Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.
Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between “Jane (whom I adore)” and “Jane, whom I adore,” and the difference between them both and “Jane – whom I adore – ” marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place,” in Isaac Babel’s lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.
—Pico Ayer
—from “In Praise of the Humble Comma”
—found in Time (June 24, 2001)
faze /FAYZ/. verb. To perturb, disturb, unsettle or fluster. Unrelated to phase (from the Greek phainein, to show), with which it is commonly confused—see the Mark Twain example below—faze derives from the dialectal feeze (to alarm or frighten), from Old English fēsian (to drive away, to banish).
“His spirit?—why, it wasn’t even phased.” (Mark Twain)
“Peter and Don each did the same from down below, hooking their arms around her legs. It was a most awkward, animalistic position, and yet Peter found that it didn’t faze him in the least to be doing this.” (Elisabeth Hyde)
“It doesn’t faze me when my dreams are interrupted; they’re so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak…” (Fernando Pessoa)
“Red-Eyed Randy stands close to ArmedCompanion, who has the unfazed expression of a professional boxer challenged to a fight by a drunken nightclub bouncer.” (Nuruddin Farah)
Minna Sundberg, author and artist of the dystopic serial comic Stand Still. Stay Silent created a beautifully realized visualization of the tree of human languages.
Sometimes science fiction becomes reality, one small step at a time → Biomedical engineers connecting a human brain to the internet in real time || Also, another amazing (and beautiful) breakthrough: Scientists Can Now Repaint Butterfly Wings.
I don’t really get the science, but the idea (and the metaphor) are seductive → Light Has Been Stored as Sound For The First Time.
The interwebs have been abuzz with the news that Charlie (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) was originally a black character…the New York Times has the detailed story.
Even Racists Got the Blues (Thanks, Reader S.!)
I’ll just leave this right here → A pile of trash in the ocean has grown to the size of France—and some people want it recognized as a nation
Interesting history of a now-rarely-used word (though it was used by Chaucer and Shakespeare) and how it probably came to be written into Kim Jong-un’s speech (neukdari just doesn’t resonate) → What is the definition of ‘dotard,’ which North Korea called Trump?
A compelling project that increases awareness of the beauty of endangered languages and maybe even contributes to saving some of them → the story of Tribalingual.
Today is National Punctuation Day (for Clamorites in the US…the rest of you are spared), celebrating the useful and illogical rules alike and promoting irritating acts of pedantry. I enjoy apostrophe catastrophes as much as the next person, but for my own amusement at the daily struggle of communication, tempered by sympathy, much as I am entertained by—and feel great empathy with—kitchen disasters and cake wrecks. Sorry, all you Eats, Shoots & Leaves fans, for not sharing in the condescending vision of punctuation dystopia. But we can all still laugh and learn the conventions together: XKCD on hyphens, writing skills and a third way || The Oatmeal on semicolons and apostrophes.
View the trailer for ► Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion film Isle of Dogs, which he says is heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa!
Via Reader B., a story on the Secret History of the Pissing Figure in Art. Pairs well with a typeface ready to make a splash: pissjar sans. I’m (kind of) resisting a steady stream of bad puns here.
Reader T. was the first of a few to add some context to last week’s WORD: “Just to be anal about it (hmmm — probably not the best expression to use in this context, but I’ll roll with it), a key ingredient to the term ‘cuck’ as used by white nationalists is not just that your wife is having sex with another man, but that she’s being pleasured by a BLACK man. Or, I suppose, a Jew, although I’m not sure how the optics of that distinction would play with the likes of Christopher Cantwell, who would probably be inconsolable in either case.” — Yes, though we are already seeing the term expand there just as it is expanding in terms of gender (in both white nationalist rhetoric and in porn, incidentally). I just chose not to go there assuming (correctly!) that some readers would bring it up.
Reader M.: “The pairing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Harriet Tubman was a good one. And ‘cuck’! Getting a little political, are we?” — Not intentionally, or at least not in the way we see it in common public discussions right now. Clearly some readers felt differently: I lost a half-dozen subscribers, including the one quoted next.
Reader V.: “Your claim to avoid politics and then posting something political makes me sad. Like saying ‘with all due respect’ and then being disrespectful. If you don’t think Coates, Tubman and cucks are making a political statement, you need to grow up.”
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