New Word Thursday: borstal

By the end of the nineteenth century, many people were beginning to take a closer look at the ethics and repercussions of child labor. They started to think that maybe children shouldn't be expected work like grown-ups.

The recognition that children and adults should be treated differently extended to other areas, too, including the prison system. At the end of the 1800s in the United Kingdom, authorities in Her Majesty's Prison Service thought that perhaps juvenile delinquents ought to be separated from the adult prison population and given a better chance to rehabilitate.

The Borg Download a Thesaurus App

Time Flies When You're Having a Breakdown

Did you miss me?

Yes, my plan to celebrate National Poetry Month with daily poetry readings fell through. And yes, on top of that, I haven't posted in two weeks.

And yes, I went to the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) and haven't even blogged about that yet. But I have a good excuse: I took a new job.

Jack Frost Gets In One Last Read before Spring

Ten Great Things about the End of the World

Thinking about the apocalypse can be scary. The end of all of one's hopes and plans in some great (and possibly painful) conflagration is enough to give anyone nightmares. But the end of the world isn't all bad. Here are ten things you can actually look forward to after the planet is destroyed/the universe ceases to exist/everyone else is raptured:

You Must Be Mistooken

I had never heard of someone using tooken instead of taken until about a month ago, when a friend of mine complained about a coworker who consistently uses this "word." Now, he's on his last nerve. He might go postal.

I can see the headline now: Office Shooken by Tooken Massacre.

A Visual Three-Word Wednesday

Today's three words for Three-Word Wednesday are cling, murmur, and taken. It seems like all I've been doing lately is writing and copy editing, so today I thought I would do something different. Which means that all you're really going to get from me are the three words themselves. Here they are:

Hey Look! An Infographic!

No real intro here...I just wanted to make an infographic. Here it is:

SOPA/PIPA

My contribution to the SOPA/PIPA protest. Feel free to use this image as you please.

Coming Clean about My Addiction

I think I might have a problem. An addiction. Maybe even a sickness.

Last weekend, I took my two sons to lovely Camp Collum in Frankfort, Indiana. It's a beautiful place to camp, with lots of woods and paths, playgrounds, fire rings, a building for large gatherings, available showers, and even, in the middle of a large, open, wild-grown field, a smallish observatory. It really is a great place.

Communication Breakdown — Automobile Edition

No, I'm not going to rant about how horribly designed the tire pressure light on the dashboard is. (It really is, though. When it came on in my car, I had to go online to find out what it meant.)

But I do want to share with you two little communication-related nuggets of joy that I saw from my car.

First, on the way home from work today: In the rearview mirror, I saw the woman in the car behind me make air quotes with her free hand while she was talking on her cell phone.

Think about that: Air quotes, while she's talking on the phone. And by "free hand," I mean the hand that wasn't holding the phone — the one controlling the steering wheel.

People sometimes get lost in their own world when they're on their cell phones.

Second: If you have a sense of humor anything like mine, these signs, outside Fazoli's, might be the funniest signs in Indiana:

Books, Movies, and the Library

I went to the public library today to work on this Monday's post.* Before I left, I took a closer look at the "decorations" adorning the library walls. There were a few, smaller posters of the "READ @ your local library" variety, but the largest posters, the ones demanding the most attention, were movie posters. I found this sad.

I grant you that the posters weren't entirely out of place in a library. They mostly advertised either movies adapted from well-known books (Last of the Mohicans, Charlotte's Web, Laurence Fishburne's Othello, and the ubiquitous Harry Potter) or movies about writers and writing (Finding Neverland). But even those smaller, less-emphasized READ posters featured well-known actors.

Although it's nice to know that every single actor in the Twilight movies supports local libraries, it still struck me as sad and wrong that a library -- an institution indelibly linked with books -- had to resort to marketing its wares with icons from an entirely different medium.

That isn't how it should be. People shouldn't look at a book as a thing that might lead to a good movie, or to look to Hollywood to tell us what books are worth reading. We shouldn't be using icons of movies -- a passive activity -- to promote the value of books and of the idea of reading, which requires active participation. It's too incongruous. It sends the wrong message.

We don't look to professional musicians to get us excited about watching movies. We don't go to art museums to find out about good music. Why, then, do we rely on Hollywood to point us toward literature? Why shouldn't we instead look to the icons of literature to remind us of the joy of reading?

Were I a graphic artist, correcting this mismatch would be a great cause for me to pursue. If I had the skills and the equipment, I could create "movie posters" for classic works of literature and do what I could to get them in public libraries, perhaps donating two or three for every one I sold.

And these wouldn't just be poster-sized versions of front cover art. They would get the full treatment: tag lines, blurbs from other authors, starred literary views, and recognition of awards -- anything that drives home the joy, excitement, and importance of the work and of reading in general and places good books on par with good movies.

Because we, the readers and writers, know that books are far superior to movies.

I could do all this, of course, only if I had the skills, the time, and the equipment, which I don't. I might, though, from time to time, try to play around with the idea here in purely digital form. I encourage you to do the same (to be safe, stick with books in the public domain) .

If someone picks up this idea and tries to run with it, or if someone is already doing this, please let me know here. I'd love to get involved.


* It turns out that I have a lot of editorial peeves that start with D. I might have to split next week's posting in twain.

Get 'em While They're Young

I don't want to seem cruel, even if I am. This is a little something I found at the local 4-H fair a few weeks back:

We have to get them while they're young, people! This isn't simply a spelling matter, either; it's a matter of pride in doing your work well. It's a matter of teaching children that they should try to do things the right way and not just be "good enough." Reach for perfection even though you know you'll never achieve it. And, by Jove, look your projects over one last time before you turn them in!

Of course, experience counts for something. We learn from our mistakes, and this is the type of mistake that some (not me!) would describe using the execrable phrase "teachable moment."

I hope someone in this child's family teases this boy just a little bit about '"Untied Methodist." It won't take much for it to sink in permanently, and this child will never make this mistake again.

(In the same way that I will never again misspell gardener, the word that landed me in second place in my fifth-grade spelling bee. Alas, Lloyd Suh, you will always hold a dark place in my memory!)

Nail Pattern Baldness

Being a Cenobite isn't all swimming pools, movie stars, and buckets of blood. While the unsuspecting curious suffer eternal pain at his hands, Pinhead is suffering from Nail Pattern Baldness.

(Is this too far to go for a silly pun? I don't care.)

God Love's Apostrophe's

This picture is too good on so many levels.

First, in the realm of grammar and usage, there's the overabundance of apostrophes. (In case you're wondering, there should be exactly one apostrophe on this sign, in "Jehovah's Witnesses.") Then there's the missing period in "P.K's." (When I was growing up, P.K. stood for "Preacher's Kid." Really?)

I wish I knew the context of this sign, because the list is so eclectic. I can see why a right-wing religious nut might wonder why athiests, agnostics, abortionists, racists, pagans, and adulterers love the devil, and I can see the politics behind hating feminists, liberals, environmentalists, and democrats. But really, drunkards? Effeminate men? Emos??? Sports nuts?!?!

I'm guessing that whoever made this sign made it a little too long and then had to brainstorm for things to fill it up with. Then again, I'm just a God-hating high fullutent sophisticated swine, so what do I know?

Follow this link to see some more great vintage over-the-top Christian propaganda.

ginormous

ginormous = gigantic + enormous

This might have been coined on an episode of Seinfeld, but I'm not entirely possible. Regardless, it has become so common that it is now appearing in dictionaries.

Sometimes a thing is bigger than just gigantic, and larger than just enormous. In that case, it's ginormous, like, uh, these:

Sheesh.

(sigh) [head-desk]

From FailBlog.org.

Today's Word: rebus, and a bonus word!

rebus: A riddle consisting of pictures of objects and symbols whose phonetic or alphabetic parts combine into a representation of a word or phrase. For example:

pilcrow: That double-stemmed backward P symbol used (most often in proofreading and editing) to indicate the end of a paragraph and the beginning of a new one. Or, more succinctly, the symbol in the above rebus. Wired magazine sometimes uses the pilcrow character (in a lighter color) to mark the end of a paragraph without actually breaking to a new line. A great space-saver.

One thing I don't understand about the pilcrow: Why doesn't the word appear in either Webster's New World Dictionary or Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary?

CSL, eh.

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