The following blog post is now required reading for all my students. The comments, in particular.
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1. First, a question. What is a blog?
Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
An archive of older articles.
A way for…
Greetings from sopping wet Calgary, where thunderstorms and local flooding delayed my arrival until after midnight (2 am my time), which really put a damper on the 8am talks. I had meant to schedule some book-related posts to appear here while I'm gone, but I'm an idiot, and didn't select "…
While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word:
As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used…
I spend a lot of my free time reading, one result of which is a long list of rhetorical pet peeves. Little phrases and expressions that, for me at least, immediately make the writer look like an amateur.
Starting a sentence with “Uhm” or “Hmmmm,” for example. This is an especially common one…
Word!
Creationist agenda? Fundamentalist agenda? AIG agenda? Discovery Institute agenda? Right-to-life agenda?
My only objection to the word is that most people use the plural when they actually mean agendum.
Crikey! I LOLed my way through the whole thing! ROTFLMAO, in fact, most of the time! All of my favorites are there! "going forward" "synergy" . When I worked for an insurance company (don't ask: it was horrible beyond my wildest imaginings)we used to play Bullshit Bingo in company meetings. Our playing cards had words like these in the spaces, and the object was to mark off each word as it was used by the speaker. We were supposed to stand up and shout "bullshit" if we managed to get a row filled before the end of the meeting, but I don't remember that anyone actually had the nerve to do this. There were plenty of suppressed snorts to be heard, though. Great use of otherwise wasted life force!
What, the Christianistists don't have an agenda? Or agendas ("agendae" ha ha)?
How about the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy? Don't they have an agenda to restore the aristocracy? (Trick question; already done.)
One can only ponder how they didn't end up picking this use of the word one.
About twenty years ago I worked for a fortune-500 company (okay, it was ALCOA). I was not an executive, but got to write up a lot of memoranda, as well as standard operating procedures for the department I was in. I would consistently use phrases similar to those mentioned. It was not because I, the author, was an idiot, but because the audience, the highly-paid executives, were thought by me to be idiots. Guess what: I was right.
I would pad out paragraphs with utter bullshit and buzzwords. I actually found it comical. And the executives? They ate it up. They loved it! And they were very serious about it.
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