Grammar

some links, and some opinions

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

So, I was working on a blog post — around a week ago — and then I found an article that I wanted to link to. And then another article. And then I realized I had some things to say about each of the articles I was linking to.

And then it was a week later and I had a very long, and rather disjointed, blog post. Which was not yet yet done.

Okay, time to fish or cut bait — or some such appropriate cliche.

Here are the links — which are mostly about Harry Potter, so perhaps I should mention that I’ve never read any of the books and I’ve only seen two or three of the movies.

 
“J.K. Rowling Just Can’t Let Harry Potter Go“

I think that there are two different questions here:

1. Rowling said she was done with the Potter world, and now she’s decided she’s not. Big whoop. History is full of performers who retired and then un-retired later. People sometimes marry partners they’ve already been divorced from at least once.

People change their minds. This is sometimes a really good thing, since some decisions turn out to be wrong. Also, circumstances change.

2. On the other hand, I don’t agree with adding to, or revising, a fictional universe by social media. The only thing that counts is what’s in the stories. In a hundred years, the books will still be there, and the rest will have fallen away.

Did Shakespeare ever mention in a casual conversation in a pub that Ophelia was an excellent chess player?

Nobody knows and nobody cares.

 
“JK Rowling tells of anger at attacks on casting of black Hermione“

On one hand, I like the fact that, in theater, race isn’t that big a deal for performers (unlike movies). In the versions of Les Miserables that I’ve seen, for example, the Thénardiers have always been white, but Éponine, their daughter, has been played by various actresses who are not white.

On the other hand, I really like the fact that Rowling apparently never specified Hermione’s race in the books, and nobody noticed. I always think it’s great to tweak the assumption that so many people make — that all fictional characters are white (and straight) unless it’s explicitly stated otherwise.

 
“Comma Queen: Whichcraft–That vs. Which“

I need to watch this one again. I get the concepts “restrictive” and “non-restrictive” (I’m pretty sure), but the examples for “that” and “which” are still fuzzy for me.

(Here’s my shorthand for “restrictive and “non-restictive” as applied to commas, by the way: “Jan Sleet’s daughter, Ron, came into the room.” It gets a comma because Jan Sleet only has one daughter, so “Ron” is extra information. If the great detective had more daughters, then you’d need the name to know which daughter was being referred to. In that scenario — no comma.)

after after deadline

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Well, this (slightly) disrupts my weekly routine.

For years, every Tuesday morning I’ve gone to the New York Times website to read the After Deadline blog, which described the Times’ style sheet (and all the mistakes they made in grammar, usage, and style that week).

But now it’s been put on hiatus. Sigh.

Where am I going to get regular reminders about danglers, singular/plural disagreements, and so on?

I’ll have to console myself with the monthly Chicago Manual of Style Q&A, and the Comma Queen videos at the New Yorker website.

 

In other news, I’ve talked before about the Fast & Furious movies, but I’ve been seeing them more or less in reverse order. I’ve made it back to Fast & Furious (#4), which is okay but not as good as the three which follow it.

#3 (Tokyo Drift) is supposed to be okay but not great. There are apparently a few people who think it’s the best of the series, but that’s very much a minority opinion.

Nobody thinks #2 is the best of anything, and plus it has a really stupid name (2 Fast 2 Furious) –so that’s definitely one to skip.

But I thought I should see #1, The Fast and the Furious, so I just watched it. It’s pretty different from the later ones, which are much more about heists and global espionage. This is much more down-to-earth, involved with illegal street racing and robberies of consumer electronics.

But it introduces some of the key characters in the series, and it was fun to realize all the scenes in the later movies which refer back to the beginning. The whole ending scene of #6, for example. is a series of references to a scene in this one.

And, as somebody who writes serial stories without a plan, it’s fun to see a series where the whole thing is obviously being made up as it goes along, as opposed to, for example, the Marvel movies, where the interlocking plots are planned out years in advance.

 

One more thing. As I’ve reported before, I’m mostly in an Android world these days — the main thing I use the Windows computer for is moving audio files around. But the Bluetooth keyboard I have is not entirely satisfactory. A bit too small, and if I stop typing for too long (you know, to think about what I’m going to write — certainly not to watch a YouTube video or anything like that) it loses the connection and I have to tap a key a few times to get its attention back.

So, I’ve been imagining what it would be like to use a real, full-size USB keyboard. Then I realized that I have a connector that would work — a full-size USB to mini-USB cord that I bought once in a failed attempt to get a flash drive to work with a tablet.

Well, I thought, worth a try. Maybe I’d get one of those notices about having to download a driver or something.

So, I plugged the keyboard into the connector, and the connector into the tablet, and started typing. It worked right away. I plugged a mouse into the keyboard, and that worked, too. I’m typing on it now.

Then, as an experiment, I tried a flash drive instead, and that worked, too. I guess the newer version of the operating system has features that they’re not promoting.

This often happens — the new features they promote the most enthusiastically are the ones I don’t care about, and the ones in the small print get me really excited.

words: complex, but not frightening

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

I was reading an article in the New York Review of Books called “A Hemingway Surprise.” It’s about an exhibition at the Morgan Library called “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars.”

It’s a very interesting article, but one thing that particularly caught my attention was this, talking about a page of revisions to the story “Indian Camp,” where the word “frightened” was replaced by “afraid”:

“There is visible art in the substitution of ‘afraid’ for ‘frightened’—taking the stronger and more grown-up word to repeat the fear…”

This caught my eye — the distinction between “frightened” and “afraid.” I’m not sure about “more grown-up,” but the thing that strikes me is that “afraid” is an adjective, while “frightened” is an adjective based on a verb, so it implies action.

If someone is frightened, then someone or something must have done some frightening. If someone is afraid, then that’s just their state of being — no initiating action is implied.

I think about this because this is what’s struck me about the difference between “complex” and “complicated.” (I’ve talked about this in other places, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it here.)

The Chicago Manual of Style has a section called “Good usage versus common usage,” and “complex” and “complicated” aren’t included there. The dictionary (Merriam-Webster Colegiate, of course) notes that “complex” “does not imply a fault or failure” (implying, therefore, that “complicated” and the other synonyms do).

This is how the distinction appears to me:

Complex is an adjective, a state of being. Some things are naturally complex, such as ecological systems, meteorological systems, and so on. No fault or failure is implied.

On the other hand, if something is “complicated” (based on a verb), that implies that somebody has been doing some complicating. When somebody’s relationship status on Facebook changes to “It’s complicated,” that usually means somebody did something.

Anyway, is this one of those old-fashioned distinctions that most people ignore these days, or am I just making this up?

I’m prepared to follow it either way, of course. 🙂

semicolons (like giant commas)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

As I’ve talked about before, I’m fascinated by commas and related matters, so this new video at the New Yorker website caught my eye: “The Semicolon; or, Mastering the Giant Comma.”

Definitely worth watching (Hey, you get to find out who invented the semicolon — imagine inventing a piece of punctuation that actually gets adopted by the language 🙂 ).

However, as I’ve also reported before, the idea of videos from the New Yorker seems sort of wrong. And I really like my language-related information to be in text form, so I can refer to it easily. And it turned out that Mary Norris, the “comma queen,” has written a book: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.

So I bought the book.

Wait, do you think that was the idea all along…

performative statements, and coherence

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

I was going to start with the part about the movie, but, you know, words!

I like words and classifications of words and sentences, as you can tell here.

I get the A.Word.A.Day emails, which are cool, but this one really caught my attention, since it’s about classification: wordsmith.org/words/performative.html.

Some statements are “performative,” meaning that by saying them you are making them happen. “I promise” is one example — by saying it you’re doing it. Another example, from the French, would be “J’accuse!”

“With this ring, I thee wed.”
“I apologize.”

And so on. Cool.

(Jan Sleet, in her language-loving heart, is just waiting for an opportunity to accuse a murderer with a performative sentence. 🙂 )

 
Coherence

I just saw this film, and I enjoyed it a lot. You think it’s going to be a typical indie relationship drama with a bunch of friends brought together for a dinner where all their secrets and grudges will come out, which it sort of is, but there’s also this comet…

Even in this age of high-budget CGI-based science fiction, you can make a really effective science fiction picture with

  • Almost no budget
  • Eight actors
  • Five days
  • No sets (the director shot it in his own house)
  • No script (the entire movie was improvised, based on a very detailed plan which the actors didn’t know — each day the actors got minimal notes, and none of them knew which notes the other actors got)
  • Two cameras
  • A minimal crew
  • A very smart idea

It also has a complete awareness of the genre tropes that it’s playing with. At one point, in an inexplicable situation, the characters find a science book (which very improbably just happens to be in the back seat of a car). But this is no deus ex machina info dump — the characters think the book will help them (they’ve all seen the movies, too), but it’s really absolutely useless. They don’t figure this out, but it becomes obvious to the audience.

At one point the characters are going to split up, and one protests that that’s always a terrible idea. Another character says, “We’re not splitting up, we’re just going in two separate groups.” Which is, of course hilarious, and even more so when in the commentary track the actor says that when he said the line, in character, it seemed completely sensible.

A smart film, a puzzle that rewards repeated watching.