Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, August 7, 2024
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90 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I kinda realized in my half sleep the acronyms of the two presidential tickets. It seems that America will be choosing between HW and TV.
How appropriate. Do we want do our homework or watch television?
Was just reading about Musk suing an Advertisers Industry group because they recommended against advertising on Twitter… after Musk told advertisers to f*ck off and if they don’t like his policies they are free to take their ads elsewhere. It struck me that this is the perfect distillation of the angry arrogance of the Republican/Libertarian/Billionaires Boys Club mentality: if you won’t accept my stupid and failed ideas as genius and acknowledge me as the apex of the food chain well, f* k democracy and f*ck persuasion, you must be compelled by any means necessary.
So, the GOP is planning to contest an election loss in the courts should they lose in November. They would effectively leave the process in limbo, if you will, while they move their case through the court system. But, they’ll be doing it with Biden still occupying the seat. So, riddle me this:
What’s to stop Biden from resigning and turning over the office to Harris? What if a President Harris, performing her official acts of office — for which she is immune from prosecution — declared some kind of emergency and suspended the election, or did some other “official act” by which she consolidated power and set herself as POTUS for life?
It seems obviously farfetched, but since SCOTUS practically granted a President virtually unlimited power to act with its immunity decision, it isn’t such an impossible scenario, after all. Republicans may get that unitary executive government they’ve been pining for, after all. Right up the ass. As usual, they can’t or don’t think five minutes past their faces.
@DeD:
MR is gonna get at me for that multiple use of “after all” in that post. After all, it’s a violation of the rules…
As a Midwesterner, and as an ex-Minnesotan, I knew who Walz was even before the veep stakes. Seems like a solid dude.
I knew who Buttigieg was – I voted for him in the Iowa Caucuses. I knew who Mark Kelly was – astronaut, Senator, husband of Gabby Giffords. Josh Shapiro’s name rang a vague bell in my brain – I remembered he was a Governor but I couldn’t peg from where. Vermont? Ohio? I had to Google the name to recall it was Pennsylvania.
I’m a bit of a politics hound and had almost no clue who Shapiro was. Of course, as has been noted in other threads, Rs are trying to have their latke and eat it too re: Shapiro – picking him would be a DEI hire, not picking him is anti-Semitic. Heck, I didn’t even know he was Jewish until two weeks ago. And, frankly, I don’t fucking care.
Harris picked Walz. In the election, the VP choice doesn’t make a lick of a difference nationally. Maybe a point or two difference in their home state at best. If the worst were to happen, who is the back up? I know I’d prefer Walz over phony baloney, hyper malleable Vance any day as an emergency back-up.
Governor name recognition is regional. Walz, to me, was a known commodity, whereas Shapiro was a name I vaguely recognized. Were it me, I would’ve picked Kelly.
I know who I’m going to vote against, and it’s not because of Walz, or even Harris. I’ve got no problem with Harris at all, but this is an election where I’m voting against someone. All the while knowing my vote will be meaningless because Trump will win Iowa roughly 54-46 and my vote won’t matter at all. Winner take all EC votes per state is just fundamentally a bad system. It disincentives voting and encourages disengagement for everyone not in a toss-up, battleground state.
The Electoral College system has got to go the way of the dodo. It’s currently anti-democratic, it was designed to be anti-democratic. Can’t we just go to a nationwide plebescite like a normal country?
WRT the choice of Tim Walz as VP candidate: The one resume bullet that stood out to me was that he was a Command Sergeant Major. That’s a big deal in our military circles. To sum up the importance, it means Leadership, Leadership, Leadership. Apparently Walz has that skill set in abundance.
@DeD:
What’s to stop Biden from carrying out the coup himself?
According to the Eastman Whacky School of Crazy Law, Nixon and Gore are the worst idiots ever, since each could simply had named himself president in the 1960 and 2000 elections. Well, the VP is running again, and the outgoing president is immune and hates the Orange Felon.
@DeD:
I don’t care who is President. Unchecked immunity is a really bad idea. So and so declared themself President for life and imprisoned the opposition as enemies of the state by executive order – our hands are tied, the precedent is clear. It’s up to Congress, those not imprisoned anyway, to set limits on Presidential authority.
It makes my brain hurt. How could any sentient conservative leaning justice be okay with that concept? I am beyond boggled.
Stormy Dragon Carrying on a silly discussion from last night in the Walz forum, my late brother was an ELCA pastor. He told a story of his Bishop giving a talk. The Bishop said he usually started a talk with a joke, usually a Norwegian joke. But he’d come to understand that ethnic jokes were demeaning and no longer really politically correct or proper. But he’d been told it was OK to tell a joke on an ethnic group that no longer exists, “So, there were these two Hittites … Sven and Ole.”
Presidential campaigns are too long. Far too much time to organize dirty tricks, shill campaigns, and other nasty stuff. Other countries call an election and voting starts in 30 days. Now the presidential campaign season is two years long.
“But how do we get to know the candidates”?
Answer: you don’t. You won’t really know much about them them after two years and you really will have no earthy clue as to what they can accomplice until after the election and we find out how much congressional support they have. Oh and all those things they promise that require a constitutional amendment, they are nothing more then aspirational talking points. Oh you want a cease fire or an end to some conflict that the US isn’t technicality in? Well good luck. Oh you won’t vote for this persona or that person until they make a promise they really don’t have any agency to keep, then congrats, someone else will be selecting president for you. We as a country need to get used to the idea that there are political parties and get to know their leadership and judge them on competence over the long haul. Everything else is a personality contest.
/off rant
Campaigns should be started, run and don in 90 days max. I will allow a 6 months transition for two more cycles just to show how magnanimous I can be. I am frightened that our elected offices have to be a charismatic figure first and a competent administrator second. A lot of the at is due to never ending campaigns where wealthy doners call the shots.
@gVOR10:
How many Norwegian jokes can their be?
I’m reminded of an episode of Get Smart and Smart having a East Himalayan joke book. It had six entries.
There are probably more Norwegian ones.
@Rick DeMent:
The end of the Cold War.
We had to find internal enemies to replace the external ones. No credible external threat means that all that pent up hatred has to go somewhere else. It’s physics. The law of conservation of energy. Antipathy requires a target.
And we really can’t hate China because they make 2/3s of the stuff we buy.
Politics have gotten markedly stupider in my lifetime.
@Bill Jempty:
From personal experience, hundreds. Probably more.
@Bill Jempty:
I grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There are roughly several thousand Norwegian jokes. And Swedish jokes. Exact same jokes, just nation swapped. All starring hapless, stupid Ole Olson.
@DeD:
In the trade we call it the ‘echo effect.’ There’s no set rule for how frequently you can use a word or phrase, or in what proximity, but it’s something that embarrasses me when I spot it in something I’ve written. For example the preceding sentence which contains the word ‘something’ twice. So I rewrite it as, it embarrasses me when I spot an echo in something I’ve written.
It can be taken too far, especially in dialog tags such as, ‘he said.’ The echo effect does not apply to said. In fact ‘said’ is by far the preferred tag because it does the job without drawing attention to itself like, ‘mumbled’ or, ‘proclaimed,’ or everyone’s favorite, ‘ejaculated.’ As long as you limit your ‘said’ tags to the amount necessary to differentiate speakers, you can ‘said’ all you like. You can ejaculate all you like, too, but that’s a rather different issue.
But all this nonsense is something for word nerds to get hung up on, not for normal people trying to convey a thought. Clarity is much more important than the rules of grammar or style. Which is good for me because I never learned the rules of grammar, style or punctuation, as evidenced by the fact that I just began a sentence with ‘which,’ rather than sticking in a comma after ‘style’ and making it all one sentence.
My literary ‘voice’ leans into short sentences, short paragraphs, and lots of white space. The book I’m working on now is aimed at the YA reader and I’m stealing one of my wife’s tricks of going with short chapters as well. Her target audience is younger, but I’m thinking it may work in YA, too. Normally I’m a ten to fifteen pages per chapter guy, she’s three pages and out. And she’s the one sitting pretty on the bestseller list.
@Michael Reynolds:
In my stories I try not to have two paragraphs or even dialogue in a row not start with the same word.
I also try keeping my chapters the same length.
What I’ve never done, is give names to the chapters in my books. Some authors do but coming up with a clever title is a skill I’m poor at.
I’ve encountered trouble naming a few of my books.
@gVOR10:
I was raised Lutheran. Swedish Lutheran, so ELCA. German Lutherans were seen as weird, almost heretical to that community. (They are exactly the same!)
Our pastor was gayer than a Broadway chorus line and everyone pretended not to see it. Which was pretty cool for the early 70s. Well, not entirely true, all the adults who cared about such things were privately aghast, but the Synod (or whatever authority) had placed him there so there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Good dude. Taught my confirmation class. At the time I was edging towards atheism and he was totally cool with that – recommended books, even.
I ended up going through with the confirmation process which involves an oath in front of the congregation – hey I was like 12 at the time! – but felt like a literal hypocrite. Outing myself as a non-believer at that age, in that there and then, would’ve been a huge pain in the butt to me and everybody else. So I just shut up and did the least amount of lip service I could get away with until I went to college.
@Bill Jempty:
On several occasions I have started naming chapters, and I always give up. Also lousy at naming books. ‘Animorphs’ started as, ‘Changelings.’ An editor came up with the title.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’ve been noticing this a lot more frequently in adult fiction. I’m currently reading God of the Woods, and some of the chapters are 2, 3 pages long. Technically, they satisfy the definition of a chapter as containing something that moves the story forward and is separate from the section before and after, but it’s an interesting thing to notice. I wonder if it’s in part due to an increase in e-readers?
@Michael Reynolds:
My editor came up with the title for my homage to Japanese monster movies.
The original title for my best seller was ‘Could I have this dance?’
I just wish I titled my cannibal story ‘You are what you eat’
@Michael Reynolds: The business of “which” caught my eye. That’s something I do, and I do it deliberately. Break up long sentences with subordinate clauses into multiple sentences, with periods at the end. It isn’t correct grammar, but I’m trying to make it sound like I’m speaking, not writing an essay for an English class.
(I do not pretend to have the experience writing that you do, but I have done it a lot over the years. I have written articles for journals and proceedings, and that’s got to be the most stultifying writing ever done. But it gets the job done, and nobody gets awards for style in journal submissions.)
Yes, I do take note of the “echo” business. Though every once in a while, the repetition is deliberate. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Guilty.
@Jen:
The theory in kidlit was that short chapters and lots of white space were encouraging for beginning or less proficient readers. “I finished a whole chapter!” In adult lit it may be an adaptation to a more fragmented attention span. Most YouTubes are 20 minutes, TikToks are 30 seconds. You can’t read Salman Rushdie or Umberto Eco at TikTok speed.
@Michael Reynolds:
Schooled! I’m not fond of YA lit, but I’m probably gonna start that “Gone” series shortly.
@Jay L Gischer:
Ditto. I tend to write in spoken English. When I write a long sentence – longer than one could read aloud in a single breath – it’s often for the purpose of making the reader feel breathless.
@Jen:
The trouble with 2-3 page chapters is I write scenes longer than that.
What I do is scene breaks as marked with the following- *****
Sometimes I have many of those in a chapter. For instance my Yakuza epic to be finished sometime next year after I visit Japan to do more research, has a car chase in it. I tell the chase from many different perspectives including
My main character and her husband. He doesn’t know she’s working undercover for law enforcement.
The people chasing her, they have multiple cars, so we sometimes from one to another
My main character’s bodyguards in yet another car
People listening to the radio chatter of the persons doing the chasing. The chasers are not doing very well and a comparison to the Keystone Cops is made.
A innocent motorcyclist who gets caught up in the action
Multiple Yakuza who are summoned to the chase when it is learned my main character is in trouble. She’s the granddaughter of the Oyabun and the finance person for the crime family.
So in around 15 to 20 pages, I have 30 or more ***** whereas I’d normally have 4 to 8.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m a fan of mysteries and one of my favorites were the late Robert Parker’s Spenser books. I’m a fast reader but I would fly through his books. I noticed that not only did he write short chapters, eight or ten pages, his publishers used a lot of white space. Each chapter began several spaces down from the top and would end with many lines of blank space. He was writing novellas or extended short stories.
Quite different is Greg Illes, an author I’m now reading. I like his writing but he can cram a five hundred page book into a thousand pages of print.
@Jay L Gischer:
I think I do this too, at least for online writing. Thinking about this a little more, I bet if you were to watch me read something I’ve written here, you could reasonably predict when I would start talking with my hands too. I bet you could predict the change in gestures before I did them too. That’s a wild though. I’ve also given up on fighting against the ADHD (so you’re gonna see more parentheticals (and parentheticals inside of parentheticals (bonus content))). That’s just how my brain works.
One of the funniest things (and most striking) that my therapist said to me was that she ignores the first three sentences that come out of my mouth because they are almost always bullshit meant to get someone agitated or off balance. I had no idea I was even doing that.
I’ve also just lost my train of thought. Weeee. Oh that’s it.
When I do my professional legal writing I’ve had to adopt the one sentence per numbered paragraph rule.
1. Plaintiff’s motion must be stricken because it is nonsense.
2. the caselaw says that “nonsense must never be part of a pleading.”
3. therefore rain hellfire down on the plaintiff’s counsel.
Otherwise what I think is perfectly readable, logical, and brilliant legal writing, gets destroyed by judges that can’t understand where I’m going.
@Michael Reynolds:
I have a prose preference for Hemingway style writing. Describe. Imply. Like for movies where a key mantra is “show, don’t tell”. Let me figure what so and so are thinking internally by the way of describing the place and setting and conversation.
I used to have an inside Hemingway joke with a buddy. We would go to a bar or restaurant. I would performatively look around and remark “This is a clean, well lighted place.” He would agree. We would laugh.
Third person, not omniscient POV.
@Jay L Gischer: I was told by one of my more revered college English professors, “The two greatest tools of the writer are the period and the trash can.”
Trump had some interesting tweets yesterday. In one, he wrote that Tim Walz was going to be the worst vice president in history. Someone quipped in response, “Wow, Trump is already conceding the election!”
In another, he wrote what some are labeling as “Biden fan fiction.” He went on a rant about how Biden is pissed about the palace coup that overthrew him, and how he’s going to get revenge against those he hates (including Harris, Obama, Pelosi, etc.) at the Democratic convention by stealing his nomination back and challenging Trump to a debate rematch. No longer having Biden as his opponent has really thrown Trump for a loop.
@a country lawyer:
I had the misfortune to read a James Patterson novel this spring. It offended me aesthetically on a fundamental level. It was one of Alex Cross “mystery” books. Fairly current – published last year. Are they mysteries or thrillers?
Once I’m 20 minutes in, I’m basically committed to finishing it. I enjoyed it for reasons the author did not intend – the obviousness, the cliches, the tropes, the very ham-fistedness of it all. It was gloriously bad. 220 pages and 80 chapters. Every chapter is two or three pages. The bad guy was essentially a dude Cross’ colleague met with for two minutes on page 20.
I highly recommend it for it’s utter crappiness. Sentence to sentence the writing itself is serviceable, but the concept is so banal.
I enjoyed myself greatly in hating it so much.
Does Patterson even write these books anymore or does he outsource it?
@de stijl: I don’t know if you’ve ever come across Nerdwriter, but I highly recommend him. He does a great job of breaking down how artists convey a lot of information without explicit exposition. Usually movies or television shows, but sometimes other media as well. His breakdown of Anthony Hopkins acting choices in a single scene in Westworld is revelatory, at least to me! Anyway, he did a piece, I can’t even remember what it was about, but one scene he used as an example was from a Japanese detective film. There is a very slow zoom into a room and something like five characters are introduced by having them emerge at different depths in the room. If I remember correctly there is no dialog whatsoever and they don’t even interact, but you learn oceans about their personality by what they are doing, how they are sitting or standing, the staging of their location, etc. I often think about that scene and have tried to go back and find it, but it is only one part of a larger piece and I don’t remember anything else about it.
@Jen: then, you have Pratchett, who only used chapters in, I think, 3 out of 41 books in the discworld series.
@a country lawyer:
In his later books, Bob trimmed the chapter length down to 2-3 pages.
@de stijl:
I’ve asked the same question on these forums.
@Jen:
Short chapters might have seen an uptick due to e-readers, but I will say that it took me a moment to get used to short chapters when reading books from James Patterson many years back. He seems to be a fan of short chapters (I think some of his books had lots of chapter that were barely a page long, you would get half a page of text at the start of the chapter, and the next page would only have text to the middle of the page, so barely 1 full page of text between chapter breaks, which I get works for some authors and the genre/subject matter they are engaged with).
Also, this may not be accurate as I cannot remember a specific title, but I think I have read a classic work of literature or two where there are lots of chapter breaks (the flip side is that I have read some classics and general works of fiction where I was lucky to get a chapter break after at least 20 pages had passed, a break every 10-15 pages makes for an easy read, and makes it easy to complete a chapter before you put a book down for the night and go to sleep, or something like that).
@Monala:
He really is more and more disconnected from reality every day.
He also seems to be losing interest in the election itself. He’s been doing 2-3 events per week (most non-incumbent candidates do multiple events per day), but since his disaster at the NABJ on July 11, he did only one event (yesterday) and his next one is Friday. All of his are in safe states, with the NABJ interview being the rare exception. Contrast that to Harris who is in the midst of a 6 day, 7 battleground state, blitz, with multiple events in each.
@Bill Jempty:
Most of the colossus sellers don’t; they franchise their names.
@Rick DeMent:..Campaigns should be started, run and don in 90 days max.
I sure would like to see a draft of the proposed legislation for all 50 states that would bring this about. For starters this legislation would have to be passed by the sitting legislators who it would apply to if they want to run again after their first term. (That would be most if not all of them.) Secondly how will legislation be worded to prohibit any early campaign activity yet not violate a citizens free speech?
Will this 90 day window apply to all the different party primaries and caucuses that nominate candidates to run in general elections.
What activity will be defined as a political campaign? If a citizen wants to explore prospective support for candidacy for public office will any gatherings at the local coffee shop have to be in the 90 day window?
Will incumbent officeholders be banned from State and County Fairs if those events are further out than 90 days before elections?
Looking at this page from the Green Papers I see that the process to select delegates for the big two nominating conventions for the 2024 Presidential candidates started in March of 2023.
All of this is political campaigning. Good luck getting all this done in 90 days.
I’ll be rootin’ for ya!
@Michael Reynolds: Wow, that’s a great idea. I mean, the runon sentence, with lots of “and then” can do that, but there’s a more general concept. Cool!
@Jen: I am currently reading a non-fiction book that I wish would have shortened the chapters. I hate not reading to the end of the chapter, but this bastard makes it sometimes necessary.
Side complaint: who writes a history book with no bibliiography or citations of any kind.
The book (Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland) is fine if a bit of an “old man yells at clouds” diatribe. But there are better reads out there.
Hey, completely different topic, on something which I have some curiosity about. I was talking with a friend who is 12 years younger than I. It came up that in my middle school and high school years, we had a fair number of live bands that played at school dances. I would always go, not because I’m a party animal, but because I wanted to hear the bands, and also socialize with my schoolmates. I didn’t go to keggers, so this would have to do.
My friend said that it was all DJs for her. No live music at all. This surprised the hell out of me. You see, my school was small. Really small. There were 63 in my graduating class. And, we had multiple bands made up from students. They were solid players. Not awesome, and they were cover bands, but they were live bands, which I like so much more than records (though we did those too, but no DJ, just a record player and somebody’s collection of singles. We called them “sock hops”)
So, what’s going on here? Is this a generational change? Or is it that my area/school was especially musically gifted? Or maybe being a small community, we knew about the local bands that would play for cheap? I am clueless.
@Mister Bluster:
My impresssion is that countries with short election cycles are ones where the ruling party can call an election at any time. This prevents people from getting into full campaign mode, for a variety of reasons, until they know when the election is.
FWIW, my gut observation about the poor souls who are “conducting listening sessions” in Iowa 2+ years before the polls open is that they are hurting rather than helping their chances. They strike me as forlorn people without a real job. And only the political hyper engaged are ever even aware they are out there. That, of course, includes the media, but I think they get tired and bored with these long term candidates and are ready to abandon them and jump onto the new kid when they have a chance.
@Jay L Gischer: “Calling Doctor Beth! Calling Doctor Beth!”. FWIW I think DJ can mean something very different today than it meant 40 years ago.
@de stijl:
You and me both. I remember sitting in a pew in my parents’ small town Lutheran Church silently praying, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” until I started realizing I talking to myself and this bronze age tale of blood sacrifice was kind of hard to believe.
@Jay L Gischer: My school was even smaller than yours (47 in graduating class) and I am not sure your age, but in the late 80s, early 90s, we only had a DJ. Local bands were probably too likely to play something inappropriate.
@MarkedMan:
Denis Villeneuve’s movies do this expertly. (I can’t attest to Dune or Dune 2 because I haven’t seen them yet.)
Arrival throws you in the deep end and expects you to keep up. Sicario too. Sicario tells a fairly straight-forward story but it expects you to read between the lines for character motivation and story.
Arrival just trusts that the audience will keep up and pay attention. Even for time is a flat circle stuff. He uses movie tropes to lull the audience onto an expected path and then veers sharply away from the anticipated. And the best use of On The Nature Of Daylight imaginable.
@Bill Jempty: @de stijl:
Patterson mostly uses ghosts, though I believe he does write some of them himself.
@Jay L Gischer:
Short sentences can make the reader feel frustrated. They want to get there, they want to get there, aarrg! Build that frustration, then hit them with a run-on. Frustration then breathlessness then resolution.
Because I’m very mature I’ll skip the obvious sexual analogy.
@Jen: I read almost exclusively using an e-reader now. Kindle sends me periodic notifications that I am one of their top 3-5% users, though I have no idea about what marketing desire that fulfills. I’m having trouble understanding why shorter chapter and e-reader go together, but I can tell you the dismay that I feel emotionally when I’m reading Chapter 54 of 97 chapters even though the chapters are often only a paragraph or two long–maybe especially when they are that short.
I’ve had students ask about this feature. I told them that I don’t know for sure, but it looks like the author is dividing the book into individual scenes rather than arcs of events.
(IANAL) Elon Musk is suing people for not advertising on X/Twitter.
For a so-called “free speech’ advocate, he has no freaking clue what free speech actually means. No one is obligated to be associated with you or that content.
This is a classic example of the Streisand effect – by suing you are highlighting information you probably don’t want people to know. Yes, X/Twitter is anathema to a lot of mainstream companies that rely on broad brand appeal and goodwill.
You are highlighting a glaring weakness in your business model – advertisers don’t want to be associated with hate speech.
No one is obligated to advertise on your platform. That’s not how it works. You are highlighting your own ineptitude and subsequent massive loss of advertising dollars by bringing this lawsuit. It highlights his failure.
From a PR perspective this lawsuit is embarrassingly bad.
Even if he wins it hurts his cred. You can’t force some company to advertise on a particular platform. It doesn’t work that way.
Why… why would any sane… who thought this up…? My brain hurts. Some folks think Musk is a genius.
@MarkedMan: DJ Vance is mixing the hippest tracks that gets the kids groovin’ with traditional values. He has the VC rizz.
@Jay L Gischer: Who told you that breaking up long compound/complex sentences (the kind with subordinate clauses) in grammatically incorrect? It’s not grammar at all. It’s style. You break them up; I don’t.
Or, you break them up. I don’t. They’re both the same. The issue from the perspective of a teacher of writing centers on whether the short sentences start being a distraction to the reader. And that students who always write in short simple sentences sometimes lose track of their thoughts and end up writing paragraphs that have gaping holes in the thinking.
@Michael J Reynolds: The sort of rhythm and contour you are getting at shows up in many, many forms of human creation. I was just re-listening to John Williams “Superman” theme. It does this, right at the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9vrfEoc8_g&t=219s
Short statements, in unison, slower than what comes later, leading up to that big chord with all the brass. He makes you wait for it, and there’s a nice payoff to that.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Oh, the grammatical rule that I run afoul of all the time is that sometimes the “sentences” aren’t actually sentences. They don’t have a proper subject. Or a verb.
We talk like this all the time, and the left-out bits are easily filled in by people who are good readers, which describes nearly everyone, if not everyone reading comments on this blog.
AND, they are not actually proper sentences, and Mr. Eames would dock me for it. Probably with some sardonic comment about “Yes, it works, but learn to do it the correct way” or something.
@Beth: If you start doing parentheticals within parentheticals within parentheticals, using brackets ([-]) and braces ({-}) can help the reader keep the idea order straight. On the other hand, using 3 different text markers can involve having to re-read the work to sort out the subgroupings, which may be problematic depending on how much your ADHD is in control at the time. But again, this is all style, not grammar. As Captain Planet used to say, “The power is in your hands.” (Which turned out to be the mistake in the case of saving the environment, sadly.)
@Jay L Gischer:
I see what you did there.
This sentence no verb.
Any noun can be verbed.
Verbing weirds adjectives.
@de stijl: I’ve never read an Ernest Hemmingway book all the way through.* Or a book by Steinbeck, either. There’s something about their style and subjects that just off-putting for me. Kerouac, too. And Francis Scott and Zelda, too, although less so. I never got post-depression era American Lit. I’m glad I skipped that segment of the sequence in college.
*Fortunately, at the school I did graduate studies in English at, you could complete an MA program with only about 10 0r 12 credits of Lit coursework. Just enough to gobsmack my professors and fellow students–who still wanted to review with me for the final exam, inexplicably.
@Jay L Gischer:
Dude! You started a sentence with a conjunction!
And you did it well.
But was it worth it?
A lot of “correct” grammar we learned in grade school was based off misguided attempts to make English more like classical Latin. It didn’t even make any sense back then. It’s a bastard child of Old Germanic, Old Norse, and Norman French. You cannot Latinize English.
I took enough linguistics to know that presciptivists are entirely full of shit. “Shit” is a Germanic derived word and not particularly vulgar.
@Joe: Yeah! I would have taken a class from him.
@de stijl: The places I get ads from classify them as thrillers. And yeah, formulaic is part of the “skill set” for authors who produce as much as he gets billing for. (At least, that’s my take. But I’m also one of the people who questions whether Vivaldi really wrote 500 concertos or one concerto 500 times. It the same phenomenon in my mind in both avenues of “creativity.”)
@de stijl: Musk is a genius. He is also a fool. Genius does not preclude foolishness. In fact, foolishness might be a prerequisite for genius.
Musk suffers from a malady that often infects very smart people: They think that their smartness extends to all fields at all times. To be fair, when one is quite bright, one can get the impression in class that one can figure out everything that’s going on in the lecture and the book, and maybe a bit more. One can get a lot of reinforcement for the idea that one knows more on all subjects.
I have run in to this attitude a number of times, and I have to guard against having it myself. There are certain dumb mistakes that only smart people can make and Musk is making them right and left these days. Sigh. He’s done so much to advance EVs, too. That is a definite, positive good for the world.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I went to college in St. Paul, MN. Of course we had a course solely devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald. I took it. It was awesome!
I like Fitzgerald, although he can run to … florid. (Not the correct adjective, close enough though.) Not really verbose, just over-baked prose-wise.
Afew years later I lived about two blocks away from Fitzgerald’s childhood building. It was an interesting neighborhood. On Summit Ave. it’s million dollar houses up and down the avenue and poor areas a block away.
Two blocks away from the James J. Hill house is a struggling neighborhood trying hard to not be ghetto. Back then at least. I was dirt poor and lived on Western Ave. because that was what I could afford then.
Shockingly grandiose houses and grinding poverty a block away. Robber Baron and railroad mogul houses on Summit. Go one or two blocks north and see how most folks actually lived. If you know where W.A. Frost is, I lived a half block south of that.
Next time I go up there, I’ll drive by my old building to suss it out, and the neighborhood.
@Jay L Gischer: I’m GenX and can’t ever recall having an actual band at a school dance, they were always DJ’ed.
@de stijl:
Musk rather famously thinks that PR is a waste of money, so he has no PR team. Speaking as a PR person…it shows. He’s completely trashed his own brand in a very short time frame. Oh well.
@MarkedMan:
I keep going back to when I read on-line that Jon Stewart a few months back basically said on his show, ugh…two old men are running for President and Americans wish both of them were not their candidates. Well, in a twist (a July instead of an October surprise, if you will) one side did something about their candidate and indeed replaced him, the other side…did not.
I get that technically Trump stepping down days after the Convention would be a bit odd, but I bet there are enough GOP friendly state legislatures and judges that any rule changes to make it so J.D. Vance could then become the GOP candidate and pick his VP long after the door for the GOP to cement who their candidates for Prez and VP would have closed could have been adjusted to allow for this to happen (after all, many folks will say rules are not set in stone, or can be bent a little bit).
It does seem too late now and the GOP should be nervous that Trump has some of that irrational exuberance that Clinton had where she was this close to telling folks relax, I got this when well…clearly she did not got this.
It really does feel like Trump is campaigning, if you can even call it that, like he has this in the bag, but so far I have seen no one of any importance step up on the GOP side to say that they know something most of us do not and Trump has nothing to worry about.
I just do not buy it that no one on the GOP is worried about how Trump is trying to become President this time around. It seems a lot of GOPers are really good at not wearing their nervousness on their sleeve, but I have a feeling this might start to change as more folks become aware of just how unseriously the GOP seems to be taking this election.
@Jay L Gischer: If I recall correctly, you said you grew up in Whatcom County. If that is the case, in your time you were on a live music tour route between large live music markets in Seattle (where I barhopped for much the same reason as you discuss) and another one in Vancouver BC. My high school also had amazing bands showing up to do dances after Friday night football games back in my day, and Seattle had two or three venues that featured bands and light shows. For as long as that continued, well into the 80s as I recall, there were lots of bands on the road willing to show up on their way to somewhere else for as little as gas money. It was a glorious period for live music.
Given cost shifts in our economy, my suspicion is that bands can no longer afford to tour in the way that they used to. Big acts spend literally millions of dollars mounting tours from what I’ve read. A school may only have a couple of hundred dollars for entertainment that my student government bought for ~$25/night back in 1968. I don’t think a band can even pull of the road for that little–assuming a band can afford to be on the road to begin with.
The 5th Dimension put it this way: “We leave our mark on every single thing we do.” “Ashes to ashes” indeed. I grew up in live music paradise. Last time I looked for live music nightclub venues in Seattle, the internet suggested two, one of which was an auditorium (with no cabaret license) and the other presold tickets to “concerts” through ticket booking websites even for their dining floor/menu service area.
@de stijl:
I’ve mentioned my late brother, the Reverend. He, for a few years, was assigned (I think they say “called”) to a very small town in rural NW Minnesota. He worked IIRC six small churches. His big accomplishment was getting three of them to merge with the one in town. It was basically in the swamp at the upper end of the Mississippi. Nobody bothered to steal the land from the Indians until the early 1900s when a dam was built to drain part of it.
My brother explained the history. Several families in a county in Norway would get together and all migrate to America together, along with their pastor. They’d settle on adjacent homesteads and build a church. The next year another group, from another county in Norway, with their pastor, would do the same thing 20 miles down the road. So you end up with a church every 20 miles or so. And a girl who married a boy from the neighboring Norwegian Lutheran parish would be shunned by her family and congregation. They eventually stopped shunning and cooperated, even sharing a pastor on a rotating basis, but as the rural population dropped, it was still an effort to get them to consolidate. There was a lot of history, and family burials, in those small churches.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Sorry, I should have explained that–first, full disclosure, I have only read a handful of books on an e-reader (I just didn’t care for it–I read more slowly and retained less), but I vaguely recall that it counted pages differently/the “pages” listed on my tablet didn’t match the number of pages in a comparable physical book.
Two or three pages in a physical book might render more like double that on an e-reader, so chapters “feel” longer on a tablet.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: @Beth:
This reminds me of the time that two lawyer friends of mine were trying to interpret a newly-passed piece of legislation and one of them burst into the office shouting “I found the verb!!”
@de stijl: Unless I misread the article I read, he’s suing them after having told them that if they didn’t like the site now, they should take their advertisements elsewhere at day or two earlier. Yow! And WA!!!!, too. Or as Ben Gleib used to say on Idiotest, “Snapple Dapple!”
It’s just mindboggling.
@Jay L Gischer: That’s also no longer “a rule.” Or even a convention. Writers frequently write in fragments. For emphasis.
@de stijl: My take is that, IIRC, Fitzgerald hung out with lost generation poets in Paris and that particular contact shaped his writing style. If I’d even been interested enough in literature, that idea might have made a decent thesis. I dunno. I’d have had to read and analyze too much literature for me to be interested in proceeding that way on the speculation that I was right.
To this day, I remain a serious devotee of not reading “literature.” My brother, who always wanted to be the next Steinbeck or Hemmingway, asks me whenever he calls if I’ve read any good books lately. I always say that I only read trashy pulp novels. And it’s largely true. I probably read more “literature” in the years I was in teaching college and grad school than I’d read in my entire life, before those 3 or 4 years. Or since, for that matter. And even then, I only used lit classes as filler for my programs. I took every offering the English Department had that wasn’t a lit course every term I could.
@gVOR10: The ELCA is still working on that model in a lot of places. Longview, where I moved from this spring has 5 or 6 ELCA churches in the city limits of two adjacent towns totaling 50k population. All of them together would only make a moderate sized congregation. (Say 250-300)
As an engineer and manager, I felt like my real marketable skill was writing: proposals, procedures, specifications, policies, reports. I was eternally grateful to a couple of teachers. The first was Miss McGuire, my HS Senior Literature teacher. Wasn’t fond of her at the time. One day a week, we’d walk into class, she’d write a random topic on the board, and we had the rest of the period to write 300 words ex temp. As some of my OTB comments demonstrate, I can write 300 words on anything, whether I have a clue or not. We also memorized a lot, “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, the draughte of March…” Spelling tests, write the words on the list correctly as she read them at a conversational pace. Also a Rhetoric 101 teacher at Illinois (that’s what they called it). She taught me how to start a piece – write three paragraphs, tear up the first two, and keep going. Between her, Miss McGuire, and drawing the Rhet 101 teachers husband for 102, I was told I was the only engineering student that year to proficiency out of 102.
They, and decades of technical writing, drove home the habit of short sentences.
@DrDaveT:
“Verbing weirds adjectives” is my new favorite sentence.
My spell checker really hates that sentence hard and tried to correct what I’d typed repeatedly.
@Jen: Aha. Scalable type is a different issue than what I was thinking about, but yeah, a lot of e-books don’t match up page for page between print versions and e-book. Your other issue is one that I don’t have in that I’ve always read slowly and with unconcern for retention in recreational reading. X-ray on Kindle helps me keep track of the details these days. Very convenient.
@gVOR10: Taught both technical writing and business communications during my pseudo career. In both fields short sentences usually help the reader with focus for the topic. Comprehension, not art, is job one.
@Grumpy realist:
Some years ago, in OH, I voted on an initiative. The ballot wording was obviously written by a committee, some of which’s members desired confusion. I forget if it was a sextuple negative or just quintuple. I don’t even recall the issue, but the phrasing was along the lines of “Repeal the bill that revoked the provision that cancelled …” If the Enquirer hadn’t had a guide, I’d have been fifteen minutes trying to parse it.
I love that this sort of thing is common, but we have courts that pretend the law is some holy writ and truth can be found by parsing it. “Originalism” seems to ignore the realities of a bunch of guys trying to hammer out compromises so they could finish the first draft of non-monarchial democracy and get the hell out of that stuffy room and back to their jobs and families.
@de stijl:
Nice to hear from you again.
I wonder, Monala, how his fluffers explain this one. If it’s “a joke” I cannot imagine who it is supposed to be funny for.
@gVOR10: yah; I’ve read a lot of statutes that have so many negations and dependent clauses that you have to analyze them with a sentence diagram and a logic table. Not kidding. Had to do that for Hatch-Waxman.
(This is because the horse-trading on these bills goes on until 11:59 PM of the day they’re supposed to submit it and a whole bunch of dependent clauses get hastily crammed it with no editing.)
@Jay L Gischer:
Musk via Tesla undoubtedly helped mainstream EVs. He truly helped de-nerdify and zhuzh up electric vehicles for the general populace.
Henry Ford employed new, innovative techniques like assembly lines for complex machines in his factories. He employed thousands. Ford made cars many folks could afford. One could say he founded the widespread idea of automobile ownership and all that implies.
Henry Ford was a vocal anti-Semite and pro-Nazi. Notably reactionary even for the time.
I saw a cyber truck on the street last weekend. It looked like one of those stainless steel trash cans with the swingy opening, but on its side.
It looked like a drawing of a concept car from the mid 70s that never got made because the design was so simple and crap basic. It makes a DeLorean look rococo.
If brutalist architects made a vehicle. Don’t get me wrong – I like form follows function and simple designs. I even fancy a bit of brutalist architecture. The Tesla cyber truck looks like a four year old sketched it with a silver crayon as an APV battling a mecha-T Rex in a boss fight.
I laughed out loud at the sight of it. Of course the dude had a vanity plate. I was embarrassed for him.
Hey Michael, I see that José Andrés has opened a new restaurant in Las Vegas, Bazaar Mar. Have you tried it yet? We’re big fans of his DC restaurants, in addition to his amazing WCK charity.
@gVOR10: OK, apparently we’ve got a group of ex-Lutherans at OTB that had doubts (at the very least) through confirmation.
@Franklin:
Also at least one Anglican. lol
When someone suggested I might consider confirmation, I replied something like “Can I be a confirmed Anglican agnostic?”
I was at a Church of England Primary School at the time.
For those unfamiliar with English education system: a CoE school, especially a primary, is only marginally a religious thing, unlike other denominations.
It’s mainly one of those persistent English historical oddities.
On being told of my response, my father chuckled and said something along the lines of “Keeping up the family tradition.”
(Apparently there’s both apostate Catholics and Presbyterians in the family tree; us Farrens being an insubordinate bunch.)
@de stijl: am too lazy to track it down, but there’s at least one Cybertruck owner out there insisting that the CT is definitely not raccoon-proof…with pix of the damage.
@DrDaveT:
He has Bazaar Meats at Sahara but word is he’s pulling out. Place is reserved up every time we look at it. Sahara is one of our ‘neighborhood’ casinos. He has another in the Cosmo that’s on our list. A genuinely good man. Practically a unicorn.
I’m at the movies (Deadpool). The last time I was at a theater (Oppenheimer), an indictment dropped. Alas, I don’t expect similar good news this time.
But you never can tell…
@gVOR10:
Family history is that great grandfather was involved ( &/or responsible) for building a number of churches in rural ND. Years ago grandma visited a survivor building in Hatton.
And then I start thinking about the distances involved and speed of travel in mid-late 19th century, and my mind blanks.
@Flat Earth Luddite: We have an old wagon here on the ranch, it used to be the grocery store’s wagon. It boggles my mind how tough people were back then. I’m not gonna lie, it pisses me off when the electricity goes out or OTB goes down. These motherfuckers were delivering groceries IN A WAGON.
First world problems.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I do indeed hail from Whatcom County. Well-remembered, sir.
And yeah, what you’re saying fits: There was a club at Birch Bay for a few years that in summers had some acts in that were pretty well known: The Peter Green version of Fleetwood Mac, as the most famous. Also Merilee Rush and the Turnabouts.