On the “OK Boomer!” Contretemps

SERIOUSLY ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION: “Who (and what) profits from pitting one generation of progressives so viciously and stereotypingly against another?”

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”
— Andre Malraux

365 Names: Flow

FLOW is preferred to The Flow, since “the” suggests separateness — “Thingness,” if you will — and as Flow cannot be reliably distinguished from that-which-flows, said usage would upset “the” carefully built phenomenological apple-cart. (And we certainly can’t have that.) Just another attempt at naming the Nameless…without naming it, of course.

“NaSSWriMo!”

TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre time-travel novel to show for it.)

But some of us who write aren’t het up on novels so much as, say, short stories about a mercenary cook who used to be a holyman but can’t quite shake his past. Toward that end, I invite you to join in the alternative: NaSSWriMo, an acronym which I just made up and won’t insult your intelligence by defining.

It’s Really Spelled “Hallowe’en”

(TO BE CLEAR, IT’S ACTUALLY a slight abbreviation of the phrase “All Hallow’s Evening,” AKA “All Hallow’s Even,” AKA “Hallows E’en.”)

There’s something to be said about archaic or alternate spellings / renderings. For example, a beloved English teacher once opined that the spelling “grey” instead of “gray” made the word look and feel, well, “greyer.”

Different fonts make the words we read sound different in our minds. Italics (at least for me) convey a more choral mindfeel than does plain text; bold is like a quiet sit-up-and-pay-attention monotone; ALL CAPS evokes shouting; deletion lines are like mumbled static. Put them all together, and one has CONTROLLED CHAOS.

Words To Bring Back: “Patois”

– Definition: n. A type of local dialect.

– Used in a sentence: His discourse was punctuated by a patois rich in “I know, right?” “Wait. What?” and “Yeah, no…”

– Why: It’s a better (and more elegant and less judgey) label than “vulgar tongue.” Besides, I look forward to hearing people pronounce it “p’toyse” (as I did before I understood French usage).

The harder it became, the more I wanted to do it.”
— Female round-the-world sailor, from the film MAIDEN