result of the controversial new Carey Treatment, Crichton’s timeline ran out. The late author, known by some as “The Terminal Man”, opted not to provide the public with full disclosure regarding his illness, but rather to keep it within his personal sphere of close friends and family. He was noted to have kept his zero cool, despite what must have indeed been a state of fear. Crichton was 66 years old. Jurassic Park.

Brilliant. But his death is a loss - there are comparitively few thriller writers I rate (and even Crichton's prose is often terrible), but he is one I've always enjoyed reading.

Kurt Vonnegut

I've never read any Vonnegut, so it's a bit daft to write a post about him, but it's sad to hear of his death and to lose a writer of talent.

Looking at his wikipedia page, I liked the following; his eight rules for writing a short story. I have trouble with short stories - both reading and writing - but I'm tempted to try to conjure one up using his rules and see if it's an improvement.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Here's his Guardian obituary.