Category: Blame it on the voices in my head–I do

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Pop Culture Is “Misunderedumacated”

Two simple examples:

Geographical “illiteracy”: time after time on “remodeling” or “house flip” shows, folks referring to a peninsula as an “island.” Sometimes, folks’ll refer to the same feature as both. Folks who have no concept of the difference between a peninsula and an island are illiterate.

N.B. “Material literacy“. . . ain’t. Literacy, that is. Having common, ordinary, everyday words in one’s (written or verbal) vocabulary and not knowing what those words mean? Yeh, “misunderedumacated.”

Here’s another very simple example, though just one of many in the long, long list of words people use without even knowing what they are saying: lay vs. lie:

“Lay” takes a direct object: one lays down a book. “Lie” takes a subject: I lie down on the sofa.

The (simple) past tense of “lay” is “laid.” The (simple) past tense of “lie” is “lay” or when “lie” is used in the sense of “wittingly utter a falsehood” the (simple) past tense is “lied.” At least the past participles are easier: lay?[has/had/have] laid; lie?[has/had/have] lain; lie (utter falsehood)?[has/had/have] lied. *heh*

Ain’t English fun?

If you ever have trouble remembering which to use–lay or lie–just remember: Bob Dylan got it wrong. “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed. . . ” would have had red pencil through each of the “lays” had he submitted it in an English class. . . if the teacher had been literate, that is. 😉

BTW, the “subject/object” issue raises its ugly head all over the place, but it’s especially glaring when people use the first person personal pronoun,”I,” in an objective position, when “me” is called for.

It’s just people who aren’t really literate showing their “misunderedumacation.”

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It’s the Little Things #3,485,326

I had to chuckle. While listening to a rendition of “Mitt hjerte alltid vanker” (a yootoob low quality recording, but still beautiful), I read a few of the comments. First one commented that “Norwegian is such a majestic language.”

OK, a wee tad amusing by itself, but the song was in. . . Danish. Close (very close), but no cigar. Amusing.

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The Trumpery’s Fav “Bible Verse”?

[Sidebar: it’s not just subliterate, lying politicians who make up “scripture.” I’ve known more than a few literate “preachers” who have done so wittingly.]

I hear that The Trumpery’s favorite verse from “Two Corinthians” actually starts out that way. Two Corinthians Two:Two (Trumpery Standard Version) “Two Corinthians walk into a bar. . . “

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Silly Hivemind Podpeople

Saw a question posed by a Talking Head Podperson:

“Are the Presidential Debates ‘Rigged’ Against Trump?”

*duh*

If they were real debates, then The Trumpery wouldn’t have an even vain hope against even the worst public speaker on the national stage, the Queenie Cacklepants Cylon (Worst? Why, its Human Emulation Module is so defective that every time it engages, the thing looks and sounds like a deranged Bonobo chimp wearing a defective shock collar, that’s how bad the thing is).

As it is, with Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind Talking Heads posing their agenda-driven questions (no doubt directly from the Hivemind’s daily download from the mothership orbiting Uranus–well, it’s as ‘kind and gentle’ a spin to put on the Hivemind’s monolithic narrative as any), all The Trumpery has to do to energize his base s show up and berate the Hivemind Podpeople for their biased approach.

Nah, what would REALLY stack the deck against The Trumpery would be if Gary Johnson were included in the show trial “debates.” THAT would chap his gizzard no end. Oh, and the Queenie Cacklepants Cylon? It’d need a LOT more oil on its disposal chute’s hinges to try to dump enough fecal matter (salvaged from banal politicians, concentrated and stored for use in its pronouncements) to make any impact at all.

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Urgent Need for Organ Donors

The Trumpery needs a brain. Anyone who has a brain to spare, please take note.

Meanwhile, The Queenie Cacklepants Cylon needs a new heart. It ate the heart of the little child it had sitting on its desk.

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Existential Questions

I ask people, “How am I?” because I want THEM to deal with an existential question that doesn’t intimately involve their own existence.

If someone asks me how I am, I tell them I don’t answer existential questions on days ending in “y”.

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No One of Any Significance. . .

If I ever tire of Phreddie P. Phineas Phocksphire Pharquhar, I think I would be happy to adopt “Nanny McPhee” as a sobriquet. . . although my Wonder Woman thinks “Manny McPhee” would be a bit less gender-bending. 😉

Thatisall.

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It’s the Size of the Fight in the Dog

As Peter Grant quoted when he posted this, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” ~ Mark Twain

BTW, I recommend Peter Grant’s sci-fi milfic/space opera books as HIGHLY appropriate for readers whose literacy reaches (legitimate) middle school levels, no matter what their ages. Sometimes a bit saccharine, but that’s better than destructively “gritty” in my book, especially for young readers. Think sci-fi milfic/space opera pretty much as written by Zane Grey. Or maybe less fantastic “Doc” Smith translated though a Zane Grey-ish filtering. *heh* (The more I think on that, the more Grant’s new Western series makes real sense.)

A big bonus is that Grant’s books seem to be very competently edited, so that readers are rarely led astray (and mistaught) by misused words, poor grammar, and punctuation errors. That’s just competent line editing. In addition, the content editing eliminates all (or almost all) of the plot bobbles so common to many books published nowadays, even (sometimes especially!) from big publishing houses. This is important, IMO, since reading engaging stories with good morals and ethics that are WELL-WRITTEN can help readers just pick up all these good things along the way.

Of course, unless a book is exceptionally well-written (and by that I mean of stellar class, worthy of survival to become an enduring classic such as “Pilgrim’s Progress”), didacticism can be a killer. No, just well-written (and competently edited) stories that have moral, ethical characters facing conflicts and choosing wisely, and therefore teach good lessons without having to stop and pound lessons into the reader.

Of course, there are competently-written books whose protagonists are bad examples for readers to emulate. I despise that sort of crap.

Poorly-written books that either have protagonists who are “good” examples or protagonists who bad examples are both to be condemned as simply poorly-written books. I find both to be anathema.

And then there are the kinds of books thatb Holly Lisle has correctly classified as “suckitudinous fiction.” Technically well-written but worthless “lit-ra-chure” such as Fitzgerald is celebrated (by self-made moral morons) for having written. Of them I can only say, “Gagamaggot.”

Peter grant’s fiction is all, as far as I have read in his sci-fi milfic/space opera (I have not yet read his new Western novel), light, entertaining, sometimes saccharine (to the point of nearly Goody Two-shoes saccharine), well-written fluff that is highly appropriate for YA readers and engaging even for folks nostalgic for an earlier ethos in sci-fi, where a more elevated moral/ethical behavior would be expected.

Here’s Peter Grant’s Amazon page.

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The Joys of Good Grammar

The joys of good grammar include clearer communication, but also include the “joy” of sometimes making an otherwise enjoyable set of lyrics grating to the ear. *heh* For example, John Jacob Niles should be retroactively slapped upside the head for,

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.
For poor on’ry people like you and like I…
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

No, “like you and like I” has the pronouns in the objective case position, not subjective case. The often made lame excuse of adding a mental “are” is no better than correcting it to “like you and like me.” In fact, it’s worse, apart from “like you and like me” ruining Niles’s rhyme scheme.

It’s unfortunate that Niles died in 1980, because he really deserves a dope slap for this abomination. I’d offer remediation for this stanza, but then I’d have to fix the rhyme schemes of the other two verses to match, and I’m not quite sure it’d be worth the effort. Of course, that would afford the opportunity to fix the really awkward last line in the second stanza. . .

Nah. I’ll just pass on the whole thing.