Category: Grammar/Usage Nerdery

This used to be a pretty good burn, although tempered by the fact that not every dictionary has pictures, and so there’s always been a bit of the unreal and, thus, the dismissible.

When you look up basic bitch on Wikipedia there’s a picture of Ugg Boots.

That’s, actually, a fact (for now). And so it’s like yet another thing Wikipedia’s taken over is the improvement of our comparison burns. If you could time it right, how great would it be to upload a picture of the basic bitch in your life, and then prompt him or her to look it up?

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Now I’m thinking of Gary Lutz and his Lishian sisters and brothers who see the sentence as the wellspring of creativity. I’m not a Lishian. Assertions about good sentences are bona fide ways to get me paralyzed from creating. But that’s not to mean I don’t like gussying up my sentences when such gussying occurs to me. And lately, when I gussy it’s been more of a gussying down than up. If I can see a way to make my sentence clunkier, or to let it dabble in a bit of redundancy, I want to take it.

For example, last week I wrote an announcement that The Cupboard, the pamphlet series I and my friends have been running in different permutations for oh eight years or so, is getting new editors. We three are stepping down. It’s good news, in that those stepping up have more time to dedicate, and thus The Cupboard should flourish. Here’s the first draft of how it started:

The Cupboard is about to release its 20th volume. This doesn’t necessitate a change, it just happens to happily come with one.

I had two problems:

1. Twenty volumes might, given some set of circumstances, compel a change. I sure changed after my 20th. So I felt like I needed to say that, while it might necessitate a change, it doesn’t necessarily do so. Such a change isn’t inevitable, is what I felt I wanted to say. Was that the same as compelling change? Yes and no?
2. It’s fine to split infinitives in English. I know that. Still, I don’t always like to. But to not split “happens to happily” I’d have to have “happens happily to”.

Solving problem 2 gave me the license to solve problem 1. I wanted to use both words and I wanted to put them together because I figured I could and that it would be the kind of sentence a workshopper would stumble and thus pick up his pen over. Again, I saw my opportunity and took it:

The Cupboard is about to release its 20th volume. This doesn’t necessarily necessitate a change, it just happens happily to come with one.

It’s a clunky and ugly sentence, and I love it. As someone who spends so much of his time trying to articulate what’s good and bad about writing, I see that sentence and I see that it’s bad, and I love it.

It’s the best sentence I’ve written all month.

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There’s this episode of American Dad where Francine complains to Roger about how close Stan is getting to his old bootcamp crush who has returned after some time away. Here’s Francine:

Those two are stuck on each other like gum on a hot summer sidewalk on a summer afternoon.

I’m sorry. I’m taking a creative writing class, and I can’t turn it off—like a fire hydrant, gushing onto a hot summer sidewalk. My words cascading, like water onto a hot summer sidewalk. A cat skitters by, each step a relief, cooling its paws from the hot summer sidewalk.

This is such great writing because it so accurately gets at what makes bad short-story writing bad short-story writing: the focus on elevated diction. The belief in words as words and not as things that connote or convey.

Sure, not all great writing is a windowpane you see right through, despite what some old-fashioned teachers and books might tell you. Some great writing calls attention to itself as writing. How, though, does that stuff differ from, say, Matheson? Is it just in terms of freshness?

I don’t want to talk about kitsch or camp. Not anymore.

Last week, I mentioned seeing the Family Guy episode where Peter and his friends track down the source of all dirty jokes. In the credits I saw it was based on a short story by Richard Matheson. A short story? And who?

The episode’s title is “The Splendid Source” which is also the title of Matheson’s story. I found it online. Here, after an epigraph from Balzac that gives Matheson his title, is how it starts:

It was the one that Uncle Lyman told in the summer house that did it. Talbert was just coming up the path when he heard the punch line: “’My God!’ cried the actress, ‘I thought you said sarsaparilla!’”

Guffaws exploded in the little house. Talbert stood motionless, looking through the rose trellis at the laughing guests. Inside his contour sandals his toes flexed ruminatively. He thought.

Later he took a walk around Lake Bean and watched the crystal surf fold over and observed the gliding sands and stared at the goldfish and thought.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said that night.

“No,” said Uncle Lyman, haplessly. He did not commit himself further. He waited for the blow.

Which fell. “Dirty jokes,” said Talbert Bean III.
Continue reading Writing So Bad It’s Beautiful – Part 1

It’s a distinction I have a hard time making. While a quick scan through recent writing projects shows I opt for should over ought, I feel I do the opposite when talking. I feel I ought to say should, but I opt mostly for ought. So I took it, as I ought’ve months ago, to the dictionary to see for sure:

Reserve ought for expressing obligation, duty, or necessity, and use should for expressing suitability or appropriateness.

So I’ve got a new rule of thumb: “should is appropriate,” meaning that when given the choice should not only expresses appropriateness but is pretty much always the more appropriate word than ought.

It’s not that easy, though, in that doing one’s duty is doing what’s appropriate and often vice versa, so I’m afraid I’m going to continue to opt for ought because it sounds smarter and more literate. This is a boring post, I know, but here’s what I’m really trying to get at: I’ll always go for the higher-diction option in this situation. I feel bad when I say who when whom is appropriate, even when usage guides whose authority I trust tell me that whom is pretty much gone from any non-formal use.

Hypercorrecting up might be the clearest marker of pretentiousness. It’s, like, its definition maybe. I’m sure I hypercorrect on ought, and I know I hypercorrect on further v. farther, but I think I’m good at not hypercorrecting to “[X] and I” models when used in non-subjective cases (e.g. My mailman never gave my dog and I much love). I grew up among friends where one’s grammar/usage errors became weapons for others to rhetorically destroy you with^[1], and so it became over time important for me to be right and that importance still lingers well into adulthood. It’s a problem I need to work on harder.

And yet, I don’t know: my voice is mine. Do I sound pretentious in conversation? Probably. Did I get Amazon Reader Reviews on my book that called out its arrogant tone? Yes. Do I have a choice on how I sound? Sure, but I’ve spent so long worrying that I wasn’t coming across the way I needed to in order for others to see me as normal/interesting and like me as a result, and all that worry still hasn’t made me normal or interesting. Not in the way I’d hoped. And I’m getting tired of worrying. It’s really important for me to be right. But it’s also fun to be wrong, I’m slowly learning.