Fabulous!

This I must credit to Grammar Puss for bringing to my attention:

zeug·ma n.

1. A construction in which a single word, especially a verb or an adjective, is applied to two or more nouns when its sense is appropriate to only one of them or to both in different ways, as in He took my advice and my wallet.
2. Syllepsis.

This is what I love about language: there's always something new to discover.

Oh, Grammar Puss, I feel like a neophyte! Back to the style manuals I go.

Practicing Inversions

This afternoon, I sold some clothes. While waiting my turn in the sellers' line, I overheard the two saleswomen talking about Sylvia Plath, whom I've never actually read. I should pick up the "Bell Jar", I thought. Isn't it tragic that as an English major, Plath's death-by-oven and obsession with pie-making are all I know of her, and even then, as information secondhand?

Too many things on my to-read list. Admittedly, Moby Dick has been sitting on my shelf since the eighth grade. "It was my favorite book," my uncle told me. I've never thought of selling it or even giving it away, because I will read it, maybe soon. Someone's favorite book is not to be taken lightly. At the time, it may just have seemed too hefty a read.

Lately, life has seemed like tackling a whale. Something monstrous and elusive and untamed, it seems. Getting through writing, slogging through the mire of rough drafts and stories whose voices or plots seem a bit off, has been a bit of a rough sea. I'm a peg-legged Ahab cursing the great beast. Consumed by vendetta, I can't see straight, don't know west from east, north from south. The story, the words, the text, the time, they're circling, a vortex. They're circling, like vultures I'd say - but that'd be going from ocean to desert in one paragraph.

How Jonah got out, I can't recall.

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate my last remark
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark
What did they do just when everything looked so dark?

(Man, they said "We'd better accentuate the positive")
("Eliminate the negative")
("And latch on to the affirmative")
Don't mess with Mister In-Between (No!)
Don't mess with Mister In-Between...

For some reason, I could've sworn the word "pejorative" was in there, but then I looked it up and that means just the opposite of the gist of the song. Was it "let go of the pejorative", perhaps?

Note: Johnny Mercer's lyrics were not inversions, but my sentences, for the most part, were.

Discovery, even after years of diagramming

"The joining of ideas in compound structures--placing them side by side, especially without connectors--is somtimes called parataxis."

~from Artful Sentences, by Virginia Tufte

e.g.

They snipped the ribbon in 1915, they popped the cork, Miami beach was born.
~Norman Mailer

Isn't that wonderful? There's a name for that!

*

Currently taking a class that focuses not just on grammar but how language affects writing, specifically prose, specifically fiction. Our first session was yesterday, it breathed a bit of life back into me, it made me sad it would be only four weeks.

Hey, that was parataxis!

Wonderful.

This is why I started this blog.