Archive for December, 2005

Inner Housewife, Strawfeminist, & other action figures

  Given my heritage, I’m willing to bet five bucks that I never had an inner housewife. If I did, she up and left years ago — see evidence above — maybe during the converted motel period, when I usually ate off of napkins to avoid doing dishes. (The water I covered them with started to stink after a week . . .

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Twain on grammar and brevity

From Ron Powers’ Mark Twain: A Life: Twain became a stickler for grammar. Perfect grammar was “the fourth dimension,” he said, constantly sought but never found. (“I know grammar by ear only, not by note,” he confessed.) He was appalled by the subjunctive: “It brings all our writers to shame.” He valued brevity…. “An average English word is four letters . . .

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