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 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!
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.
Jerry Bock passed away last week. For those of you who aren't geeky enough to recognize that name without more explanation, he was the Bock half (obviously) of the duo Bock and Harnick, who wrote Broadway musicals (Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist to Bock's composer, is still alive). And if that doesn't help, maybe this will:
So let me pause here because I want to make one thing very clear. I adore Fiddler on the Roof. I think it is brilliant and quite possibly one of the best musicals ever written.
But it's not my favorite musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.
That distinction goes to the little-known 1963 gem She Loves Me.
It's the story of The Shop Around the Corner in musical format. (The movie was originally adapted from a play called Parfumerie, by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo, and subsequently remade as In the Good Old Summertime and, later, You've Got Mail.) The music is sweet, the story and characters are charming, and, of course, the guy gets the girl in the end. (If you think that's a spoiler you're not paying attention.)
Unfortunately, this beautiful little musical was overshadowed by the mega-shows Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly that year, with which it couldn't compete, and so it only played for a short run, and was mostly shut out come Tony time.
Which is a real shame. It features such songs as "No More Candy" (trying to sell a musical candy box to a skeptical customer), "Tonight At Eight" (our leading man is nervous about his impending date to meet the girl of his dreams), "Perspective" (the older clerk in the store explains how to keep your job), "Romantic Atmosphere" (a frustrated maitre d' tries to impress upon a bumbling waiter the importance of setting the mood for lovers' meetings), "Tango Tragique" (a cautionary tale about anonymous pen pals), "Where's My Shoe" (leading lady gets a bit of a crazy-go-nuts scene), "Ice Cream" and "She Loves Me" (the leading lady and leading man, respectively, discover a softening of their feelings of animosity toward each other), "Grand Knowing You" (the skeezy clerk's big farewell), and several others.
Including my very favorite, "A Trip to the Library."
In this scene, when last we saw our secondary lady, (who is a bit of a floozy), she had just had her heart stomped on by the skeezy clerk for the last time, and valiantly resolved to change her ways and not be taken in by such a skeezy guy again. She comes back to work the next morning and reports on her progress to the leading man. It seems that last night, she found her feet taking her on an unexpected route . . . to the library. "You've never seen anything like that library! So many books! So much marble! So quiet!"
I chose this version out of all the many on YouTube because even though she flubs a couple of the lyrics, she sings it more closely to the way the original actress, Barbara Baxley, did. I prefer the slightly more vulnerable and sweet tone to the brassier belting featured in most of the other renditions. If you'd like to see how it plays out on stage, though, I did enjoy this version:
I ask you, how can you not love a show with a song that rhymes "respectable" and "bespectacled"? And who could resist a lyric like this:
I have to admit, in the back of my mind I was praying he wouldn't get fresh, And all of the while I was wondering why An illiterate girl should attract him. Then all of a sudden he said that I couldn't Go wrong with the way of all flesh— Of course it's a novel, but I didn't know Or I certainly wouldn't have smacked him!
If you have never heard of She Loves Me, I suggest you do yourself a favor and check out the soundtrack. Or keep an eye out on your community theater notices, as this show is frequently mounted around Christmas time. Check to see if there's a production going on near you and go to see it. Take a friend and sink back into this lovely little musical. I promise you won't regret it.
Day 9! Wahoo! (When was the last time you went "wahoo"?)
When people post things on the internet and spell words incorrectly (especially common words like "there" vs. "their" or "they're"), I judge them.
When people post things on the internet and either blatantly misuse or eliminate punctuation altogether, I judge them.
When people post things on the internet and forgo capitalization completely, I judge them.
When people post things on the internet without proofreading, resulting in a mangled jumble of what I can only guess was supposed to be English, I judge them.
In short: I judge people for not proofreading. Seeing a post that demonstrates a less-than-minimum competency for the English language makes me jump to conclusions about the education or intelligence of the poster. And that is bad. Because I am a bad person.
But I am also an English major, an editor and a writer, and I just can't help it.
So now you know.
P.S. In the interest of further disclosure, if you are a person I know and love and make one of the above errors, I still love you and make excuses for you. If it's someone I don't know, though, their reputation sinks drastically in my estimation. Yes, it's biased and unfair. I still do it. (See supra, "I am a bad person.")
This will be a longer post later, but sleep deprivation is kicking in and my brain is currently incapable of producing long, intelligent, interesting posts. So for now I just have a few quick bullet points:
1. I love YA literature. 2. I think YA literature is often better than many other types of literature. 3. There are YA books coming out this year which I am greatly anticipating. 4. One of them is being given away as an ARC. 5. Here is a link to the giveaway. 6. Tell your friends. 7. But don't enter. Because I would like to win. 8. That is all.
So I have previously mentioned how much I like a certain show. But I think that this is my favorite number so far. It's the one I find myself repeatedly revisiting on YouTube; I just hope they don't take the video down anytime soon. Enjoy!
I like the TV show 24. I used to watch it regularly before it jumped about seventeen sharks at once during season five or so. (If anyone missed that moment, I have two words for you: Vampire Jack.) I still will watch it occasionally, though, because Shallow Man evidently has a higher shark tolerance than I do.
I also have a fond weakness for Joss Whedon.
These two facts together meant that I was watching Fox on a regular basis back in January. And, as with every other January in memory, Fox started running promos for its fall lineup. Yes. Commercials IN JANUARY for shows that wouldn't air until September at the earliest. (In past years, September has rolled around and they've announced the series premiere for a show and I would stop, confused, because I was SURE it had been on the air forever. Which it had been. Or at least 30-second snippets of it.) Which bothers me, because I am usually of the opinion that overhype, even of a good thing, can ruin what's being hyped.
And if the hype-age continues and escalates non-stop all summer (when I'm also watching Fox regularly for amazing dance goodness), it makes me even more annoyed.
And also very conflicted if it's something that looks like something I'll like. Because my contrary streak wants to purposely not watch it just because it's been shoved down my throat for NINE months. I don't think advertising campaigns for a TV show should last the same amount of time as the gestational period of a human. But maybe that's just me.
But I really, really, really like singing and dancing and musicals. So I decided, when the series premiere finally came around, to give it a chance. Just once. Just to see.
I am, of course, talking about Glee.
Leaving aside the fact that the pilot aired I think three times before the official series premiere. Never mind that I'd had people asking me all summer if I'd seen Glee yet. Don't pay any attention to the endless commercials that have been running all year.
Once I saw it, I loved it. I forgave everything. Because it's fun and smart and sassy and full of singing and dancing and oh my goodness Matthew Morrison. Yes, that Matthew Morrison. The Matthew Morrison who, as Lt. Cable in the most recent Broadway revival of South Pacific hit one of the most gloriously beautiful high notes I've ever heard in my life in "Younger than Springtime." If I believed in putting up music players in my blog sidebar (which I don't, because they always make my browser crash; if you have one on your blog and I still read your blog it means I really love you) then I would have my blog sing that note to you pretty much non-stop. (Okay, not non-stop. I'd throw in most of the rest of the SP soundtrack and Donna Murphy singing "One Hundred Easy Ways" in Wonderful Town. But with plenty of High Note thrown in.)
Well, with all that, how could I not love it? I can't unreservedly recommend it, as it veers into very PG-13 territory from time to time, and the way they portray the not-pregnant wife is beyond the point of unbelievability (no person in that situation would naturally react like that). But for the most part it is, as far as I can tell in my admittedly limited experience, the best show on TV right now with the possible exception of So You Think You Can Dance which did I mention I'm going to see in concert in less than two months and YIPPEE for that? (Yeah, I don't watch too many TV shows. I'm more of a movie girl, or a discover-the-amazing-TV-show-AFTER-it's-been-canceled-or-is-just-about-to-be-canceled-so-I-guess-I'll-just-watch-TV-on-DVD kind of girl. See, e.g., Arrested Development, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, Pushing Daisies which also by the way does anyone have the DVD for PD so I can see more than the one partial-episode I've seen?)
But it still hadn't moved to "addiction" phase. Until last night's episode, which featured this sequence:
And there you have it, folks.
My name is Elliespen and I am addicted to Glee.
P.S. If you've missed out completely on this show so far because, say, you've been living under a rock for the past nine months or possibly just because you have higher television standards than I and never even flip past Fox, you can catch up on all the episodes so far on hulu.
Not only did you do an amazing job of tying off the massive amounts of loose ends left over from the first three books, along with taking a HUGE step forward in bringing your writing skills closer up to the level of your storytelling capabilities, but you've also achieved what I thought was a complete impossibility.
You've finally made me like -- and maybe even love -- your main character.
So first I have to express my impatience with the fact that the So You Think You Can Dance results show airs at 8:00 instead of 7:00. The performance show airs at 7:00. Why the difference in times? Is it so vitally important that Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader air right at 7:00? Why can't they put SYTYCD first and THEN air the 5th-grader at 8:00? Good grief, Fox. Good. Grief.
But I digress.
While watching TV in hopeful anticipation of my show, blissfully unaware that I was to be denied for another hour, I saw a commercial for the new Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Someone there has apparently had the bright idea to team up with The Dark Knight for movie tie-ins and they will therefore be releasing -- get it -- BAT-SHAPED REESE'S CUPS. As in, less Reese's because they've cut the cup into the shape of a bat. Say what? They dang well better cut the price accordingly.
Because as "cool" as a bat gimmick is, when I buy a Reese's, I want my full allotment of chocolatey peanut butter goodness.
"[...] celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit." In short: small round things beyond Neptune that orbit the sun and have lots of rocky neighbors.
I can tell you, I'm certainly breathing a sigh of relief here. Back in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union cruelly stripped Pluto of its planetary status, I was worried that Pluto would remain unclassified forever, wandering around its uncleared orbit forever just wondering what it was and where it came from. Now it only has to wonder where it came from. However,
it remains to be seen whether astronomers will use the new term.
"My guess is that no one is going to much use this term, though perhaps I'm wrong," said Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, who has led the discovery of several objects in the outer solar system, including Eris. "But I don't think that this will be because it is controversial, just not particularly necessary."
Brown was unaware of the new definition until the IAU announced it today.
"Back when the term 'pluton' was nixed they said they would come up with another one," Brown said. "So I guess they finally did."
Who do we have to thank for this amazing act of astronomical confidence boosting? Who is the new superhero in the galaxy, bringing justice and handles to abandoned ex-planetoids everywhere? Who ya gonna call?
The International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, of course!
Say what?
Okay, okay, okay. It was really proposed by the IAUCSBN (International Astronomical Union Committee on Small Body Nomenclature). The IAUWGPSN only accepted it. Then the IAU Executive Committee approved it.
Say what?
You mean not only does it take them 2 years to come up with something "better" than "pluton", but they also have not one, not two, but three whole committees that it has to go through? Two of which appear to exist solely for the purpose of coming up with names for planet-type stuff? And "plutoid" is what they give us?
Puh-leeeeeze.
I guess they're only members of the IAU because they couldn't get an honest job as a real astronomer. You know it's bad when the people you're supposed to represent say outright that they're not going to pay attention to you anymore. At least the IAU has a good attitude about it, though.
"The IAU is a democratic organization, thus open to comments and criticism of any kind," IAU General Secretary Karel A. van der Hucht told SPACE.com by email today. "Given the history of the issue, we will probably never reach a complete consensus."
I think they've got that right. I don't see them agreeing with me anytime soon that they've messed this affair up from the get-go.
Note: So I wanted to get this up earlier but YouTube is blocked on campus... but it's up now and the dateline will still be right, so it'll have to do.
*ahem* Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Dear Frederic, Happy Birthday to You!
I won I won I won! Robin McKinley liked my poem and I WON!!!! Robin McKinley liked my poem and I won an AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF DRAGONHAVEN JUST FOR ME BECAUSE SHE LIKED MY POEM!!!!!!!! SQUEEEEEEE!!!!!!
Check it out check it out check it out! Right here. (Mine is the one by "Ellie.")
Squeeeee!!!!!!
P.S. I also have a great, squee-inducing Valentine's day story, too, but I'm waiting until I get the pictures to post it here. Stay tuned for more details.
Misery at seeing the horrible abuse some people commit.
And most of all, madness because it's driving me crazy that I had to stop reading the site because I was laughing too much and causing disruption in the library so I have to wait until I get home to see the rest.
I'd been hearing a lot of people talking about Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, recently and I was intrigued -- you've got to be curious about a novel about vampires written by a BYU grad (and lest you chide me for potential spoilers, that's all spelled out on the back cover of the book). So I picked up a copy at the bookstore last week and started reading it, mostly in fits because I didn't have very many large chunks of spare time until Friday afternoon. At that point, I settled in and read almost straight through till the end.
I only stopped long enough to get up and order the sequel off Amazon when I realized there were only three chapters left of this absolutely wonderful book.
Then, when the sequel, New Moon, arrived on Tuesday afternoon (can I take a moment to say just how much I love Amazon Prime?) I jumped right back into the story. And remembered the real world when I finished the last page at 11:00 p.m., not having stopped to eat dinner or do laundry or really even say hi to my sweet and understanding husband when he got home about an hour into the book.
I then spent several hours on Wednesday and Thursday prowling around Stephenie Meyer's website and the Twilight Lexicon, and pondering the respective merits of Edward and Jacob, and I have now come to the conclusion that I'm addicted. I had suspected it before but my suspicions were confirmed when I realized that I'd been complaining to Shallow Man for the last ten minutes (who was listening very patiently, I might add) that I had to wait until FALL before the next book in the series came out, GOSH!, and how on earth was I supposed to wait that long to find out what happened???
I wasn't even this obsessed when Harry Potter 6 came out. Granted, yes, I did read that one straight through as well, but I haven't re-read it since and I don't spend hours thinking about the implications of being with someone who did magic (like I was trying to figure out how the whole eating dinner as a family thing would work out if Bella and Edward had a family -- because she'd start telling the kids to eat their veggies and they say "But Daddy doesn't have to eat them!" and then she'd have to explain that's because Daddy doesn't eat real food.... Yeah, I should probably stop now).
I'm making myself take a little break now while I finish re-reading Jane Eyre, but I'm not really fooling myself. Because I know as soon as I finish it, I'm just going to re-read Twilight.
My name is Elliespen, and I've been in love with Twilight for eleven days.
Happily married, book-and-movie-loving owner of two cats, who is curiously susceptible to writer's block, can carry on an entire conversation using only movie quotes and Far Side captions, and knows the correct spelling of "prima donna" and the right way to use "quintessential."
Yes, that's it.
-
I came across this poem, "The Spot" by Holly Day, this afternoon. (Scroll
down to the bottom of the page; it won't let me link to the individual
poem.)
Ye...
