Booking Through Thursday

Suggested by Nithin:

I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

Don’t forget to leave a link to your actual response (so people don’t have to go searching for it) in the comments—or if you prefer, leave your answers in the comments themselves!

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos... do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–-if any-–do you have in your library?

I can't say exactly how many since I don't have all my books cataloged in LibraryThing yet.

Let's see... I have style guides, Struck & White and Chicago (yes, I bought the new edition as soon as it came out) as well as APA (required for grad school) and MLA.

Ten days left! Have you bought anyone books for Christmas? Planning to? What's on your wishlist?

There are a few book links this week. Here we go!

So I've got a job again. It's not much: I get here at 8:30, eat a croissant, then spend my day reading through legal documents so boring they could, um, enlarge a hole to a precise diameter with a cutting tool by means of rotation. Also, apparently, boring enough that I'm getting jokes out of the dictionary.

There are bonuses of course. Like, you know, getting paid. And replenishing my pen and scissor supply. Plus: I'm only working three days a week, which makes every Monday a MonWednesday, which in turn makes every Wednesday a WednesFriday, which in turn pleases me immensely. In fact, T.G.I.W.F.

Kudos to William Safire for his "On Language" column today, in which he writes, unequivocally, that "if the word torture, rooted in the Latin for 'twist,' means anything (and it means 'the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce'), then waterboarding is a means of torture."

Safire also pointedly ends his column with this quote from Darius Rejali, on why "waterboarding" has recently been coined to replace "water torture," the "water cure," and the "water treatment":
"There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding" — a word found as early as 1929 — "they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them."Most important, and most striking, however, is Safire's lede, in which the language maven, our most prominent popular word dissector, refuses to mince words:

I was tagged by Trish at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin?' for this meme which originated here:

As I read yet another book review of a memoir this weekend, my husband told me that I should write one. I said that my story would be much too short and rather boring so when I ran across the following book I decided it was just my speed. A six word memoir! Written by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, Not Quite What I was Expecting: Six Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure is a compilation based on the story that Hemingway once bet ten dollars that he could sum up his life in six words. His words were- For Sale: baby shoes, never worn. There’s a video on Amazon with examples from the book, it sounds like a fun read! I’d like to start a six word memoir meme and here are the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir

dirty triple (durt'-e trip'-uhl) noun. A triple-double in which one of the three "double" categories is blocked shots.

Usage example: Before he transformed into a creaky mummy, Dikembe Mutombo was a master of the dirty triple.

Word history: The term was coined by Basketbawful reader LooseChange. Here's what she had to say about it:

Made from golden lions and lightsabers.

The article below was originally printed on the Huffington Post.

WGA Strike Primer: The Endgame

by Robert J. Elisberg

In the beginning was the word - yet the word most heard these days in Hollywood is not about the beginning at all, but the end. What is the "endgame" to stop the strike? Ultimately, that's the only thing that matters. And with the AMPTP corporations negotiating instead with a

Although we here in Canada had Thanksgiving in October, I'd like to wish my American friends a Happy Thanksgiving. Love that Macy's parade!

Booking Through Thursday is a little different this week. First, it was posted on Monday and, second, it's hosted by someone else. So here it goes:

Connecting Words

I've been avoiding a few big-time classics for awhile, mainly because they are so long.

I've decided to buck up and read at least one of them, and, since I'm so bad at making decisions, I thought I'd leave it up to you. With that I bring you Reading Faceoff, Round One: Classics Edition. Voting ends in two days, so vote now! Feel free to comment to further explain your choice.

UPDATE: Voting is closed! I didn't mean to delete the poll, but I did and I guess life just sucks, doesn't it? Take my word for it: Anna Karenina won, with a whopping (not really whopping, but I like the word) 40% of the vote.

I don't expect to have finish it too too soon...procrastination is still my forte, and I've been putting this one off for years. So, expect a post on it...soonish.

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. ….Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u.

Today's lead editorial in the New York Times expressed perhaps justified concern about the Supreme Court's grant of cert. in a case involving the FCC's claimed power to apply sanctions with regard to what the Times calls "fleeting explitives." (Although I don't know why the Court is eager to review a case that the Second Circuit so clearly decided correctly, I'm not sure I can count to five with regard to votes favoring the FCC. Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia have both been very good on some free speech issues, and I see no particular reason to assume that they are catspaws for a censurous FCC. So maybe they took the case to send an even stronger message to the FCC censors. We'll find out next year.)

Unlike a certain proportion of my fellow countrymen, I'm not in the slightest bit anti-American.

Nevertheless, Americanisms entering the language do irk me somewhat (although I do confess to being guilty of overusing the word 'cool'), and as such the below ad for VW, spotted in that bastion of Britishness, The 'London' Times, did annoy me slightly.

Not the message it's trying to convey. Nope, no problems there. In fact, yes, Mr. VW, I am a little worried about fuel prices and I do often contemplate what new and ingenious ways may be emerging to slash my petrol costs.

But I have never, ever, in my entire life, called anything clever 'neat'. Unless I am referring to the laying of a table, or, going back a few years, my efforts at 'colouring in' at school. At the very least I have certainly never described, an admittedly admirable feat of engineering, neat.

Thanks Naida for tagging me!

The Rules
1. Write your own six word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag five more blogs with links
5. Remember to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Hmm, six words...: A Complex, Spiritual, Empathetic, Intellectual Being

Sorry but I couldn't come up with an illustration.

I'm tagging:
Lesley's Book Nook
Tiny Little Reading Room
Fond of Books
Blogging My Books
A Striped Armchair

When a poem is finished, you can't move anything around in it -- you can't substitute one word for another, you can't change a punctuation mark or a line division or anything sort of phrasing without diminishing the effect to some degree. So in other words, it's language brought to a kind of state of perfection. Obviously there is no such thing as perfection, but as close to it as possible. I think that's one of the tests. Most prose paragraphs you can move things around without diminishing the effects, but a poem--everything is in its place.
-- Ted Kooser --

Have a great Wednesday!

Is it possible there has been a massive shift in the zeitgeist? Last night I channel surfed to Hardball and got stuck there for a while. Tweety and Mrs. Alan Greenspan, of all people, were skating right up to the ultimate TV taboo -- not any of the seven words you can't say, but the one word you absolutely, positively, cannot apply to George W. Bush, and that is of course the L word.

In the greatest ice dance since Torvill and Dean, they showed clips of Chimpy chattering and then opined to the effect that "That just isn't true," or "It simply isn't credible," and even went so far as to tell us all the actual, real, valid, reliable, factual, concrete truth -- the stuff that happened, not the stuff that Republican politicians said happened. They still couldn't say the Simian-in-Chief was lying, that's still illegal, but even though they couldn't use the word, they wanted us to know what they were thinking.

Basketbawful reader Mithat Gurdal submitted the following picture, which proves once and for all that man love knows no boundaries, be they work or race-related...

Editor's note: Keep the man love coming, people. And I mean that purely in the "send me e-mail" sense of the word.

Funtastic extra: The word verification for this post? qqeeyr. Seriously.

I'm working with a colleague to analyze some focus groups he conducted in which people talk about their communication with their physicians. I'm working mostly with the ones that were conducted in Spanish, but that's largely beside the point for this post. I'll give you my English translation of the material. We had two groups consisting of people who had a college education, and two groups consisting of people with limited formal education. The moderator asked them to explain what the term "depression" means to them. Here are typical reponses from the smarty-pants people with ejumukashin:

It is a mental state caused by stress or a traumatic event. It is a state of hopelessness.

It’s a very complicated term, you have to know a bit [lit. the dregs] of psychology in order to understand what is happening to you. At first I thought that depression had a biological component but now I know that it has a social component.

To sleep many hours, not to want to get up, to use a lot of drugs, not to respond to the stimuli of daily life.

It is an electro-chemical change in the levels of the neurotransmitter.

The levels of serotonin are lacking, serotonin levels that the brain does not produce.

And here's the sort of thing the unschooled rabble had to say:

The book is entirely out of my hands now, but the pressure still hasn't lifted. Several times a night these last few nights I've woken in heavy sweats, desperatley wanting to change words I am no longer able to change. It is a terrifying thing to accept that the way I said things on particular days sometime at the end of last year are now set forever.

I woke up and lay in the dark at 3am last night trying to force myself to remember the words of the serenity prayer. I eventually remembered 'accept...', 'change...' and 'know the difference...' But I couldn't string the rest of it together or get any comfort from even the jist of it.

They are just words I keep telling myself, just, just words... But it hasn't been easy letting go of them.

In two days it will be National Novel Writing Month again and I encourage readers to participate if possible.

Last year was my first year in NaNoWriMo and I crossed the finish line with a couple of days to spare. Problem was that after 50,000 words, the novel I was working on wasn't close to finished. I had resolved to finish before moving on to other things, but the truth is I wrote myself into a corner and I can't figure out how to get the characters out. It is said that Tolkien took years of time away from writing Lord of the Rings while thinking of ways to get the Fellowship out of Moria, but in the time in between he invented like half a dozen languages. I don't think battling pixellated zombies is quite on the same level.

Melody from Melody's Reading Corner tagged me for this meme, which is to sum up your life in 6 words. I can't think of anything other than the following right now (and I know it is too tame!) :

Reading as much as I can

Now for the rules:

Stars: ***1/2I read this book for the Four-Legged Friends and In Their Shoes challenges.

This book wasn’t exactly what I was imagining it to be. With a title of Dog Years and a genre of memoir, it was obvious it would be about someone’s life with dogs. However it’s more than that. It delves into the author’s life more than the average memoir and in fact, it’s labelled with a biography sticker at my library. The first 4 chapters I found quite dry and hard to follow. The antedotes about the dogs were interesting but he seemed to ramble on about his life and his view of life. From chapter 5 on however it got better. The stories got more interesting and I could tell there was a shift in style so that the story flowed easier.

I'm not exactly an early adopter, but the Amazon Kindle sounds like an idea whose time has come to me. Amazon's version of the e-book has one non-hardware feature that is appealing: there's no monthly fee or service contract. Books downloaded through Amazon's service are competitively priced--bestsellers at $9.99 (with older books presumably cheaper, one would hope). Popular periodicals such as Newsweek or the Wall Street Journal would also be available.

With the Scripps National Spelling Bee underway I find it fitting to do a post on this.

First off I want to clarify this, I love watching the spelling bee, it is very interesting and I am always amazed at how smart these kids are.
But really now, I mean this is really pathetic. We have these kids studying and learning to spell these insane words all day.

Many of these kids spend all day couped up inside their homes studying to be the best and the smartest, I mean come on now. We even have spell check now (and boy I am glad we do)! So why can't they use it?

Well we obviously need to have some sense of how to spell words, but if I can make it by then these kids can too. There is no need for these kids to spend their whole lives studying these words the majority of America can't even pronounce.

The business and financial punditocracy is terrified of ever uttering the word "recession" because they think they'll get blamed for self-fulfilling prophecy if it happens. But now they are starting to utter it, in the required format "I don't think it will happen but it might," which means they do think it will happen. Some are even gloomier and are embedding the D word in breathy exhalations.

I watched the Red Sox-Dodgers game from Ft. Myers on ESPN today. It was an interesting game, as the Red Sox led most of the way. But of course in early spring training games, the stars disappeared after just a few innings, leaving the guys with what I call, the "football numbers." You know, the guys wearing numbers in the 80s and 90s who will be on their way to minor league camp soon.

The Red Sox were ahead 5-2 in the ninth, when we saw two Red Sox pitchers, who will probably only be in Fenway Park if they pay their way in someday, give up seven runs on two home runs to two guys on the Dodgers also wearing football numbers. Not exactly the dictionary definition of a tough loss.