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Author of "It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences" and "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies"
New!
You know, like grammar and stuff.
June Casagrande
Author of "It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences" and "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies"
It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences
New!
"Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered By the Grammar Snobs"
Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies
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Blog Archive
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2009
(166)
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January
(20)
- Why Can't Junie Read (or Make Time to Do Crunches)?
- Great Moments in Copywriting
- Words Writers Are Too Dependent On
- Words I Can't Decide How to Pronounce
- Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about w...
- It Works on So Many Levels
- Sweet Inspiration for Learning to Pronounce 'Scallop'
- Some Tips for Resume Writers
- Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, clever...
- Most Underrated Outrage of the Last Eight Years
- Things I Think About on a Monday
- Single Quotation Marks = Quotation Marks 'Lite'? Nope
- Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, clever...
- The Road 'Few' Traveled
- Happy Monday
- The Newspaper Apocalypse Officially Begins — In My...
- Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about w...
- Words Are Out to Get Me. No, Really.
- A Copy Editor's Lament
- Pasadena Dreamin'
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January
(20)
Posts
6 comments:
I'm sorry, is the period directly below the quotation mark? It's like an interrobang! (or however you spell it)
Funny. I didn't even see that. I couldn't get past the first two sentences. Ah, yes. That's what Freud wanted to be remembered for.
Now if only some ad whiz would get wise to all the money to be made using Abe Lincoln's likeness to sell rhinoplasty services. And, hey, can you think of a better Ambien pitch man than MLK? I mean, if he remembers he had a dream, he must have been disturbed out of REM sleep ...
Okay, maybe I'm fried from watching my kids bubble all day (yay state tests), but I cannot figure out what's up with the first two sentences. Plz 2 explain. Kthx.
If you're having trouble understanding the first two sentences it's because you ARE on the ball. They're that "he shoots, he misses" brand of logic.
"Freud's problems (ILLOGICAL. FREUD ISN'T ICONIC FOR DEALING WITH HIS OWN PROBLEMS. IT'S HIS THEORIES, NOT HIS PERSONAL WOES, THAT ARE MOST ASSOCIATED WITH HIM.) weren't all in his head (TRANSLATION: "HE HAD PROBLEMS IN HIS ASS."). And when his hemorrhoids were hurting it was hard to think about anything else (TRANSLATION: "HEMORRHOIDS ARE A DRAG, BUT WE HAVE NO SOLID INFO ABOUT HOW MUCH THEY INTERFERED WITH FREUD'S WORK. SO WE'RE GOING TO STATE SPECULATION AS FACT).
Summary translation: "In the grand tradition of forcing dead famous people to hawk products, we're going to appropriate Freud as our hemorrhoid pitch man. And we're going to write our copy from a point of view that assumes the reader already knows Freud suffered from this problem, because when you talk to someone as if they should already know something, they're too intimidated to question whether it's true."
Honestly, I don't mind appropriating dead famous people to sell stuff as much as I mind leaps of logic. A peeve of mine.
Anyhoo, you were right to respond with "huh?"
I get it now!
Go public domain. Too bad them folks can't actually roll over in their graves.
But you noticing this and me not is exactly why you get to be the copy editor and I get to corrupt children's minds. (Goodness gracious, my internet spell-checker thingy says "children's" is wrong. Boo! Oh, speaking of, at Howl at the Moon (a dueling piano bar at Citywalk) last night someone actually managed to use an apostrophe correctly for the "word of the day": "OJ's guilty." Can you believe it? Drunken fools can punctuate!)
"Go public domain."
Exactly!
And I'm skeptical about the O.J. punctuation. There's a good chance that they would have put an apostrophe there regardless of whether it was a contraction a possessive or a plural. Might've been knee-jerk.
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