Grammar

more commas!

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

As I’ve had indicated before, I’m fascinated by commas. And now, the New Yorker has started a video series, and the first one is about commas. And, for all the reputation the New Yorker has for their unrestrained use of commas, this video is about when you should not use them:

video.newyorker.com/watch/comma-queen-comma-queen-series-premiere

(I do have to say, as somebody who has been reading the New Yorker pretty much since birth, the phrase, “the New Yorker has started a video series” seems very odd to me. I switched to getting the magazine digitally for a while, but I switched back to print. Newspapers are fine on the Kindle, or on the web, but the New Yorker needs to be on paper.)

creativity, the internet, and commas

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

A couple of good links here. One is short and one is longer, but both are worthwhile.

The shorter one is about the ever-popular serial comma.

The other an interview with Dave Allen, of the band The Gang of Four, about the effects of the Internet on musicians (and on the arts more generally).

He makes a lot of good points, though with one important point he circles around it pretty well but doesn’t really nail it. He gives some examples, but it’s important to say it clearly: Whether something is good for creativity and whether it’s good for artists getting paid — those are two very separate questions.

One point that he made which really hit me was this:

One falsehood, that always trips up the argument of blaming the Internet for musician’s woes, is the idea that there was some golden age of music where every musician could be famous and live better than the rest of us. It never existed. Competition today is the same as it ever was.

The most popular musicians get rich; the rest, not so much.

As Jean Shepherd always said, “Nostalgia is based on the idea that things were ever better than they are now.  They weren’t. Things have always been lousy.”

commas and cinema

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 3 Comments

A couple of quick links to the New York Times.

1) They have posted two interesting articles on the comma, with one more to come. These are very useful, since I always have the vague idea that I'm not using commas correctly. So far, it seems I'm doing okay, though the "Identification Crisis" part clarified some things for me. Also, I really like to read about the New Yorker house style. 🙂

  1. Fanfare for the Comma Man
  2. The Most Comma Mistakes
  3. Added later: Some Comma Questions

 
2) Kristan Hoffman wrote a post called "Writerly Wednesday" (which you should read), and she linked to a post on the New York Times website called "Like the Video? I Wrote the Book." I'm posting this here because I reacted to a completely different part of the post than she did.

The publishing world is currently in a state of cluelessness and desperation roughly analogous to Hollywood circa 1970, when the counterculture was ascendant, musicals and epics were tanking at the box office, and the studio’s reasoning was, Let’s give some hippies a camera and a million bucks and see if they can make something The Kids’ll want to see, an experiment that gave us Gas-s-s-s ... or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order To Save It!

The cluelessness and desperation is, as he says, only roughly analogous, since the issue back then was that the culture was changing, and the issue now is that the technology is changing. But the analogy is there and has some validity. I remember those days, and it went far beyond Hollywood. The same thing had happened in music a few years earlier, and on television and in comic books at roughly the same time as in the movies.

But his conclusion is pretty much the opposite of what actually happened. The desperation to bring in new blood led to some clunkers, yes, but it also led to what Roger Ebert has correctly characterized as "the golden age of the Hollywood art film," featuring the early works of Coppola, Spielberg, Altman, Lucas, and many others. Robert Altman, for one example, was making more than a movie a year in the early 1970s, and all of them were interesting, most were very good, and at least two were masterpieces (McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville).

no more battling, please

~ Anthony Lee Collins

I don't usually post in the middle of the week, but this is sort of a special occasion.

A few weeks ago, I read an article about Teddy Kennedy, and the title somehow referred to his "battle with cancer" or that he had been "battling cancer." The article itself was about how he had been aware that he was dying, and he was saying goodbye to people, writing his memoir, reflecting on his life.

I wasn't seeing any "battling" in there. And that made me aware of what a cliche it is, that people who have cancer are always battling.

And then it became clear that the Onion felt the same way (Man Dies After Secret 4-Year Battle With Gorilla)

But this morning the "After Deadline" blog at the New York Times (which I follow religiously) made the same point here.

I liked the point about "women athletes," too. I will admit that I just edited part of "The Case of the Four Women" to take out a reference to a "goatee beard."

mr. language person

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

(With apologies to Dave Barry.)

I'm sick, so I have no idea if I will post this, or if there will be more of "The Family Murder Case," or both, or who knows. But, lying feverishly in my bed for the last few days, surviving mostly on tea, I've had a few thoughts.

gerunds

I'm obviously a bit of a fanatic about some aspects of grammar and punctuation, but other areas I'm not strong in. One is parts of speech. This may go back to diagramming sentences in high school, which I (and pretty much everybody else) thought was a big waste of time. I wonder if current education theory would say that we were missing out on something really vital, or is diagramming sentences actually a silly idea?

Anyway.

Nouns, I understand what they are. Verbs, they're pretty easy. And adjectives, too. But then you get into the complicated ones, like past particles and marsupial phrases, and those have always baffled me. But the one which baffled me the most was gerunds.

I always thought the gerund was something like the infield fly rule. You could understand it as it was being explained, but after a few minutes, the information would drift away. But a week ago (admittedly before the fever started), I looked it up in The Chicago Manual of Style, and I got it. And I still remember it. A verb used as a noun.

Walking is the best exercise.

Walking is clearly a verb (anything that describes moving yourself around is a verb), but here it's being used as a noun. So, it's a gerund.

As McCarthy says in The Time of Your Life: "It's so simple, it's amazing!"

Now I guess I'll have to learn about the propositions and the injunctions and so on.

I already know what a conjunction is. That's pinkeye.

Oh, and, if further proof was needed that The Time of Your Life has altered my brain, I just figured out why the bum in "The Church Murder Case" was named Toledo. It's because so many of the stories Kit Carson tells in the play are about Toledo ("Did you ever try to herd cattle on a bicycle?").

Oh, and, emboldened by my mastery of the gerund, I decided to investigate another question. The next mystery story will be called "The Golden Mystery" (I explained before why it wasn't "The Golden Murder Case," but I'm sick so that means I don't have to find where I said it and put in a link). Now, obviously, if the events of the mystery were suffused with a golden light, "golden" would be an adjective. But "Golden" is actually a name, so it's more like The Greene Murder Case (which is an actual Philo Vance, not one of mine). So, is that not an adjective?

Well, I looked that up, and it is a "proper adjective" (which of course makes me think that the other adjectives must be improper in some way, or maybe that just comes from watching Gosford Park). So, that's settled, too.

interesting development

According to Time Magazine (or possibly it was Newsweek – who remembers?), more books were self-published last year than were published by conventional publishers. This is the first year of which that has been true. Ever.

Wow.

So, let me put in a plug for my book, A Sane Woman. Available from Amazon.com or directly from lulu.com.

It's good. You'll like it. Good characters, interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good ending. And it has a really nice cover. Order some for your friends.

more on the gerund (or "why I like the CMOS")

The Chicago Manual of Style section on the gerund is one short paragraph. The Wikipedia entry goes on for a very long time, and includes "passivization," "pronominal substitution," "clefting," and "left dislocation."

And, no, I didn't make those up.

This is the sort of thing that discourages me from pursuing these sorts of questions. It makes me want to say, "That's all very interesting, if that's your idea of a good time, but I'm having too much fun writing my detective stories to take ten years off to learn all that."

Or maybe I'll just give them all the good old bilabial fricative.