Archive for the 'Fun with words' Category

Machine language

Published
by
Colm
on 10 February, 2010
in Fun with words
. 5 Comments

Which of these looks right to you:

I have to go; somewhere there is a crime happening.

or

I have to go: somewhere there is a crime happening.

To me, the semicolon seems like “I have to go. Tangentially, somewhere there is a crime happening,” whereas the colon is much more authoritative: “I have to go AND HERE IS WHY”. You could of course make them two independent clauses, but let’s not lose all decorum here.

I don’t know if Robocop even cares about grammar. It seems like he should. I mean, the Terminator can get away with being all curt and barky1 because it doesn’t ever have much it needs to communicate, but Robocop is an officer of the law. You know? He can’t afford to be ambiguous.

  1. and pronouncing “neural” as if it has four syllables [↩]

On the metaphysics of customer service

Published
by
Colm
on 1 October, 2009
in Fun with words and Misc.
. 8 Comments

Got a text message from NTL there. Oh hey NTL, haven’t heard from you in a while! What’s happenin’, bro?

In Regards to a recent Termination – Cancellation on your Chorus/NTL account please be advised that despite numinous attempts we have been unable to contact you to collect our equipment.

Man, whatever. I mean, let’s not get into who tried to contact who, and who got through first time and arranged to pick up the equipment, and who nevertheless didn’t bother to turn up. Let’s not get into how maybe you’re coming off a little pissy right now, NTL. No. There are much more interesting things we could talk about.

When I first glanced over the message I read it as “despite numerous attempts”. But that ain’t what it says.

From Wikipedia: “Numinous (from the Classical Latin numen) is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity.” Dear Mary. So that itch I’ve been getting on and off just behind my ear, is that them deploying their mighty powers to try to communicate with me? Perhaps my rock-solid rationalism has prevented them getting a clear signal. I shall clear my mind and meditate, and we shall see if we can sort this matter out once and for all.

… nope, still just trying to flog me a landline. Dammit NTL. Such a waste.

A free thing for you

Published
by
Colm
on 3 April, 2009
in Fun with words and Writing
. 13 Comments

Spectacularly poor timing – I meant to post this much earlier – but I find myself in possession of a whole heap of blank postcards (for mysterious reasons!) and I’m looking for something to do with them. I’ve always felt bad when other people do mix CDs and whatnot because there’s very little I can give them in return. So here we are: send an email to post at emesq dot com with your postal address and maybe a word or a sentence on what you’re into and I’ll write a short story for you.1

I’m hoping this is a thing that will be fun for all concerned. If it goes well enough we may even be able to throw some capital letters on there and make it a full-blown honest to god Thing. I would like that. And so would she.

  1. Very short, mind, we’re talking about a postcard here. I’ll make up for it by throwing on a wee doodle as well. Maybe even in colour! [↩]

Psychomachia as it pertains to mass transit

Published
by
Colm
on 4 March, 2009
in Fun with words
. 12 Comments

Some battles you can’t win. I’m telling you this for your own peace of mind.

You think that because you’re here, because it got you here, that it’s your friend, that it’s the good guy. Or at least you think you can see a good guy somewhere in there. You think that, sure, right now it’s in a bad place, it’s done some things no one would be proud of, but hasn’t everyone? Wouldn’t everyone? You think you can reach in there and bring that good guy out.

But you don’t know the truth: this ticket is not redeemable.

Oh, there was a time when it was. The old days. But not anymore, not after everything it’s done. See, when you’ve come a certain distance you just have to keep going. Momentum. The devil has you as his own. Like the man said: you can run from a knife, but you have to charge a gun.

So you can try. You can try all you want. You can call down the armies of heaven, you can move mountains. But you should know: this ticket will not bend. It will not fold. It’s going straight to hell and brother, it will bring you with it.

I have a headache

Published
by
Colm
on 6 August, 2008
in Fun with words, Links and Misc.
. 9 Comments

from banging my noggin against the Free Rice game. It’s one hundred levels of vocab-testing madness! And for a good cause.

Actually, I don’t know how many levels there are. I’ve never made it past 49 (which still makes me pretty smart and handsome if you ask me) and it gets damn punishing. I hope the skinny bastards know what I’m going through here just so they can have their leisurely brunch in the sun.

In other news I remain superlatively tired, having never gotten around to a proper night’s sleep since Batman Weekend. Or long before, for that matter. Still: no time. There’s celebratory Antics to hit tonight, podcasting tomorrow and whatever’s going on on Friday on Friday. I shall trust in jaegerbombs and ProPlus to get me through.

Two links

Published
by
Colm
on 15 April, 2008
in Films & TV, Fun with words and Links
. 4 Comments

A short blog about the coolness of other people.

1) “And all the while your silver-brown moon-foxed face gives me full throb, hard and wet, something akin to a cement mixer and a tropical dishwasher going at it like mechanical bullfrogs in full view of a thousand cock-fisted jackhammers.”

Bête de Jour has a way with words.

2) Via The Chancer, some fellas and a lady have sweded Rawhead Rex. In contravention of all existing treaties on Irish comedy, it’s actually very funny. (If you haven’t seen the film, watch the trailer first.)

Pan narrans and the like

Published
by
Colm
on 10 April, 2008
in Fun with words, Music and Writing
. 1 Comment

Over at mybrilliantmistakes, Cynthia Closkey has a post about the decline and fall of the oral tradition:

If I post a story on my blog, it’s captured in words. That’s nice if I want it to be captured. But what if I want for others to take it and run with it, add their own twists? [...] rarely does anyone take a post and reimagine or re-present it in a new light. In fact, I think if someone did, they might be slammed for stealing the originator’s idea.

[...]

I think the Web is a little too good at preserving things, so we can’t experience the beauty and surprise of mutation.

(I’m aware of the irony of dumping all that in a block quote. Whatever, man, whatever.)

I remember a person In The Know telling me that jazz is essentially about two things: collaboration and improvisation. That doesn’t really jive – so to speak – with the modern way of doing things, where bands, authors and so on are seen as monolithic entities with a distinctive style and personality. A lot of effort goes into building and maintaining this kind of image, and recognition and personal glory are seen as rightful rewards.

The upshot is that there’s very little tendency to play around with creative output. That’s why I love projects like Desert Sessions and Goon Moon: it’s a bunch of guys playing around. There’s also a (slowly) rising trend of musicians making master tracks available for their fans to remix and share, which is of course opening the collaborative playing field. What about writing, though? Back in the day, stories were cannibalised left right and centre, with the emphasis on what the writer could build around that. Nowadays that just feels like cheating.

That’s a shame, to be honest. It’s fair point about the level of preservation on the internet – I wonder if we’re approaching a kind of recording saturation – but it’s also an ideal medium for collaboration and/or riffing on other people’s ideas (*cough*), and it’s exciting and fun to be involved in something like that. Cynthia wonders whether the spirit of the oral tradition is “part of the human experience”; yes, I do believe it is.

Sophisticated pantslessness, bonus readables

Published
by
Colm
on 19 March, 2008
in Fiction and Fun with words
. 1 Comment

I happened across this on Wikipedia:

Going commando, the act of not wearing undergarments in popular culture

That’s pretty specific. What if you don’t wear underwear at, say, an opera? Is there a different name for that? I suggest something along the lines of “going commandeau”.

Via reddit: Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel, a very good flash piece about fictional science.

Please finally note that, after some arse-aroundery, we have decided that from now on Ill Repute will update twice weekly: Eli’s post on Monday, George’s on Thursday. Do have a read.

Edit: Make that George on Monday, Eli on Thursday. Arses are still mildly rotating.

A bunch of rijke fokkers

Published
by
Colm
on 14 March, 2008
in Fun with words
. 0 Comments

Four days late on this one, but languagehat has a great post on the origin of the term “pettifogger”. Most interesting is the following quote from the OED:

In German fugger, fucker, focker (see Grimm) has had the senses ‘monopolist, engrosser’, ‘usurer’, ‘man of great wealth’, ‘great merchant’, and, in certain dialects (doubtless originally through ironical use), ‘huckster, pedlar.’

That is marvellous. It’s well worth reading the full post.

Continuing on a similar tack, some fortuitous Wikistumbling has led me to my new favourite sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” There’s also “James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher,” but that ain’t nothing but cheap trickery.

Fun with words

Published
by
Colm
on 5 February, 2008
in Books (and the like), Films & TV, Fun with words and Writing
. 3 Comments

In “When Film Gets Good…” Terry Southern maintained that it was “wasteful, pointless, and indeed in terms of art, inexcusable, to write a novel which could, or indeed should have been a film.” There were subtleties to his argument that I won’t go into – his point was that film, being more of a direct appeal to the senses, can run rings around novels when it comes to portraying straightforward dialogue and narrative. Now, being a writer himself he naturally didn’t leave it there, but insisted that prose writers needed to pull their socks up in terms of originality and offer something that films could not.

I mention this because I’ve just finished Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade, which is one of those novels that’s infatuated with written language. Continue reading ‘Fun with words’