– Definition: n. an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. – Used in a sentence: Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is perhaps the Western World’s first serious…
Category: Crit
Examination, analysis, appreciation.
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”
Words to Bring Back: “Drub”
– Definition: v. 1. hit or beat (someone) repeatedly 2. defeat thoroughly in a match or contest – Used in a sentence: Isn’t it nice when the Bad Guys finally get a well-deserved drubbing? – Why: Because “B.T.S.O.O. him” is…
Humoronomics (Pithyism #3=1)
A JOKE, ANECDOTE, OR SHAGGY-DOG story should be no longer than necessitated by the redemptive power of its punch line.
BEING A NERD ISN’T ABOUT the things you love — it’s about the way you love them.”
— Wil Wheaton
Metaphoraging Roundup 2020
AS THE EARTH RETURNS IN its orbit to where it was last year, here is a look at the top ten posts The Metaphorager’s readers enjoyed (I hope) during the past twelve months: My Favorite Jewish Joke – 80 Views…
Fixing a Hole
RECENTLY, I RECEIVED SOME SPAM from Chosen People Ministries (one flavor of the Jews-for-Jesus-ers). When their website’s response-form asked why I wanted to unsubscribe from future mailings, I wrote, “Exodus 20:3; 1 Kings 18:21. Go play with someone else.” They…
The Torah Guides’ Torah Guides
THE TORAH CAN BE A great read — inspiring, comforting, uplifting, provocative — but without the explanatory input of generations of commentators, it can also be a bit daunting. Fortunately, Jewish tradition has portioned this essential text into weekly bites…
Disposathon!
SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE: IT IS easier to get rid of everything in one big purge than a few things in a bunch of smaller ones. The time: June 1985. Hopped-up on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums,…
5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative
1. ONE OF THE CHICKEN-OR-egg challenges of modern media (social and traditional) is their pervasive sense of nonlinear immediacy, by which I mean the everything-at-once flattening of the artistic landscape.
Of Heroes, Waterbeds, and After-Midnight Television
THERE IS A MOVIE THAT follows the struggles inherent in the so-called Hero’s Journey: a high-born child is raised in secret by commoners, and eventually groomed by a wise elder to overcome obstacles and fulfill his destiny by taking his…
Fandom as Cargo Cult
IF WE BUILD IT, THEY will come — again. First, you need to know what a “cargo cult” is: a folk religion among some groups of Melanesian Islanders who believed that they could attract cargo-carrying airplanes by engaging in sympathetic…