InutilityEDITORIAL: DROPPINGS FROM PIGASUS
Professor Grammaticus's debut created a sensation among Provincialists and industry critics, so without dropping a vowl, we have RUSHED him back to your screen with another masterful medley of malapropisms; another flush of semicolonic solecismae; another round of ripping righteous writing rants. Let grammar flourish and syntax thrive!
1. Quit mixing up “masterful” with “masterly,” you booby! The first means “overbearing in a macho way (think John Wayne),” the second “with the evident skills of a master,” or “really cool work, Dude!” Don’t blink!
2. Watch out when using exotic punctuation marks like semi-colons (;) and colons (:). If you don’t know what they are for, they’re like land-mines or hand grenades! The semi-colon is a full stop (period = . ), whimsically inserted into the middle of a sentence (God only knows why), which means that on either side of it must be clauses that equal complete sentences, NONE OF YOUR DAMNED OLD SENTENCE FRAGMENTS, OK? Got that straight? (George Orwell once rushed from his seamy flat, shouting, “I’ve written a book [the novel Burmese Days] without using a single semi-colon!” The publisher’s editors, of course, turned a whole batch of them loose into the text like ferrets in a rabbit warren.) The best injunction about the semi-colon is “pray you avoid it, it out-Herods Harrods.” The colon is even weirder: it introduces a discrete idea or separate thought, or a list of ideas (whose clauses, if whole sentences, may be set off by semi-colons). Got all that? Confused? Then don’t touch the damn things! You don’t need them unless you are a black-belt prosewriter, see?
3. Never let me catch you using bangs or shrieks—exclamation points (!)—or italics for emphasis, either, Buster! No ALL-CAPS or other typographical tomfoolery. You haven’t earned the .007 license yet, and don’t even think about putting anything but direct dialogue or certain titles in any kind of quotes (“) or (‘)! And just what do you think single-quote marks are for, anyhow? If you’re some kind of odd European you might have marks like << and >> or – to introduce dialogue, but don’t dream that you’re James Joyce or Herman Hesse, bud! Don’t talk back, either . . .
4. Oxymorons and idioms, OR Oxy Morons and Idiots: a) Beware of unconscious self-contradictions, sometimes pretentiously called “oxymorons,” i.e., jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, Fox news, etc.; b) Try like hecko to use idioms correctly, e.g., “home in,” NOT EVER “hone in” (only knives, axes, etc., are honed), and you Kiwis down there in New Zealand quit saying “up and up,” when you mean “getting better”—up and up means “on the level” or “kosher.” Then the other day I heard someone mix up “spirituality” and “spiritualism.” On television. Without reprimand. And whoever said that hicked-out dullards shouldn’t be able to distinguish between “cavalry” and “calvary”? Or even know they are two different words? While I’m here, I’m also ticked that idioms are vanishing into the Great Cesspool of Cultural Illiteracy at a rate of knots, so people don’t even know where (say) “lock, stock and barrel” came from and think it has something to do with Wall Street. No wonder they don’t know how to use it!
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WEWWWWWWWW! YOWZA! YOWZA! That Saxomaniac's a chockablocka burnin' stuff, ain't he, ladies & gentlemen? Man, when I seen that old man come through the door with a Seeing Eye babe on each arm, I'm like, "Must be gravy day down at SSA." Few weeks later he's Dumbledorf on testosteroon around here, the unblinking eye that never blinks, got TWO babes on both arms, I'm sprinkling talcum powder in my hair and asking where summa that magic at. Him and me, we both got the Gift, right? Maybe I ain't using mine right. And now a word from our sponsor, ladies & gentlemen.
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