I woke up rather early this morning. The clock indicated the time as being 4:25. As soon as I had swung my feet over the side of the bed and turned on my bedside lamp, Eva came trotting in, her tail moving at a rapid rate and her head swinging to and fro in time with her tail. She's a good little puppy. Well... she's not a puppy anymore, and she's not so little either. But she's certainly a good canine companion.
. . .
In the 'comments' after a Language Log discussion regarding a passage in the newly published autobiography of Mark Twain on spelling, I read the following:
I share both Twain's gift for spelling and his disdain of it. It is trivially easy for me to spell words correctly because I find that if they are spelled any other way they "look wrong." I can't explain it better than that, but it's definitely a visual experience for me. If I am unable to say verbally how to spell something, all I need do is write down both the spellings that seem reasonable when I am thinking of the letters as sounds, creating images to compare. One of them will "look wrong," and if the other does not, then I have my correct spelling.
Now that's exactly how I have always determined the correct spelling of a troublesome word. When I 'see' the two words together in print, I can almost always recognize the one that is spelled correctly.
Never thought about that before.
By the way, I sometimes read the entire 'comments' section after a particularly intriguing Language Log posting -- they are often more interesting and more enlightening than the original post itself.
Language Log was where I first read about the "schwa" --
Imagine that: a seventy-one year old man who had never heard of that word.
schwa: the sound "uh." For example, the vowel sound heard at the beginning of the word alone;
A short indeterminate vowel, like that at the end of "sofa". By far the commonest vowel sound in English.
Isn't that interesting?
. . .
Another new word:
execrable
(EKS uh kruh buhl)
utterly detestable; abominable; abhorrent.
deplorable: of very poor quality or condition
I'm pretty sure this is a word I will avoid using. Of course it's a perfectly good word, but I just don't like the sound of it.
And yet another word I just learned today is apophasis, but I am not sure that I will be able to remember it.
apophasis
(uh POPH uh suhs)
mentioning something by saying it will not be mentioned
The phrases "not to mention her atrocious behavior" is an apophasis.
. . .
Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate says that Julian Assange The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda.
This WikiLeaks thing is one of those seemingly significant events currently 'making history' of which I have no clear cut opinion. In my mind I am torn between a usually definite stance of 'all information should be available to everyone' and the belief that 'in time of war, full disclosure can be harmful.'
. . .
I have again reworked my novel's first revision of Chapter 1, heeding the sound advice from other writers. I deleted most of the reportedly excessive adjectives and adverbs. I removed some of the reportedly flowery references, "carven caves, etc." The result is disappointing. While I can see the obvious compositional improvement (more publishable) the new version seems flat and 'dull as dishwater.'
Perhaps instead of a revision, Chapter 1 needs a complete rewrite.
I'll have to give that some thought.
__________
"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."
--Noam Chomsky
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