today, i was reading a lovely book i am required to read for my creative writing class while making lunch, and enjoying myself quite thoroughly. (and it really is lovely. "a book about punctuation?" you say. "lovely? ha!" to which i respond: "for someone who must constantly refrain from painting huge commas on the sides of buses, or from telling her friend's sister that the cute painted sign on their wall that says (i'll change the name for anonymity purposes) 'The Johnson's' heinously blasphemes against the proper use of the apostrophe, or from marking out with a giant red sharpie the incorrect use of a semi-colon on the subtitle of a rented textbook......... this little english book about punctuation is lovely. besides, british wit veritably oozes off the pages into my hands.") anyway. as i was merrily reading along, silently thanking the heavens that at least one woman in the world understands the internal torment i experience when i think about the fate of the english language, i came across this sentence.
"There will be those, for example, [speaking about the role of taste in punctuation] who insist that the Oxford comma is an abomination (the second comma in "ham, eggs, and chips"), whereas others are unmoved by the Oxford comma but incensed by the trend towards under-hyphenation -- which the Oxford comma people have quite possibly never even noticed."
yeah, Oxford comma.
i finally know what it is now.
and so now i have been humming vampire weekend all afternoon, reveling in the realization that the bands i listen to are smart.
one more thing. this blog has been taking up my entire day: i now have a folder on my computer with 50+ pictures of all the places i want to go. visit it, you will be totally blown away.
one more thing. this blog has been taking up my entire day: i now have a folder on my computer with 50+ pictures of all the places i want to go. visit it, you will be totally blown away.
oxford comma -- vampire weekend
an interlude -- the decemberists
mykonos -- fleet foxes
So this explains your status update. Frankly, I'm a little insulted that my clever, witty, and even somewhat British comment—which I was quite proud of—didn't make it into your post. (Not really, I just wanted to practice my em dashes [which are kind of similar to hyphens] and Oxford commas. I've always been partial to Oxford commas.)
ReplyDeleteP.S. Writing such a nice comment seems somewhat cheapened by the fact that I was forced to type "fxrcan" for your CAPTCHA box. Somehow it seems like a portmanteau of an obscenity and a racial slur, expressed in text abbreviation.
comments like that are why we keep you around, andrew.
ReplyDelete(using the "royal we" there.)
and thank you, i've always been a fan of them myself. but i never knew they had a specific name until today.