The keyboard is mocking me again. All the words I need are right here, nearby, but my fingers can’t seem to find them. I mean, c’mon — all the letters and punctuation — they are all right here. I just sit and stare with the vain hope that maybe the keys will organize themselves into words. I am going to lie down on the couch again until it happens.
Has anyone else noticed that consonants, especially the T, seem to be disappearing? It’s as if we are breeding a group of American Cockney. Examples:
It’s not the Tennessee Titans (ti-tenz), they are the Ti-uhns. The second T is dropped. It’s impor-ant (and don’t get me started on “impordant”). It’s not Twit-ter, it’s Twit-er. I am blanking out on the other examples I have heard recently, but you get the drift. The T seems to be the worst because it requires a little extra work with the tongue. Maybe it’s all those tongue studs….
Not only are we losing our ability to read at any great length and write accurately (my student journalists seem to think that close counts and gross factual errors are — meh….), we seem to be getting lazy in our spoken word as well. Can texting be ruining that, too?
UPDATE: I think the R is going away as well. More and more, I hear people say fo-ward instead of forward.
I like to worry about odd things. These thoughts usually come to me in that crease between falling asleep and being asleep. Sometimes the damn things actually wake me up.
The latest was the difference between re-writing and editing. Can writers edit or do they only re-write? If an editor does a heavy-handed job, is it really a rewrite? When does it reach a point that an editor deserves a co-byline? Should editors even be allowed to edit that much?
I worked one summer as a copyeditor at a ski magazine. The editor had accepted a freelance article that was so badly written I had to take a heavy blue pencil (yes, it was that long ago) to it. The story was as much mine as the writer’s. We should have sent it back to the author.
As a writer, I always re-write — probably too much. But do I edit my own work?
I know it doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying about it. I have to quit this post. The Muse just raised her head from the couch and inquired about proofreading.
I like words. How they sound, how they feel rolling off your tongue and lips. I like avuncular and laconic and phlegmatic. I like it when words I didn’t even know I knew come tumbling out during a conversation. I usually surprise myself when I dip into my subconscious lexicon, as small as it is. (I am certainly no William Buckley.)
The other day as I was driving to my university to drag the often uninterested through issues surrounding the usually unread textbook chapters when I passed a group of inmates picking up the trash along the roadside. The warning sign said, “Prisoners Working.”
Suddenly my over-burdened mind hit upon a question that bugged me the rest of the day. Prisons and jails are both places where criminals are incarcerated, right? So why are “prisoners” the inmates, but “jailers” run the jails? Ah, the English language.