”
Most of the crew are belowdecks snoozing
or have paddled off to some
lesser employment,
but we
few,
we faithful,
we are here.
“
On longboating
Reply
Monthly Archives: April 2008
A brief survey of unlikely deathbed regrets.
According to Google, here are some of things on or at or doing which people have claimed that no one on their deathbed ever said they wish they’d spent more time:
- on gurn
- with the Tories
- alone with my computer
- with my family, and less time building supercool high-tech robots to hurtle across the desert in a winner-takes-all race for million-dollar stakes
- watching TV
- hating Nominet
- dusting
- arm-wrestling with Gordon Brown
- in school
- cleaning
- on acting lessons
Along with that happy bouquet of negative assertions, there’s a truckload of the more canonical form to be found:
- at work
- at the office
- in the office
- at the factory
- on my business
But, honestly, nobody on their deathbed ever said “I wish I’d spent more time canvassing examples of the canonical form of the deathbed-wish-I’d-spent-more-time trope”.
(As inspired by the observation, by user drezdn in a metatalk thread of such exceptional size that I am refraining from linking to it out of politeness to you, the credulous reader, that “No one ever says “I wish I would have blogged more” on their death bed.”)
Language Log 2.0
After one too many rounds of server headaches, the folks over at Language Log have finally jumped to both new hardware and a new CMS, with date-forward content living at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll on a shiny WordPress install.
And while it’s certainly coincidence, I can’t help but note that they’re (for the moment, at least) using the same theme that my recent redesign was built around. I don’t care if it’s meaningless: I elect to be flattered and there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it.
I’m also pleased to see that Melvyn Quince is posting again. Give ‘em what for, Doc.
Emoticons and syntax?
And interesting question today on Ask Metafilter about “the grammatical relationship between emoticons and punctuation” — what’s the consensus on handling the insertion of a smiley into punctuated text, essentially.
Personally, I think the question of what an emoticon is — punctuation? a word/phrase? — is maybe not so simply answered at this point (and the varying answers in that thread seem to support my thought). Are there any analogues to the emoticon in pre-Internet English writing? Is this more or less virgin territory, or is there some history to work from?
I can think of, say, inserting a parenthetical exclamation point (!) as a sort of punctuation-as-mood-marker (and like wise a puzzled (?) marker), but I’m not sure that’s more than non-kissin’ cousins with the emoticon in terms of flexibility and expressive variety.
(Here’s another AskMe, from 2006, on emoticons and mood and which mentions the (!) thing in the first comment as it turns out.)
One of these days, I should do a roundup of emoticon use on Metafilter in general.
I Dream of Laundrie
Just woke up from a I’m-still-kind-of-sick-apparently dream that our dirty laundry pile had somehow got crazily out of hand and was really difficult to wrangle into a stable tower (a tower!) that wouldn’t fall over or spread.
That may be a new record for most pointlessly stressful dream I’ve ever had. I’m feeling a bit better than I have been for the last couple days, but I never have ridiculous dreams like this when I’m 100% healthy. Ugh.