John Prine, Christmas in Prison.
The searchlight in the big yard swings around with the gun
And it spotlights the snowflakes like the dust in the sun.
Deck us all…
Robert Earl Keen, Merry Christmas From the Family. Almost certainly the only Christmas song to reference AA and tampons.
Truth decay
With politics around the world increasingly characterized by lies, fear, and anger, Frontline, on the U.S. PBS network, is looking at how Facebook has been used to drive voters apart.
John Doyle reviewed the show in the Globe and Mail and offers this observation:
At the core of the matter is one key discovery about social media that’s not new any more: Fear and anger create ‘greater engagement’ online and therefore more advertising value.
Think about that for a minute. Irrational garbage isn’t an unintended consequence of social media — it’s part of the business model.
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.”
A word I just learned
… reading the Strong Language blog. (Warning: the Strong Language blog is all about very rude words. You may be offended.)
Chanty-wrastler
n. (a term of abuse for) an insignificant, unscrupulous, or contemptible person (cf. wrastler, variant of wrestler n.).
1954 R. Jenkins Thistle & Grail (1994) iv. 61 Am I Carnegie, that I can throw away fourpence on that shower of chanty-wrastlers?
1988 G. M. Fraser Sheikh & Dustbin (1989) 41 A chanty-wrastler is a poseur, and unreliable.
2016 R. Gavin 3 of Kind 76 If ah get mah hands on that chanty wrassler.
From a new update to the Oxford English Dictionary.
(A “chanty” is a chamber pot.)
The Writing Life
James Ralph was an 18th-century content creator, scratching out a living in England’s New Economy. In an age of political, social and technological upheaval, life could be precarious for those who kept the printing presses stoked with words.
Writing in 1758, Ralph said “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines; but that the former has his Situation in the Air, and the latter in the Bowels of the Earth: Both have their Tasks assigned them alike: Both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance.”
The quote comes from The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print Culture, a remarkable collection of writing about writing and the plight of writers. Editor Paul Keen writes that Ralph was “often dismissed as a Grub Street hack writer,” but managed to produce some important work, including the essay quoted above.
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In the new world of letters, anyone, it seemed, could be an author – even women. (Anyone, that is, who belonged to the educated classes. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the literacy rate in Great Britain rose above 60 per cent.)
Lines I like
“Every time you think you weaken the nation.”
Moe to Curly
The Three Stooges
Half-shot Shooters, 1936
The Liberal record
The Tyee has published a handy pdf version of our look at the record of the British Columbia Liberal government.
You can download it here.
