Merrily goes the donkey...

[venta]

A round up of minor arcanities:

Today's word from the calendar is assishness. So far the calendar has produced around half-and-half words which could feasibly be slotted into conversations - this is one such, meaning (unsurprisingly) "asinine quality, stupidity". So off you go: use it today three times in conversation, and once in your LJ.

Having now finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I can report that I am a fan of the Oxford comma. Which is apparently the correct name for the controversial comma inserted after the penultimate item in a list. So: our main weapons are surprise, our nice red uniforms, and a fanatical dedication to the Pope. See the comma after uniforms ? That's an Oxford comma, that is. I've got no idea why it's so named. And while I don't always put it in lists, sometimes it's very handy. Everyone with an interest in writing should read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by the way. It manages to steer a pleasingly sane course between the extremes of "punctuation is set in stone" and "punctuation doesn't matter at all".

And, looking for something else, I found this website. Which contains all sorts of odd facts about how to splice tape and create different effects thereby. I don't believe I'm likely to do this, but it interested me none-the-less. Reminded me of the day a schoolfriend and I discovered that you could turn tape inside out to play songs backwards, and spent an educational afternoon looking for hidden messages in songs. We didn't find any.

Comments

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Yay to "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"! I talked evil_nick into letting me buy a copy at the weekend. Am very much enjoying it. :)

I'm fairly inconsistent wrt the Oxford comma, but on the whole I tend to be in favour. It puts a slight break where one would put a slight break in speech, and I tend to like that kind of usage.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Having now finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves

And, not as advertised, I am now not reading Foucault's Pendulum. Sorry, satyrica :)

This is because the book I borrowed from snow_leopard, which I thought was Foucault's Pendulum actually turns out to be The Island of the Day Before. So I'm reading that instead :)

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Chrononotonthologos is my word for today.
Shame it would be rather tricky to get it into scrabble really.

[sampiano.livejournal.com]

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Did you get that for christmas also? I wonder how much our christmas lists overlapped!

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

The first Jeremy Vine show - not that I'd normally listen to R2 - of the year had him asking listeners to phone in with "how many copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves did you get for Christmas?"

I didn't get any, but I did buy a few copies for people.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Grammer for me has allways been an optional extra, along with spelling......

I do have a copy of eats, shoots and leaves it's for my brother the grammer pedant.

[(Anonymous)]

'our main weapons are surprise,'

Surely, as an item in a list preceding the penultimate which, I agree, needs an Oxford comma, there should be a semi-colon after surprise.

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

I like the Oxford comma; it's small, neat, and surprisingly frequent.
*double takes*
Ooh! There goes another one!
(Got the book for Xmas too, though I know a *far* ruder version of the cover title joke....)