The dog ate my homework.

Dearest readers,

Traffic was a nightmare.

I have promised you would have Part Deux by the end of the week, and I will tell you that it’s essentially written but just needs editing. But then something came up. Yeah. I had to…uh…someone got…uh…I was called into work. Yeah. Work. An emergency. And I had to drive in rush hour, and there were three – no, four…uh…five! Five accidents. Yeah, five accidents on the way. It took forever!

 

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Hey, what about us?

I wrote on the About page for this blog that I will be writing about almost anything that is even remotely related to language, because that’s where my primary interest lies. I did, however, ask you, dear readers, to allow for the occasional rant. The following isn’t really angry enough to be called a ‘rant’, but it is certainly an expression of displeasure that is not, technically, related to language. So here goes nothin’. Continue reading

My Latest Literary References

Ladies and Gents, I present to you Zelda…

and Mrs. Parker…

 

They are both living up to their names. Zelda was named after the inimitable Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F.Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda was a wild creature, but fiercely loyal and loving when she wasn’t fall-down drunk. Her claws came out when faced with a threat (*cough cough* Hemingway *cough cough*).  She was an elegant, striking beauty in her time and did not like being trapped. She always looked for an escape and was very curious about new adventures. Though certifiably crazy, she settled into a quieter existence after being institutionalized and outlived her famous drunkard of a husband.

Mrs.Parker is called so because it was what writer Dorothy Parker preferred to be called. She was famous for being a key member of the boisterous Algonquin Round Table, though she was a quieter presence than many would suspect given her current reputation. She would sit at the table during lunch, relatively quiet and demure, and when asked, she would deliver one of her brief but deadly invectives in her soft, affected  and uniquely accented voice. Her bite was, in fact, as devastatingly bad as her bark. She was lively enough when she, like Zelda, was fall-down drunk (which was much of the time for both of them). She spent her last days in the company of poodles and terriers.