Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

From today's Carolyn Hax live chat: "Seems to me that if 'confusing' is an issue, then we're all living in the wrong millennium."

"When you start looking at a post about some foreign language's oddly specific word for something that you never thought there would be a specific word for, remember that English has a specific word for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'.

"English also has a single word for 'manipulation of electoral boundaries to reduce the influence of opposing political groups in future elections'."

-- Dancer, your Space Dad (algo_anthill), 2019-01-01

Seen on a recent Ask A Manager thread:

“I am OFF DUTY and if anyone wants to have a crisis they can do it THEMSELVES.” (From a post by someone using the handle HR Lady).

Sometimes joy just shows up naturally, but sometimes it’s hard work. Sometimes you have to chase down joy and club it repeatedly to subdue it and drag it back to your lair.

—Marissa Lingen

I'm rereading John McPhee's Assembling California. Near the end, he describes a visit to a ruined winery:

Outside was a bronze plaque mounted on a freestanding wall of unreinforced masonry. It bore the words "San Andreas Fault has been designated a Registered Natural Landmark."

(Comments are closed, because if you imagine I am going to risk the violence of a discussion involving plural inflection, linguistic variation, the Wall Street Journal, corpus linguistics, Latin, Eton, snobbery, soccer, Davids Beckham and Cameron, Prince William, FIFA, corruption, bribery, the BBC, Vladimir Putin, Wikileaks, the Russian mafia, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin, you must be absolutely out of your tiny mind. I will be spending the weekend hunkered down in hiding with Julian Assange at a secret location outside London, avoiding the many forces around the world who would like to hunt down Language Log writers and kill them for daring to speak out on irregular plurals and other morphological and syntactic controversies.) —Geoffrey K. Pullum, at Language Log

"I really think the best course is to act as if you are living in a functional world. Act as if the people around you are of course sane adults who own their choices. Often, they will surprise you by being just that." —marshlc, on the "Tell Me About It" discussion board

Social dancing is a form of courtship, and courtship is about two people getting together for the purpose of making pies. —Jon Carroll