REPLY TO ALL

ohmygod. Oh my ever loving god and higher power. I didn't mean it. OMG. I would've never hit SEND. I'm screwed now. I'm fucked. I'm gonna lose my job because of one stupid email. You just can't say those things to a client, not by accident and certainly not on purpose. OMFG. I was totally joking, but no one will care and it won't matter. You don't even say those things to a friend, not unless they know you and your twisted, convoluted, hyper-ironic, self-deprecating, quasi-sarcastic so-called sense of humor, a sense of humour (for our Canadian brothers and sisters) that is rapidly degrading and vanishing as my fingers tap on the keyboard. You. Do. Not. Say. Those. Things. Full stop (for our partners in the U.K.). I ran to IT, but they said it's impossible to stop that email, to halt it, to disappear. They rolled their eyes and then guffawed. Gawd! What am I going to do now? FMH! And I don't mean "flexible metallic hose," no siree, Bob, check your Urban Dictionary. Maybe I can plead temporary insanity, a spasmodic tic of digital Tourette Syndrome coupled with Surplus Attention Impulse Disorder (SAID), which is why I "said" what I did. Anyone who knows me knows about my SAID challenges, my SAID imbroglios and stumbles. But will HR accept this? No, of course not. If we had a union, it'd be a grievance procedure, a slap on the wrist (or somewhere else hahahaha; there I go again), and that'd be the end of it. If I was lucky. If I were lucky. REPLY TO ALL. Every other time, I have been so deliberate, sure, careful, vigilant. "Do not REPLY TO ALL," I have warned myself as many times as a lap around the beads, as many times as the mala beads on my right wrist, my fake Buddhist beads, 108, if you must know. What if I say somebody else came to my desk and did it? It's worth a try! Naw. Not even in this wide-open, free-for-all, unprivatized workspace. Who am I kidding? Give me a banker's box (or bankers box or brand name Bankers Box). I'll start packing up my office now. You say we don't have an office, we have an open plan? If you say so. I'm gone. Include me out, oxymoron and all. Exeunt omnes. Stage left. Exit moi. I'm already off the network. I can't even hit REPLY TO NONE. 

wet paint

hey you; you, not them; you; look here; don't touch me; do not touch me; touch forbidden; warning; please touch touch me; please please pretty please touch me; now; dare you; danger; stand back; come here; no harm no foul; who are They to tell you what to touch or what not to touch; it won't hurt anything; what's the harm; go ahead; WET PAINT; after all, it doesn't say touch or don't touch; it doesn't say anything like that; WET PAINT merely states a fact; but is it a fact; is it really wet and is it really paint; no command, no imperative mode; an adjective modifying a noun; reality-based; T.S. Eliot said a poem is not complete until it is read, with that in mind the declaration WET PAINT is incomplete, unfinished until the proposition is tested, is borne out, by human experience; and what about nonhumans, a bird, say, who flies headlong into the sign or into the supposedly nondry paint, such a tragedy; if Heidegger can ask 'why beings rather than nothing,' can we not query the veracity of this sign; luring, seducing, tempting, daring, cajoling, nudging, almost screaming to touch, touch furtively rapid-fire when no one is looking, no one around, running the risk of imprinting your inimitable fingerprint, your human stain, for all it's worth, now and seemingly forever
 

he said she said they said it said

[insert smartphone text notification sound after each entry below, as appropriate, or inappropriate: piano tinkling, bell chime, shotgun, thunder, guitar twang, lion's roar, fart, burp, post-orgasmic sigh, trumpet blare, car horn, alarm, jet roar . . . ]

Dad: where are you?

Mom: hey, you.

Girlfriend: wyd

Friend A: 'sup?

Brother: hi there

Dad: frown emoji

Ex-gf from 1986: Where ya been all my life?

Sister:  where've you been today

Friend B: wtf

Girlfriend: wya

Friend C: wanna hang out

Ex-gf from 2015: Netflix n chill?

Girlfriend: whats your problem

Sprint: your bill is available online

Other brother: you got 20 bux till tmrw???

Friend C: hey, can I borrow like 20$

Mom: hello????!!???

Girlfriend now ex-gf: fuck offfuck you, you fuk and I'm pregnant

Dad: do you have the keys to the Mustang?

Ex-gf from 2018: I had your baby did you know dat

Friend A: u alive?

Ex-gf from 2015: Im in Kazakhstan dickface

Sister: u no i luv you dontcha

Mrs. Rivers, 7th grade English teacher: it's a gerund; know it now!

National Grid: your bill is overdue. your power will be cut off . . .  

Sister Mary Aloysius Gonzaga de Porres: that's a mortal sin

Dad: HELLO?

Brother: are you coming over now or not?

Dr. Ozcomert: are you breathing?

John Angleterre, boss:  Please be advised your position, and you in that position, have been terminated. Do not enter the premises under any circumstances under pain of arrest.

Sister: g'night love you talk tmrw

Private Number: Your appointment with Probation has been canceled. Please be advised it would be prudent if you were to assume a new name and Social Security number. Leave town now. Better yet, if you have a passport, leave the country. STAT.  

dangling participles

Williams and Fayette. By the Legion hall. Misting. Next to the Open House. Closed. A skeletal artifact from before The Ending. Gutted. Payphone on a pole. Dangling handset. Nodding in the breeze. Forgotten. Booth or kiosk. Prenuclear minimalism. Raided. Metal, wire, plastic, screw, bolt, time, pleadings, hustles, cries, calls. Jangled coins an eternity ago. Deserted. Abandoned pedestrian loiterers. Freeze-framed headlights. Telling. Remnant. Torn. Ghostly metronome. Busy signal. Blaring. Humming. Buzzing. Waiting. Having had. Having been. Dangling.

the play's the thing . . .

Play it as it lies. Lays, if you will. Play Layla, the long version, of longing, if you please. The play's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king. Play the cards you're dealt. A pair of queens. Royal straight. Royal gay. Royal blue. Play it as is. Plebeian. No overplay, excess, much, more, most. Play your hand, not heavy-handed, ham-fisted, handcuffed. No superlatives, nor absolutes. Try the comparative, for wiggle room, for loopholes, for breathing space. Infinitives. Imperatives. Let it go. Let it be. The be-all and end-all. Is what it is. No more, no less. Just this. Just now.

'No' Is a Complete Sentence. Or Is It?

You can debate it. You can logically and persuasively argue yes or no as to whether "no" constitutes a complete sentence. Your answer depends on context, communication theory, and linguistics. (Go ahead and Google away at "the Gricean Theory of Conversational Implicature" as you're waiting for your Americano at the coffee shop.) Also entering the equation (oops, that's math; wrong subject) is whether you are a strict or loose constructionist in how you define a sentence.

Yes or no, either one works for me. I don't care, as long as I can continue to say "'No' is a complete sentence" and apply it to the matter at hand.

And what exactly is the matter at hand?

Two matters come to mind:

1. People who have a hard time saying no to demands imposed by others
2. People who feel the need to explain, defend, or justify their refusal of a request they want to reject but can't 

Enter a play within the play, as in Hamlet:

Can you lend me $500?

No, I can't because my counterfeit money-making machine in the basement stopped printing when the black-ink cartridge ran out, plus I need to reorder the special paper from my 'friends' at Treasury.

No, the triplets need formula, diapers, binkies, onesies, and meds. And I owe our upscale, artisanal photographer a down payment for the quasi-royal official portraits of the triplets.

No, not today; can I get back to you after I check with my accountant, my lawyer, my therapist, my Zen roshi, and my local arms dealer?

How about $300. Can you lend me that?

No, I'll never get it back.

No, I just spent my last $275 on Mega Millions, and I have no gas in my car, and I forgot to buy my pain meds.

No, I won't. I would but I can't. No, I might but might not. Not sure. I sometimes can and sometimes do but I usually can't and don't. 

Dude. Just give me fifty effing bucks until Monday when my effing ship comes in, okay? Can you do that?

No, my ship is coming in too, at the same dock.

No, because when your ship comes in I'll be at the airport.

No, because Monday I'll be tied up all day in bankruptcy court.

Dad/Mom, can I have the car?

No. Dad has a date.

No. Mom has a date.

With each other?!

Now, answer each of these questions with the monosyllabic no.

Start with an interior whisper to yourself.

No. 

Practice it.

Out loud now.

Mantra it.

No. No. No.

How do you feel now? Feel better?

Yes. 

"Because if you can't say no, your yes doesn't mean anything." Regan Walsh

lingua franca Icelandic

From the sparse research I have done, I have learned that Icelandic is an ancient language that has not changed all that much since 1100, give or take the odd hundred years. Icelanders apparently can easily read the original texts of Norse sagas dating back over a thousand years. Yikes! I guess it would be as if modern speakers of English could easily read or speak the language of Shakespeare's time, with "easily" being the italicized, boldfaced operative word. More accurately, you would have to go even farther back in time, but not quite to the time of Beowulf! (I was an English major and recall a tiny bit from my linguistic studies.) From what I understand, Icelanders share with us who speak English the Germanic grammatical structure of S-V-O, subject-verb-object, with allowances made for emphasis or poetry. Speaking of poetry, I hear over and over again that Iceland is a land of bards. I like that. As a solipsistic bard, I am humming the tune for my own personal saga; searching for the narrative, plot, and story line. Many of the characters have or are playing their parts in my saga, myself included. Other characters wait in the wings.

second person

You. You know your place. You're not the first person; nor are you the third person. You're the second person. You're not into this I, I, I, or me, me, me, sounding like a befuddled victim or an auditioning singer, respectively. You, you're secure in who you are, fully content to be equally spaced between First and Third, grammatical avenues. You are more adept at conversation, if for no other reason than your absence of the ego-driven trumpet bruited by Person One. Yes, you lack the clinical detachment, the objectivity, of Person Three, whether singular or plural. But you, whether alone or with your second-person brigade of fellow pronouns, are intimate and direct, whether whispering or ruminating. You.

parade of adjectives

ebullient smug abject awkward effervescent indignant proud loud crowded smart tart cold marmoreal aloof passionate possessed dreamy banal xenophobic wanton noir verklempt vivacious vivid funky fetid glamorous humid jazzy lame impotent mammoth musty rocky stolid stoic solipsistic trendy unctuous avid bronchial bloated bloviated beastly cunning desultory paltry

parade of prepositions

under through above below about from to at behind across during in into of toward

20 adverbs

A literary friend and colleague tells me her three-year-old granddaughter is lovingly, lately, [serial comma obeyed] and lushly taken with adverbs. She loves starting sentences with adverbs. In a nod and salute to her, here is a twenty-fold parade of adverbs:

1. laconically
2. Catonically
3. pianissimo
4. apodictically
5. voluptuously
6. asymptotically
7. munificently
8. coterminously
9. late
10.seriatim
11.sotto voce
12.eschatologically
13.latently
14.preternaturally
15.fast
16.upstairs
17.yesterday
18.neverthless
19.always
20.very

naturally wondering

Wendy's is introducing "natural-cut fries with sea salt." That's from the package of a small order of fries, bought today, I am at liberty to say, in Liberty, New York, not far from Route 17.

NATURAL-CUT
FRIES
WITH SEA SALT

the package reads, also saying, "We slice up only whole Russet potatoes and leave the skin on to bring out their natural flavor." Also: "The result? Fries that are crispy, delicious, and totally irresistible." Hey! Maybe the serial comma is making a natural comeback! Love that serial comma after "delicious." Naturally. And meaningfully.

But here's the thing that has persnickety Pawlie scratching his grammarian's head: "natural-cut." It's that hyphenated adjectival construction that has me wondering.

• In nature, do Russet potatoes, or any potatoes, undergo cutting?
• How does natural cutting take place?
• Who does it? The Grim Reaper?
  
• What does it mean to be "naturally cut"?
• Does it hurt?
• Is it emo, even if naturally so?
• What is the opposite of "natural-cut fries"? "Artificial-cut fries"?
  
• How does one cut artificially? Through verbal ripostes?
  

Yass, yass, yass, as Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty would say, I think I know what Wendy's intends: natural taste, not processed, not doctored, not ruined by too much freezing, refreezing, microwaving, etc. Something like that. I get it. (Perhaps the copywriter could've called them "Natural, Cut Fries," but -- still -- what are "unnatural" fries? Picky. Picky. Picky. How about "Natural, Hand-Cut Fries"? Fine, but likely not literally true. Just thinking out loud, digitally, here.)

They're pretty good, the natural-cut fries from Wendy's. But I like Burger King's fries better; must be the peanut-oil taste. Arby's curly fries I like, too.

But hats off to Wendy's on its Apple Pecan Chicken Salad. Pretty good; reminds me of a Panera Bread salad.

Naturally.

And don't forget: the San Francisco Giants are still World Champs.

Still basking.

The Officious Offalness of the Office

Two out of two Pawlie Kokonuts daughters are fans of "The Office," the television series (the American version, not the British, original rendition).

While I will while away an idle moment or two watching "The Office," I cannot claim to be a fan (nor a public enemy). (Notice how the previous sentence used "while" as a conjunction and as a verb? Mrs. Rivers of Burdick Junior High School, in Stamford, Connecticut, in the early 1960s, would be delighted that I can make this parenthetical statement.) Why don't I delight in "The Office"? It's simple: it's too much like Real Life (no, not the Albert Brooks movie "Real Life").

Who cares to relive the petty crimes of the cubicle cosmos? The accumulated humiliations perpetrated by hubris-brimming "leaders" and unmanageable managers?

Not I.

I don't miss it.

It would be weird, wouldn't it, in an Andy Kaufman sort of way, to portray in my own office of entrepreneurial independence the twisted power plays and poses of office life, all played by The Laughorist?

Yeah, it would be.

10 quotes on verbs, and other syntactical structures

1. Pork is not a verb. -- Bart Simpson
2. Life is a verb. -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
3. Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. -- Martha Graham
4. Love is a verb. -- Clare Boothe Luce
5. Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail. -- Clive James
6. God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
7. The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive. -- W.R. Inge
8. If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
9. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. -- William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
10. I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, punctuation marks. -- Dennis Miller
    

contractions

Someone we know is about to have a baby; the term of pregnancy is nearing completion. She had been having contractions, and now through the wonders of modern science her contractions have, well, contracted. Her contract with nature, though, reads, somewhere in the fine print, that Nature will have the last say about her baby's first say, and when it will be. Contractions. I was thinking: Why call them contractions? Pregnancy is all about expansion, ain't it? Just look at the impending mama, the pregnant, the full, the expanded version of womanhood. Why not call contractions "expansions"? Of course, being a male, I was reminded that contractions are called contractions because the uterus is contracting. Well, okay. If you say so. But those contractions still complete the whole expansion regime, don't they? Grammatically, contractions are another matter altogether, being the combining of two words and then using an apostrophe to stand in for missing letters. so, even grammatically contractions contract, but do they really? It's more like they are a shortcut to expansion. (Don't can't won't hasn't didn't aren't isn't hadn't and so on; find me some that are not so negative.) So there we are again: contractions masquerading again as expansions. More or less. Depending. On a letter here or there. Or one's viewpoint. So, here's to

c o n t r a c t i o n s

contrarily speaking.

Some Sententious Sentences on Sentencing

"Jesus wept." It is said to be the shortest sentence in the Bible. I first heard it as an exclamation from my friend Jeannie, from Enid, Oklahoma. Since the expression has biblical origins, one can get away with it as a mild expletive. You can almost hear the sigh that accompanies it. But what else is there to say about sentences? And to whom do I say it? Well, for starters, you can very legitimately start a sentence with "but" or "and," despite what Mrs. Rivers told us in seventh grade at Burdick Junior High School in Stamford, Connecticut. You can also end a sentence with a preposition. It's something you can live with. You can also decide to boldly split an infinitive within your sentence -- and do so with grammatical impunity. The other point I want to make about sentences -- I know, "sentencing" in the heading lured students of criminal justice to this blog under false presentences -- is that, despite a muddy river of digressions, or appositive phrases, or recursively recurring and redundant recasting of words to the point of annoyance, a perfectly grammatical and "correct" sentence is not limited to the soulful brevity of a lachrymose redeemer, but may also include such meanderings as incarnated in this sentence. So, I have said it before and will proclaim it again, "A run-on sentence is not one that 'runs on and on and on' in the impatient reader's mind; a run-on sentence, also known as a comma splice or fused sentence, is a punctuation error -- an error that has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of words or syllables in the sentence, be they running, walking, trotting, sprinting, galloping, sauntering, crawling, or strolling words. I'm done.

Twenty Adjectives

You know how the preacher shouts, "Can I get a witness?" Well, can I get an adjective?

You know how the gym teacher says, "Drop and give me twenty [push-ups]"?

Here's 20 adjectives:

1. avuncular
2. solipsistic
3. psychagogic
4. demagogic
5. unctuous
6. hoary
7. wizened
8. teleological
9. epistemological
10. tetchy
    
11. querulous
12. ambient
13. stochastic
14. sarcastic
15. calm
16. prosaic
17. stingy
18. generous
19. riddled
20. saucy
    

Manatea, anyone?

Browsing through the free USA Today at the hotel, I spotted "mentee" in a headline and outwardly and inwardly frowned.

The story was about mentors and, um, mentees.

Sigh.

Merriam-Webster cites "mentee" dating to 1965 at least.

I'm so old-fashioned.

Mentoree, anyone?

Probably not. No sponsors.

Or sponsees.

Oaf-killter

Things matter.

Small things can matter a lot.

Staying at a hotel (courteously unnamed here) this weekend, I noticed the push-button console for the elevator in the lobby was askew, slightly off-kilter. In a bathroom off the lobby, a faucet was installed not-quite-parallel to the line of the sink (its top rim). An amber light attached to a hair dryer flickered in the dark of night. The television set in our room had a mysterious wire with what looked like a computer chip dangling from its front, more obviously than a dangling participle.

None of these matters proved fatal, not even severely anxiety-producing.

But they were unsettling to the careful (or even almost-careless) observer.

And the same applies to language.

A few mistakes here and there, a few verbal tics, and the reader gets nervous, distrustful.

As an editor, I frequently tell clients that readers start to distrust your data if you make some seemingly trivial blunders. The readers start to think, "They got that wrong; what else is wrong?"

An example: I received an impassioned plea for church stewardship pledges with "alter" [initial cap] instead of "altar" at the heart of the request. The writer's sacrifice of accuracy was like Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. Not quite, you rightly say. After all, there's an infinite gap between sacrifice and near-sacrifice. (And didn't Mark Twain say the difference between the right word and the wrong word is like the difference between "lightning" and "lightning bug"?)

Of course, many don't care about such minutiae.

But, to paraphrase Grace Slick's refrain in the 1960's, "Go ask Isaac."

Nettlesome Meddlesome

Hoping to be one of the "gentlemen of brave mettle," and at the same time gainfully employed, last week I ventured to take a battery of exams at a recruiter's place, spurred on by a personal revenue stream reduced to a trickle, a creeklet almost as bereft of water as this blog has been absent of words recently. (I just love the luxury of meandering words scheming to stream into syntactical straitjackets, don't I? Yes, I do.) A battery of exams. Let me say tests test me like an assault, an affront to my front; a disappearance of appearances. They undress me. They always have had that effect on me. So, just the thought of taking a test ups the anxiety quotient. ("Ups"; now that's a curious verb to describe performance anxiety.) When I discovered, at home, the night before the test date, that the testing software would not work on a Macintosh (the only computers we have at home), I felt both relieved and justified. The next day, while filling out enough paperwork to duplicate the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I nearly returned the cheap ballpoint pen to the attractive receptionist and almost walked out. My surrender to dignity consisted of my refusal to fill out certain sheets of paper, e.g., detailed instructions to call so-and-so to rat on me, I mean, serve as a reference. (It turned out not to matter, boys and girls.) Isn't there a poem somewhere that begins, "Terrance, this is stupid stuff"? Remember that great story by Alan Sillitoe, "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" and its terrific cinematic portrayal by Tom Courtenay? I mention this for its uber-humanity, its staunch and angry defense of individual personhood, which must apply here somehow, or else I wouldn't mention it, would I? First test was Microsoft Excel. After about two questions, I skipped out of it. (The receptionist-headmistress had granted me permission to do that a few moments earlier.) Then the Microsoft Word test. The software was a little quirky; it took me a while to get it; then I did okay. Then the reason I came: a so-called copywriter test. It wasn't bad. It was kind of fun. Stuff like "cite" vs. "site" vs. "sight" and "affect" vs. "effect" (which was wrong in the health and safety video presentation that soon followed). I have to admit I goofed on a "copywriter" question involving "meddle" as a verb. It was nettlesome. I lost my (heavy) mettle. And as I clicked, I knew I clicked wrong. I knew it. Know that feeling? (Why do we do that? It's like saying the precisely wrong thing in a social situation just as your brain is forewarning you.) Then a grammar test. I got results saying I was in the 90th percentile for the copywriter and grammar tests (if I recall, the test affirmed the serial comma), though I was peeved at myself for not getting 100% in each case; mostly a matter of overthinking and trying to outfox the test and its invisible taskmasters. It's always been my problem. Then during a keyboarding test, the whole network froze. I only needed to type two more characters, too.

In the subsequent interview, the pleasant young lady sheepishly declared I was overqualified and offered to share my paperwork (the OED, remember?) with "our professional side," as she nodded to another side of the building. I sheepishly smiled a woolly frown.

The "professional side"? This, after two hours?

And then you wonder why I've been depressed?

Chalk it up to overqualified, overfoxed, hyperanalytical experience.

What would Kierkegaard do?

He'd cry, but those Danes are just so stoic.