Thoughts on Remembering; or, A Highly Scientific Study

Remember, remember

the fifth of November,

Gunpowder treason and plot . . . 

So I have to confess that I've never seen V for Vendetta. A few years back when I first got on Facebook (I was a late-ish adopter) I was surprised but nerdily pleased to see the number of Guy Fawkes references bandied about on November 5th. (You may have noticed by now that I'm American. I assume that these references are more plentiful among the Brits.)

I didn't realize that there had been a huge movie in which Guy Fawkes (or at least the mask version of him) and his associated rhyme featured prominently. I just thought a whole bunch of other people were book nerds and liked Agatha Christie. 

I mean, sure, I'd heard of the movie; I just had no idea what it was about except for Natalie Portman shaving her head.

I don't think I figured out the V for Vendetta/Guy Fawkes link until the next year when Guy Fawkes day rolled around, everyone started quoting rhymes, and a few people started complaining about people not knowing anything about history and just quoting dumb movies, blah blah blah. (The fact that people were throwing sheep at Guy Fawkes, or sheep dressed like Guy Fawkes, or foxes dressed like sheep, or whatever, clearly showed that Facebook also endorsed the Guy Fawkes thing, which made the likelihood of the book geek scenario shrink, collapse, and dwindle down into a bedpost nothing.)

It was slightly deflating to realize that, far from being a co-conspirator in geeky book type lore, I actually was simultaneously 1) not a member of the Kool Kids Klub and 2) being despised for appearing to belong to the Kool Kids Klub by members of the We Actually Know How To Spell Cool But We Are Soooooo Over It Kids Club. And nobody but me seemed to know or care that I knew the Guy Fawkes rhyme like twelve years before it was a cool/lame movie. 

Ah, the trials of being a book geek. 

All of which is to say, I have apparently discovered the limits of the popular memory. The populace at large only remembers things for six-and-a-bit-years. I can say this with some certainty after conducting a highly scientific test (i.e., looking at my Facebook feed and realizing that only one person mentioned anything about Guy Fawkes and then figuring out that the movie came out seven years ago). 

Obviously, V for Vendetta has now been forgotten; it has become lost, as my old Welsh professor would have said, in the mists of antiquity. 

That, you know, or people were too busy throwing tantrums having political discussions in preparation for tomorrow's election to bother with silly pop culture references. 

Pretty much awesome.

So today is a bit of a cop-out post (see earlier post about Little Guy's Cold of the Millenium; I'm getting the residual effects today), but this is amazing. Enjoy.

Anticipatory ache.

Note: This has been sitting in the draft folder for several months, as you'll see from tomorrow's post, but I decided I liked it enough not to give it up. So here it is.

I open my front door to take out the trash and 90ºF+52% humidity hits me like a hot water bottle to the face. I close my eyes and try not to gasp at the shock of it because I don't want that sticky warm air going into my lungs, and all of a sudden I'm no longer standing on my front porch in Tampa on a May afternoon.


It was one of those nights during reading days/finals week where you've gone past a late night and into a really early morning without realizing it, and I'd hit a wall in whatever project I was working on, so I decided to empty the nearly-overflowing trash (one of the many small household tasks that fell horribly by the wayside during finals weeks). It was mumble o'clock in the morning of a cold December, but the stupid cat (as opposed to the smart one, who was curled up in a pile of quilts) heard the call of the wild and bolted out the door as soon as I cracked it open to come back in from the dumpster.

There was a sheet of ice all over the road, since the guy the HOA was paying to plow the private roads of our little neighborhood had gone out of town a few days before, of course neglecting to designate a substitute, which departure heralded the first big snowstorm of the year. Not having been properly removed by a plow, the snow had frozen under the various tire tracks and footprints, making a treacherous path, especially if one was trying to move quickly to overtake a stupid cat who was trotting down one's small road towards the larger cross street at the end of the block.

And halfway down the road I looked up from muttering under my breath about selling certain felines to wandering groups of gypsies and saw the moon. It was large-ish, though not full, and unobscured by clouds. The moonlit air was crisp and sharp, making shadows in the hollows of the ice. There was no other sign of life on the street than myself and the soft movements of a black-and-white cat no smarter than your average brick, and my breath caught in my throat as lines sang through my head:

The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.  

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep. . . .*

I paused to take in the sheer otherworldly loveliness of the moment, the cold air searing my lungs and throat till I almost couldn't breathe from the ache and the awe. The stupid cat had also paused, not willing to be too far separated from his pack leader, and had looked back at me just as I returned my gaze to him. We stared at each other for a long moment, and then he turned back and continued to lope down the ice-covered street, leaving me to stumble behind in a chorus of small ice crackles. I did catch up with him at last in the middle of the cross-street—luckily no cars were near—and carried him back to the house, shutting the door firmly behind us to keep wayward cats indoors.

The slam of the door in my memory shakes me back to myself. I step back inside and lean against the wall, willing the ghost of that cold air to come and cleanse my lungs from the humidity, and try not to think about this most recently realized implication of our cross-country move.

I push it out of my mind until late that night, so late that it's nearly early morning. My husband is gently snoring next to me and my mind is insistently focused on my phone. Finally I give in and pull up the Wikipedia article on Tampa's climate.

Average winter temperature: 70's in the day, 50's at night.
Lowest ever recorded temperature: 18°F; December 13, 1962.
Only known blizzard: The Great Blizzard of 1899.

I know my husband, if he were looking at this, would start singing the Hallelujah chorus; after all, he's the one who always started a Florida job search on the first day of snow every year while we were in Utah (he refers to it as "the enemy from above"). But to my Utah-born-and-bred heart, this is a sickening blow.

My son will not know snow. The weather here will rarely even hit freezing, let alone go through any type of snow weather. I will never again have to chase a stupid cat down a street slick with ice at ungodly hours of the morning.

It's only May and I feel the anticipatory ache of missing winter start deep within my bones. I have months to look forward to the fact that I will not get a chance to sit looking out the window at falling snow with a mug of hot chocolate in my hands.

Into my mind flashes Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight." Not the words exactly, but the impression of it. Frost creeping along the ground, firelight, a sleeping child. My throat tightens as I think of my son's lost frosts, and I pull up the full text on my phone.

I'd forgotten that after the first stanza, this isn't a poem about winter so much as about letting your child grow up to love nature and run free in the sunlight and love the world.

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores . . .**

I think of what my husband says, that Florida is, more than anything else, so very ALIVE. The size of the spiders alone attests to that fact, but more than that it's hard to escape the life that abounds everywhere. Plants, trees, lizards, bugs, crazy birds I've only ever seen in aviaries. And I do want my son to experience amazing things.

But even amid the comforting thought that all is not lost; that even having given up the snow I have gained other good things for my son, I still sigh at the final stanza:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

And I lie in my bed in our apartment in Tampa, at dark-thirty of the morning, listening to the whir of the fan that we need to constantly run in order to keep ourselves cool even in the middle of a May night, and mourn in anticipation of our first missed snowfall, with miles to go before I sleep.

*Robert Frost, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."
**Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight."

Star in the making.

That move, at 1:15, is exactly what the Little Guy does whenever you try to put him in his carseat, or his booster chair, or your lap, or anywhere else that might threaten to confine Mr. You Can't Contain Me.



In 16 years maybe he'll be saying hi to Nigel for me. But for now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go purchase some duct tape. We'll see who can't be contained now.

Hey there.

I promise I still exist.

What's more, I even still have random thoughts that I'd like to continue sharing with y'all. (Assuming anyone still checks this blog. Because six months is a long time with no posts.)

(Actually, six months is just a long time in general and boy howdy, have the past six been a doozy for me and Shallow Man and the Little Guy.)

(And I'd love to start telling y'all about them instead of continuing on in parentheticals, and I fully intended to do so but the Little Guy has pulled out one of his truly amazing apocalyptic colds, to which the Cold of the Century seems a mere trifle, which in practical terms means a whole lotta facial tissue—some name-brand, some not—and something like ten total hours of sleep for me in the past two days, no more than two and a half of which were consecutive.)

Wahoo!

So I'm going to skip on the real stories for now and satisfy myself with reassuring you all, once again, that yes, I still exist.



Tune in later for exciting stories! Or, you know, random nonsense. 

Victory Lap!!!

Well, we made it! I didn't know, at the beginning of the month, if I'd be typing up my 30th post in as many days today, but it worked! Thanks to all of you who have stuck around during this undertaking.

I've realized that blogging more frequently is a lot of fun, and completely doable as long as I make time for it specifically. That being said, I've also realized that I don't necessarily have enough to say to keep blogging every day. Looking back at the last 30 days, I've done:

*A whole lot of cop-out posts, usually about how tired I am because of something the Little Guy has been up to. Don't get me wrong; I would much rather be tired and boring and have the Little Guy around than be energetic and witty and still childless. But as I have said before, being a good mommy sometimes means I have to be a bad (or at least uninteresting) blogger.

*A few posts about musicals you may not have heard of but should totally check out.

*A book review.

*A series about word nerd-age.

*Much linkage.

*A moderately successful De-Lurk Day (if you never did de-lurk, or if you thought you weren't included because you don't technically lurk, you are still more than welcome to comment now!).

*Maybe one or two actually interesting posts about random stuff from my brain.

Not too shabby, I suppose, but it also has lots of room for improvement, substance-wise. I'm thinking of some changes and organization for the blog which I hope to implement in the coming month. But I reserve the right to occasionally pop in with nothing more than a note saying I'm still a mommy, and I'm still alive. But I guess if you've made it this far with me, you'll probably understand that. And, as always, if you have any suggestions and/or requests for blog post topics, please let me know and I will do my best to oblige.

Thanks to all of you for reading, and for making me feel like there were people I shouldn't disappoint, which kept me posting here this month. I love knowing that people read this random stuff I write, and that some of you even enjoy it.

So I guess I'll see you in December!



My Amazon PayPhrase today was "Elliespen's Unstable Essays." I'm not sure what to think about that.

And, in case you didn't notice before, yes, this is DAY 30! Mission accomplished!

The Many Faces of Eileen

Earlier this month, I talked about She Loves Me, a musical based on a play that has been re-adapted many times, most of which I love.

Today's featured musical has a similar adaptation record. It was originally a set of short stories, then a book, then a play, and then a 1942 movie starring Rosalind Russell, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.


Rosalind Russell was so amazing in the role of aspiring writer Ruth Sherwood, who is overshadowed by her beautiful sister Eileen (an aspiring actress), that some other amazing people (see: Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein, among others) decided to adapt the play-turned-movie into a Broadway musical called "Wonderful Town," just so Roz could reprise her role. Which she did, although she wasn't much of a singer beforehand. She apparently learned to sing just fine, though, because she won the Tony award for her performance.

The musical was revived in 2003 with Donna Murphy as Ruth, and I adore this particular cast recording. I know there used to be a video on YouTube of Donna Murphy (who was also nominated for a Tony) singing my favorite song from the musical, "One Hundred Easy Ways," but I couldn't find it. So I'll give you this version instead:


Other great songs include "Ohio" (I've not caught up on this season of "Glee" but I hear that this was sung as a duet with Jane Lynch and Carol Burnett), "Conversation Piece" (especially the bit about re-reading Moby Dick), "Conga," "My Darlin' Eileen," and "It's Love."

The great thing about this story, though, is that it's actually a two-for-one musical deal. In 1955 the story was again revisited, this time as a movie musical called "My Sister Eileen," but with different songs than "Wonderful Town" and a slightly tweaked plot. It featured the wonderful Betty Garrett as Ruth, Janet Leigh as Ruth, and Jack Lemmon (who sings!!!), Tommy Rall and Bob Fosse all as suitors for the sisters. Bob Fosse choreographed, which lead to this amazing dance number (dancing starts around 3:00):



I have to say that I like the 1955 version of the story best (Eileen comes off as less flaky, in my opinion, plus who doesn't love Betty Garrett? Plus Jack Lemmon in love is so sweet and adorable), but all of the versions are worth checking out, both movie and soundtrack.




(I think it was also a TV series in the 1960's—you've got to love stories that get so much mileage. Kind of like this 29-day blogging streak I'm on.)

Another cop-out post, but with food!

So I have a great post half-written and a couple of others that I'm working on in my head, but no energy to actually finish any of them. I think it's a combination of a four-day weekend, another does-not-want-to-nap day, and the fact that it snowed for most of the day, which usually puts me in relaxed, hot chocolate, stay inside and do nothing much mode.

I feel okay with all of these things.

I also feel okay with this:


And the fact that I made it for Thanksgiving and again today (what else was I going to do with the leftover pumpkin puree? I mean, really). Check out the recipe here.

And now I think I'll just head to bed. Till tomorrow, then!




Day 28 = four straight weeks of blogging. This has been more intense than I thought it would be.

Really, now.

If Hulu Plus is supposed to be so great, why don't they have all of the episodes for the current season of Psych?

I'm just sayin'.



Day 27 and I miss Shawn Spencer already. . . .

Insert contented sigh here.

How I spent Black Friday:

*Slept in (thanks, Little Guy, for helping out with that).

*Ate leftover pie for breakfast.

*Stayed in my jammies until 11:00 a.m.

*Watched Psych.

*Ate leftover turkey and more pie.

*Read.

*Took a nap.

*Snuggled with my baby.

*Had a movie night with good friends.

*Did a wee bit of shopping online without having to deal with crowds or the cold.

And that is how Black Friday should be done.



Day 26 down. Nearly done!

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We're heading off for a delicious Thanksgiving celebration with family, so I'll just leave you with this family favorite:



The yams did it!



Here's hoping you all enjoy day 25 as much as I plan to!

My favorite holiday.

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. It has all the good food and relatives gathering and crisp weather and good cheer of Christmas, but doesn't involve as much stress or shopping. (I dislike shopping, unless it involves unlimited resources and lots of books.)

KEY, when I told her this, challenged my assertion that Thanksgiving is less stressful than Christmas. I told her that meant she was doing Thanksgiving wrong. (Don't worry; our friendship is awesome enough that we can tell each other things like that and not get upset. Unless it's about James Joyce. . . .)*

The key to Thanksgiving is delegation. It should be like a very, very organized potluck. Everyone has an assignment and everyone brings that item to dinner. If only one person is in charge of all the shopping and cooking for everyone else, of course that's going to be too much stress for them. If you show up to a Thanksgiving dinner that someone else cooked and you haven't contributed to at all, you haven't really joined in the point of the holiday. You might be grateful for their efforts but you haven't made yourself a full part of the communal Thanksgiving experience. Everyone cooks; everyone shares. That's how Thanksgiving should be, at least in my opinion.

One of my favorite aspects of Thanksgiving is Pie. Pie, pie and more pie.

Oh, and pie.

Which I actually need to go make now. So I will leave you with these two awesome pie-related things:


Pushing Daisies. If you haven't seen any episodes of this delightful (and, unfortunately, now-cancelled) TV show, do yourself a favor and introduce yourself to Ned (the Piemaker, who has a special power), Chuck (his alive-again sweetheart), Emerson Cod (a private investigator who knits to calm his nerves), Olive Snook (the waitress who loves Ned unrequitedly), Aunts Lily and Vivian (retired synchronized swimming duo with agoraphobic tendencies and a proclivity for waving around shotguns, at least in Lily's case), and Digby (an alive-again dog). You won't be sorry. As Ned says, "Pie is home. People always come home."



I've always liked this particular Wondermark.

Now go forth, eat pie, be thankful, and take looooong afternoon naps.




*Love you, KEY! Even if I don't love Jimmy like you do. ;)

Day 24 and I'm posting in the middle of the afternoon, yo! How's that for being on top of things!

Something about names and roses and something that smells.

Yeah, I spent a long time trying to think of a good, clever name for this post and all I could come up with was that old overdone Shakespeare quote. So yeah. Whatever. (Today was another no-nap day. That may have something to do with it.)

Following up on yesterday's discussion about words that are tainted by association, I just want to take a moment to talk about names.

Everyone, I'm sure, has had the experience of a name being "ruined."

In elementary school I met a girl named Lizzie. I won't go into details, but the experience was so unpleasant that I've had issues with the name ever since. The only reason I'm still okay with Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is that when people call her by her nickname, it's spelled "Lizzy."

Another example is that several of the boys' names I liked growing up ended up going on to be the names of boys I dated.* So I could never use them for a child, which made our quest to find a name for the Little Guy that much harder, since most of my favorite names were now off the table. (Also, Shallow Man didn't particularly like most of the others, but that's neither here nor there.)

I'm also pretty sure I could never name a child any variation of Isabella now.

Of course, name associations don't have to be bad. Positive associations with names are what lead to namesakes. Which are pretty awesome. The Little Guy's middle name is actually in honor of one of our dear friends (who was not only Shallow Man's roommate, but also his best man, our wedding photographer, our chauffeur, our bouncer, etc.). My nephew is named after my maternal grandfather, who passed away a few months before said nephew was born, and now I have two awesome associations with that particular name.

I don't really have any grand conclusion about this. It's just something I've thought about in connection with the rest of my word musings. So if any of you has a pithy way to end this, please feel free to share it with the class.



*Oddly enough, almost all of them also had a sister named Amy, or some variation thereof, which was also one of my favorite girls' names. Go figure.

That's it for Day 23—we are now entering the final week of NaBloPoMo, yo. (Okay, sorry for that. Couldn't help myself.)

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Today we enter the wonderful world of malapropisms!

A malapropism, for any less-geeky readers out there, is when you mean to use a certain word, but accidentally use a similar-sounding but different word instead. The character Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing frequently engages in this behavior:

"Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons." (III.v.41-42)

He obviously means they have taken two shady characters into custody (apprehended two suspicious persons); what actually comes out is that he understood two favorable people.

Malapropisms can be entertaining and endearing in literary characters or as a once-in-a-while slip of the tongue; good-natured ribbing ensues. However, malapropisms as a result of someone pretentiously trying to sound ultra-intelligent can start to grate on the nerves.

What? Personal experience? Whatever gave you that idea?

If you've ever wondered about my bio information and why "quintessential" matters, it all comes back to the reason I went to law school: the Curly-Haired Boss, or CHB for short (closely related to the PHB). Leaving aside the more traumatic elements behind this situation, the CHB had an annoying malapropism habit, such as the following exchange:

CHB: We need to get the correct address, because that's quintessential in getting the letter sent out.

Me: (longish pause) Did you mean "essential"?

CHB: (even longer-ish pause) Did I?

Me: Yes, I think you did.

CHB: (longest pause yet, then continues as if nothing has happened at all) So I'll call and get the addresss....

Want to guess how he thought "prima donna" was spelled?



Anyway, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Okay, so it's not a story really, but thinking about word aversion made me think of the way certain words become pet peeves, not because of any aversion to the way they sound, but because of association or connotation. (Note also the difference between this kind of aversion/pet peeve and the kind related to words that are misspelled or grammatically abused.) For me it's mostly association that ruins words, and it's probably no shocker to hear that most of those bad associations are because of the CHB.

He liked to sound smart in order to impress his direct superior (who, I think, realized what a mistake he had made in promoting the CHB about a week too late to do anything to fix the situation), which included using what he (the CHB) apparently thought were intelligent words as much as he could.

These words usually tended more towards the "buzzword" category than to the "how to build a better vocabulary" side, and his tactic was to take one word, latch onto it and use it as often as possible for the next month or so until he had leeched all possible meaning out of it, then rinse and repeat with a new word. As a result, I now have almost physical reactions to the following words/usages:

Task. v. To assign. "I'm going to task you with this project."

Massage v. To tweak carefully. "We'll need to massage this letter so it doesn't sound so angry."

Robust adj. Whatever you want it to mean, as long as it's preceded by "more." "This should be more robust. I want a more robust system. Our client list should be more robust. That's the most robust sweater I've ever seen."

*shuuuuuuuuddder*

Do you have any words that are tainted by association?



22 days in and just over a week to go for NaBloPoMo!

. . . we'll be right back. But not quite yet.

So I was going to continue the Words, Words, Words series today.

But that was before the Little Guy peed on me.

Four times.

In 45 minutes.

And then had a major blowout.

(Thankfully, not on me. It was pretty much contained by his onesie [which was like the sixth one for today; we've had some impressive eruptions from the other end today, too] but it was still very intense.)

So we graduated him to the next-size-up in diapers.

One hopes this will solve the problem.

Especially because I'm pretty much out of clean clothes (four changes of clothes for me today).

And my brain is kind of frazzled from all that and not really up for exploring the intricacies of vocabulary.

So we'll take this moment to celebrate the Little Guy's first, uh, graduation.

(pause for applause)

Thank you, thank you, you're too kind.

Till tomorrow, then!



Three weeks, baby!

After these messages . . .

So today is kind of a cop-out post. Again. But that's okay.

I think I may have done this before, but books and book lists are always worth revisiting. (Like Brideshead, I guess, although I'm not sure since I've not read that one.) But I've definitely read more than 6.

I've seen this list go around several times and it always makes me wonder:

1) Why does the BBC thinks people have only read 6 of these books? Do they really have that low of an opinion of the reading habits of the modern adult? And who came up with the number 6? I even have my doubts that the BBC is actually involved in this at all, but that's another story.

2) Who chose these books? What was the criteria? Why do we have The Da Vinci Code but not Don Quixote? And why include the complete works of William Shakespeare as well as Hamlet, and didn't anyone notice that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually part of the Chronicles of Narnia? (Another reason why I doubt the BBC's involvement. Surely they would know better.)

3) So which six of these books does the BBC expect people to have read?

4) What does this say about my book and movie habits?

The answer to these questions is a pretty firm "I have no idea." But it's still fun to look at lists of books, right?

So, without further ado, here's the actual meme with my answers.:



Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.
Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.
Put an asterisk after the ones you've seen a film version of.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! Feel free to add comments too.

1 *Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 *The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 *Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 *Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 *To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 *The Bible
7 *Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 *Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 *Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 *Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 *Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 *Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 *The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 *Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 *The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 *David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 *Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 *Emma - Jane Austen
35 *Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 *The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 *Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 *The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 *The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 *Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 *Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 *Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 *Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I've only seen part of the movie, though.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 *Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 *Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 *Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 *Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 *The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 *Possession - AS Byatt
81 *A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 *The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 *Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 *Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 *The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 *The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 *Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 *Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


So that makes . . .

44 I've read in their entirety,
13 more I've read excerpts or abridged versions (or just didn't finish), and
42 movie adaptations I've seen. (I've seen brief snippets of several more, but I only included movies I've seen all or nearly all of.)

Which, I guess, makes me not-completely-uncultured. Or something.



Day 20! She could . . . go . . . all . . . the . . . way!!!

Just saying it makes me sick.

I hadn't really thought much about word aversion, even after reading the article I mentioned before. I know other people who hate the word "moist" but it has never bothered me; in point of fact, I rather like it. It makes me think of either chocolate cake or moist towelettes, both of which are amazing things in their own ways. (And after you've eaten particularly moist chocolate cake you could probably use a moist towelette to tidy up.)

There aren't that many words that really bug me like that (leaving aside words that are by definition offensive or used specifically to offend, but that's different than regular word aversion). I don't generally have the kind of visceral response to a word like people do to moist, so I wasn't going to really do a separate word aversion post.

But then Lost in Translation regarding her extreme aversion to the word "lecithin" and it gave me one of those rare moments of personal insight. (Well, two actually; the first one being that while I like the word "adjectival," I don't like using the word "nominal" to denote nouns. Probably because it sounds like I'm minimizing their importance. But that's not the important moment of personal insight here.)

I don't hate "lecithin." But I hate the word for what it is.

I do have a word aversion. An extreme aversion to the word—I shudder to type it . . .

. . . "emulsifier."

*ewewewewew*

Just saying it, just thinking it—nay, just typing it—gives me a serious case of the jibblies, the same way you get when you see a snake or a really gross spider or a really soggy something-that-shouldn't-be-soggy, like cake. It just sounds WRONG. And gross. And—

Okay, that's it, I need to go take a shower to get rid of the grossness.

Are there any words that you absolutely loathe? Leave 'em in the comments so we can all be grossed out together!



Day 19! Wahoo! We're nearly two-thirds of the way there!

Word Girl! But not like on PBS; or, Pick a side.

I think there's a PBS show called Word Girl, isn't there? It's something like that in any case.

ANYWAY.

In looking at the lists of favorite words you've left so far (keep them coming!), I came to a realization.

I have to blame KEY mostly, but Lost in Translation helped, too.

It has to do with "serendipitous" and "pugnacious."

My lovely friends gave the adjectival forms as their favorites, but I prefer the nouns "serendipity" and "pugnacity."

I guess I could also have called this post "Are you a Shuss or a Tee?" ("shuss" being "-cious" and "tee" being "-ity" if you didn't catch that). Team Adjective vs. Team Noun. I find it interesting that some people lean more to the adjectives when I guess I like nouns more, even though it's all basically the same word but for the suffix (if my prose lacks clarity or beauty here, today was another non-nap-day).

And I wonder why that is. Is it another weird property of word attraction that some people just like the way certain forms sound or feel more? Or does it have more to do with usage?

Because Shuss is really, when you get down to it, a prettier sound than Tee is. And yet, for all my love of good sounds, I think the auditory connection is trumped by my old creative writing teacher's mantra.

No, not "Show, don't tell," although she did like that one, too.

"Use strong nouns and verbs."

The point being that if your verbs and nouns are strong, you don't need to qualify them with adjectives or adverbs, which tend to gum things up. Also, that means that when you DO whip out an adjective or adverb, it makes a stronger impact; it hasn't been diluted by superfluous words. (There are exceptions, though. For example, I like "superfluity" better but it just makes the sentence more awkward. Which brings us to another mantra, "Use good judgment." Although come to think of it, that one was my mother's mantra, not my teacher's. Huh.)

So keep your adjectives; give me a noun!

I am Elliespen, and I am a Tee.

Goooooo, Team Noun!




Also, just incidentally, gooooo Day 18! So, are you a Shuss or a Tee? Let's forget Teams Edward and Jacob (or whatever other Teams may be out there) and pay attention to much more interesting teams. I want Team Noun and Team Adjective to battle it out in the comments section. Woohoooooo!

Word lovin'.

I came across this article about word attraction today and it got me thinking. (There's another article here about the opposite effect of word aversion in general and the word "moist" in particular which is also quite interesting.)

It's true that I love words. A lot. And I love coming across those dollar-vocabulary words like "ebullient" and "viscosity" (words like "thither," "felicity," "mischance"!) and sharing them with friends, family, casual acquaintances and even, occasionally, strangers on the street. I know other people have favorite words (my sister's favorite word being "perforated." Which, you have to admit, is a pretty dang cool word).

My grandpa used to have fun teaching us words that were disproportionately long for our size. Nothing quite as funny as a two-year-old trying to say "hypothetical." And given a little more time, I'm sure we'll be trying to get the Little Guy to say things like "anticipatory repudiation" or "temerity."

Probably some of the reason why I love Amazon PayPhrase suggestions so much is because they tend to include awesome words. I mean, "metallurgical?" Come on! That's good stuff right there! (Today's PayPhrase: Elliespen's Scarlet Equity. I don't know what it means, but I like it.)

But my favorite word is not a majorly complicated five-syllable word. ("Polysyllabic" is a great word, though.) It is, however, pretty much the most amazing word in the English language:

Askance.

How can you not love that word? It looks and sounds exactly like what it is. Let's take another look.

Askance.

Ahhhh. Gotta love it.

I also enjoy its cousins, "ajar" and "askew." And many, many other words, some of which are fancier and more impressive to the lay ear.

But "askance" will always be first in my heart, lexically speaking.



Let's celebrate Day 17 with awesome words! Please list some of your favorite words in the comments so we can all share the joy and beauty of vocabulary.

A Tale of Four Socks; or, Really Just Two Socks Now.

The Little Guy has roughly two pairs of socks (out of the dozens that he owns) that consistently stay on his feet. As fate would have it, these are also his only two pairs of brown socks. I'm not sure why we don't have more brown socks for him when most of his wardrobe falls into the green and brown category, thus clashing with his multitude of blue socks. But so it goes.

So why is it that on the same day that half of one pair goes missing in the laundry, half of the other pair decides to fall off of his feet for the first time? And why is it that this happens in the middle of a cemetery full of fallen leaves?

Imagine looking for a light brown sock in a pile of light brown, orange and yellow leaves.

Yeah.

Farewell, sock. We hardly knew thee.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with the dark brown laundry sock. Or else infant sockbuying might be in my very near future.



Day 16! We are officially over the halfway point now. Who would like to celebrate this milestone by sending me brown baby socks?