Some “useful” title’s in the quest for elegant usage

I found a whole lot of lovely websites devoted to English errors today. My favourites:

Common errors in English

EARTH, MOON
Soil is lower-case “earth.” And in most uses even the planet itself remains humbly in lower-case letters: “peace on earth.” But in astronomical contexts, the Earth comes into its own with a proud initial capital, and in science fiction it drops the introductory article and becomes “Earth,” just like Mars and Venus. A similar pattern applies to Earth’s satellite: “shine on, harvest moon,” but “from the Earth to the Moon.” Because other planets also have moons, it never loses its article.

The Apostrophe Protection Society

The Gallery Of “Misused” Quotation Marks

At Baylor University, home of the Baylor Bears and one or two Branch Davidians, I found a throw rug that alerted people to the following:

“You’re in” Bear Country

It baffles me to this day. Is it an obscure form of second person, like the vosotros tense? A pun on “urine” perhaps?

A random anthology of snappy writing

The first paragraph of Jonathan Yardley’s review in the Washington Post of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. I think the best first paragraph of a bad review ever.

Nobody bothered to think about it at the time, but from the moment the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, one thing was inevitable: Don DeLillo would write a novel about it. DeLillo, as has been noted before in this space, is the novelist as op-ed pundit, a ’60s recidivist who simply cannot resist the temptation to turn his novels into lectures or, upon occasion, harangues. So, of course, DeLillo simply had to write about Sept. 11, even though – as the results all too clearly demonstrate – he has nothing original or interesting to say about it.

From George Orwell’s essay Decline of the English Murder. One of his wives…

In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen’s flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room.

Jack Marx on Big Brother’s Emma. How I love “its various renovations and resulting tributaries”.

It’s astonishing that nobody has alerted Emma to the fact that the public has no general curiosity regarding the windmills of her mind, her ‘career’ as a match-flame celebrity, or her outlook regarding any issue but one: the fact that her father died while she was in the Big Brother house. This is the one thing about which Emma can speak and the world will listen. For the same reason that Neil Armstrong is not sought for his opinion on post-war Brazilian postage stamps, Emma Cornell is not required by the wider world if she does not wish to address that for which she is notable.

There are those who might argue that there is significant public interest in her body, its various renovations and resulting tributaries, but magazines like ZOO are the best arenas for such arguments, which are usually fought without words anyhow. When dealing with a newspaper, as a journalist or a subject of interview, it’s always worth remembering – if you can manage to wrap your head around such a bizarre idea – that there are readers besides yourself.

Martin Amis on Tony Blair

Then it was upstairs to the White Room for a podcast with Bob Geldof on Africa – Africa, a quarter-century compulsion of Bob’s and a solid 10-year enthusiasm of Tony’s. Then it was downstairs to the long table and a multinational convocation of bishops. Power has been described as a drug, an aphrodisiac, a “filthy venom” (in the words of Maxim Gorky); it is also, for much of the time, carcinogenically boring. Like all politicians, Tony has seven or eight kinds of smile. Smiles two and three would do for the bishops. When he is making the rounds of a crowded room, his smile, towards the end, is a rictus, and his eyes are as hard as jewels.

All the boredom is what the world doesn’t see – the hidden, humble toil of dosing and humouring, of giving face and jollying along. It is this that keeps politics halfway honest, and impedes the process that Bob Geldof alluded to, up in the White Room: “It’s a bit naff, isn’t it? What happened? The politicisation of celebrity or the celebritisation of politics?” And the question arose: what will Tony be when he quits? An ex-politician?

“No,” he said. “I’ll be a former celebrity.”

The rest here.

what is fickshon?

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I’ve got obsessed with Dave Egger’s approach to writing the Sundanese lost boys story, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. The idea that it sometimes takes a novel to tell a story very truthfully. He describes the process beautifully here.

And here’s an extract, if yer innerested. Oh, and a review/article thing in the Washington Post.