“Very good,” I said coldly. “In that case, tinkerty tonk.”
And I meant it to sting.
words
Lines I like
The air’s as still as the throttle on a funeral train
John Prine, Mexican Home
And now, a word …
And now, a word…
Lines I like
Last summer I swam in a public place and a reservoir to boot
At the latter I was informal, at the former I wore my suit
I wore my swimming suit
Loudon Wainwright III
The Swimming Song
Lines I like
Lines I like
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!
W.S. Gilbert
Ko-Ko, Pooh-Bah, and Pish-Tush contemplate losing their heads.
From The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Plain words
Saturday is International Plain Language Day.
Abstain from circumlocutions of an obfuscatory nature.
Sluggo is lit
As you may have heard, Ernie Bushmiller’s comic Nancy has been dragged into the 21st century. Its new look is heavy on smartphones, selfie sticks, online videos, and other things all the cool kids are so interested in today.
It seems to me like a strange fate for a bizarre, minimalist comic that seemed to exist outside of time. Even in the ’60s and ’70s you had the feeling Ernie listened to the phonograph and kept his milk in the icebox.
In any event, my wife informs me that the term “Sluggo is lit” is now a meme. (Or at least it was last week. You know how these things go…)
I, of course, had no idea what this meant. Lit? Turns out Nancy is saying that Sluggo is awesome, exciting, or excellent. Which, of course, he is and always has been.
And the strip, despite its obsession with modern technology, is still pretty surreal.
And kind of lit.
The immersive, ultra-hooey, gibberish-forward experience
Lucy Kellaway is my hero.
Kellaway recently wrote a column for the Financial Times that is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.
Before I stumbled over this piece via Twitter, I had never heard of Lucy Kellaway. Nor, I’m sure, has she ever heard of me. Sadly, it’s a valedictory column of a sort, in which she sums up her long and futile campaign against corporate codswallop.
“For nearly a quarter of a century,” she writes,* “I have been writing columns telling business people to stop talking rot. For the same amount of time they have been taking no notice.”
When she began, she believed corporate jargon had become so ridiculous that people would soon come to their senses and begin using plain English again. No such luck.
“Over the past two decades, two things have happened. Business bullshit has got a million per cent more bullshitty, and I’ve stopped predicting a correction in the marketplace.”
Rannygazoo 