A little bit of genius

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." -Albert Einstein

Whoever said genius and psychosis are mutually exclusive was severely mistaken. Au contraire!

Last night (on the recommendation of my awesome roommate) I watched (most of) The Cruise, a documentary about a bus tour guide in New York City. It's over a decade old but the images and feelings evoked are timeless... I highly recommend it to any lover of New York or simply poetry, for that matter.

Not only did it serve to reinvigorate my romance with this city, but it also reaffirmed my love affair with language. And, above all, it made me once again appreciate madness as a complement (and a perhaps necessary one, at that) to brilliance.

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Back in the Geek Saddle

After a year-long hiatus (in which, I must admit, I accomplished who knows what, other than moving to Brooklyn and cutting bangs) I have decided to return to the blogosphere.

This morning my boss' boss asked me the difference between affect and effect. Of course, I remembered the blog post I penned on that very subject almost two years ago, realized that what my life has been lacking lately is my daily dose of grammatical correctness, and, alas, here I am.

Baller of the Day

For those of you that missed all the fun on Friday, please enjoy this IHeartMusic blog post which includes a conversation between me and my mom discussing the word "baller."

My mom was a bit embarrassed at having our conversation published for the world to see, but she got over it really quickly when I surprised her over the weekend by showing up unannounced in Houston for Mother's Day.

It was a great, albeit whirlwind weekend, and even after her initial chagrin at my incessant use of the word "baller" - which I use in the Urban Dictionary form of the word, although to my mother, it means something else entirely - she admitted that I am, indeed, a baller.

Here's a shot of the fam at my favorite Mexican restaurant Saturday night:

Over My Head

I don't profess to be an expert in any field. One particular realm where I'm really in the dark, though, is Wall Street. (Not quite as in the dark, thankfully, as one of my very good friends who will remain unnamed, who actually told me three days ago that he never knew Wall Street was actually, in fact a street).

This blurb in The Onion made me smile, because sometimes even the most meticulous reading of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times yields nothing more than sheer frustration.

JPMorgan Chase Acquires Bear Stearns In Tedious-To-Read News Article

NEW YORK—As a volatile market reacts to news of the Bear Stearns fire-sale deal with a surge in stock prices but reduced bond yield, officers...

Check out the full text - it's hilarious.

A Time For Everything

Busy Bee. I know. I am guilty of neglecting my blog as of late. My apologies. I'm trying to figure out a better way to balance my schedule, but time management has never been my strong suit. It doesn't help that we recently lost an hour so as to save daylight. And on that note...

It's not "Daylight Savings Time," people, it's "Daylight Saving Time."

My Mom inquired as to why we couldn't just call it Daylight Savings Time. Most people do just that, anyway. (Much to my chagrin, of course. It's almost as bad as people saying they shop at "Nordstrom's." Check it twice. It's Nordstrom. But, as usual, I digress.)

I had to think for a moment on how best to explain why it's saving time and not savings time. What follows is the explanation I gave to her.

Savings is a noun, perhaps most commonly used when referring to money, as in "life savings." Saving, however, is a verb in gerund (-ing) form, which can, at times, represent a noun. For example, in the sentence, "I like shopping," shopping is a gerund in noun form, where shopping represents an activity. (You could not say "I like shop," because shop is a verb. "I like to shop," however, works because the infinitive form to shop is also representative of a noun in this case. But this is getting confusing.

Basically, Daylight Saving Time means that daylight is being saved, and so saving is a verb. The word "save" makes it tricky because of its aforementioned alternate definition - as a noun referring to monetary savings. If it was time to go shopping though, you would not say "It's shoppings time!" You would say "It's time to go shopping," or, "It's shopping time," where shopping is a verb.

In any case, I love that it stays lighter later. I didn't however, love springing forward. I hardly get enough sleep as it is.

A Subtle Stroke of Linguistic Genius

Every so often something strikes me. The following article does just that. It's from last week's New Yorker. Try to catch its intrinsic brilliance.

Say It All in Six Words
by Lizzie Widdicombe
February 25, 2008

Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then—why shouldn’t it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story. That’s a new book’s premise, anyway. "Not Quite What I Was Planning." A compilation of teeny tiny memoirs. The forebear, it’s assumed, is Hemingway. (Legend: he wrote a miniature masterpiece. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Slightly sappy, but a decent sixer.)

The book’s originator: SMITH online magazine. It started as a reader contest: Your life story in six words. The magazine was flooded with entries. Five hundred-plus submissions per day. That’s two, three words a minute. “We almost crashed,” an editor said. Memoirs from plumbers and a dominatrix (“Fix a toilet, get paid crap”; “Woman Seeks Men—High Pain Threshold”). The editors have culled the best. And, happily, spliced in celebrity autobiographies: “Canada freezing. Gotham beckons. Hello, Si!” “Well, I thought it was funny.” “Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs.” (Graydon Carter, Stephen Colbert, Aimee Mann.) Mario Batali makes a memorable appearance: “Brought it to a boil, often.” So does Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia: “Yes, you can edit this biography.” Still, there are not nearly enough. Where’s Eli Manning, and Katie Couric? (“Little brother; big game; last laugh”? “Morning girl goes serious at night”?) And what of the Presidential candidates? (“From Ill.; met Bill; iron will.”) Something from Obama would be nice: “Hope is stronger than dope, kids!” A Canadian minister has done Jesus’: “God called; Mother listened; I responded.” Quieter lives can be condensed, too. The editors offer a few guidelines. “Try not to think too hard.” That’s from SMITH’s editor, Larry Smith. It’s impossible, of course, to follow. There’s the temptation to be ironic: “Born in California. Then nothing happened.” Or to blurt out something angry: “Everyone who loved me is dead.” “Try to use specifics,” Smith added. (“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.”) That doesn’t rule out dazzling nonsense. “Eat mutate aura amateur auteur true” (Jonathan Lethem’s nesting-doll-like memoir). Wistful recollections work; so does repetition: “Canoe guide, only got lost once.” “Birth, childhood, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence . . .” You could spend a lifetime brainstorming.

The book party: Housing Works, downtown. Cookies and beer on a table. Sticky notes and markers up front: “Write your memoir on your nametag!” In back, Alex Cummings, twenty-six (“Arab hillbilly goes to New York”). He’s Egyptian, born in West Virginia. He’d come with his wife, Saira. She did not wear a nametag: “It’s hard to summarize your life.” Nearby was the author Maryrose Wood (“Divorced! Thank God for Internet personals”). She reminisced about a Sondheim show. She had been a chorus girl. She sang a lyric about divorces. “My career has come full circle.” Next, Justin Taylor—reddish hair, beard (“Former child star seeks love, employment”). A onetime child model in Miami. He’d posed for German fashion magazines. “You wouldn’t know, looking at me.” The writer David Rakoff was there. He wasn’t wearing a nametag, either. “I’m not really a nametag guy.” He said he liked his memoir: “Love New York; Hate Self (Equally).” It was similar to his books. “The same sort of glib persona.”

Julie Goss had driven from D.C. (“Inside suburban mom beats urban heart”). She was talking to Anthony Ramirez—a Metro reporter at the Times. He had submitted a memoir, too. The SMITH editors hadn’t used it. Ramirez said his feelings were hurt: “I desperately wanted to get in.” There was Summer Grimes, twenty-five. She’s a hairdresser in St. Paul. She had written the book’s title. It took “two minutes,” she explained. She had forgotten all about it. Then SMITH sent her an e-mail: “Your contest entry has been chosen.” She thought it was a scam. Then she saw the book—Amazon. She answered the next SMITH e-mail. They told her about the party. They sent a free book, too. Grimes opened it to her memoir: “Not quite what I was planning . . .” She wasn’t sure about the ellipsis: “Now I’m totally second-guessing myself.”

Did you catch the smart sentences? I'm a nerd through and through. This piece made me happy.

So what's your six word memoir?

Grin and Bear It

I was recently asked by a co-worker the difference between bear and bare. We all know the noun form of the word bear, which, of course, refers to a particular grizzly mammal.

However, the word bear can also be used as a verb, and according to dictionary.com, has a variety of specific meanings. They range from "to hold up" (as in bear the weight of) to "to bring forth" or "give birth to" (as in bear a child). Bear is also used in such common phrases as "grin and bear it," "bear the sight of," "bear with me" - and in these cases, bear serves as a request for patience, and comes from the word forbearance (which means "patience").

Bare, however, has a very different meaning. The adjective form means "naked," while the verb form of the word means "to reveal."

In a characteristically funny post on Brian's Errors, the wordsmith writes:

The confusion between this latter verb and 'bear' creates many unintentionally amusing sentences; so if you want to entertain your readers while convincing them that you are a dolt, by all means mix them up. 'Bear with me,' the standard expression, is a request for forbearance or patience. 'Bare with me' would be an invitation to undress.

The moral of the story, then? Avoid the use of confusing homophones if you can't bear to take the time and double check their meanings.