Jump to content

Paul

Members
  • Posts

    201
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Paul

  1. I'd advise due caution. Uncontrolled snickering got me thrown out of senior high Spanish. Actually, it was a joint effort by a friend and me, but I was the one who got caught. Despite that, we're still friends, 42 years after the fact. And still snickering.
  2. I did something similar a couple years ago when I found some old photos of me at one of the last Christmases at our old family home in the late 1980s, and discovered I still had some of the same clothes in my closet. Naturally, I thereupon resolved to wear them again at our next Christmas gathering. When I informed people that I was, that day, wearing exactly what I had been wearing precisely to the day 16 years previously, the response ranged from bemusement to indulgent nods. No one else seemed to realize that it was something that had to be done.
  3. Another way to see older threads is to use the controls down at the bottom of each forum's thread list page. Apparently they default to "last 30 days." When I changed that to "show all" bingo, there the original was.
  4. I've never had an avatar before, so I just made one. In effect, it illustrates my attitude toward life in general. But I see it didn't work. Ah, there we go.
  5. Nice touch with the thesaurus, BTW. I was going to mention that before, but I got carried away trying to be clever.
  6. Mathemmatical jiggey-pokery is not unknown in the naming of musical aggregations, viz. in Barbershop's sister musical genre, Dixieland, The Firehouse Five Plus Two. Following that formula, you might dub your group something along the lines of "EleCivil's Bunkhouse Four Minus One." Of course, these's nothing really stopping you from further elaboration: "EleCivil's Bunkhouse Twelve Thousand Six Hundred Forty-Two Minus Twelve Thousand Six Hundred Thirty-Nine."
  7. I have to agree with everything Pecman said. After following the first link, I read all his stuff on Nifty. Really a loss to us readers that he hasn't kept going.
  8. Man, it just keeps getting better. Some great touches, like: Well, at least I learned that I speak like a scratched CD when I’m nervous. This is good, because I had just been thinking that I could use something new to be self-conscious about. I know the feeling! Or the hilarious lion exchange in the hallway. Exhilarating, actually, seeing something unfold before you like this, sort of like a jazz musician taking off on a riff and spinning something exquisite out of thin air. And all for a purpose: it makes these characters living human beings, illustrates their personal connection more immediately tangible than paragraphs of introspective self-analysis. If this sounds like a gushing rave, so be it. I really, really like your writing.
  9. [Grandmotherly Voice]Yes, he seemed like such a nice young man.[/Grandmotherly Voice]
  10. Pretty gutsy. You ever do anything like that before? You sort of hint at it with the "Why am I the one who has to protect you" remark to your friend.I've had fantasies of doing the intimidating thing myself, usually in the context of having had some jackass driver pull some life-threatening maneuver right in front of me. You know, following him until he stops, then getting out and rushing up to his window and, with my best crazed-maniac attitude, screaming "You could have killed me with that stunt!" 'Course, I never would, since I wouldn't know how to handle it if the guy could do a crazed-maniac routine better than mine.
  11. Well, I've been speaking for 8 or so years longer than that, but it's only relatively recently that I've heard "meh" enter the language. In fact, I guess I'm something of an early adopter, since I've been using it myself for several years. Where I first picked it up, I don't know. I'm not one to fling around neologisms and jargon just to sound cool or hep (there; I thought I'd throw in a paleologism to lend credence to my profession of advanced age); I started using it because it neatly filled a need. As I enjoy posing as smartass on occasion (though some no doubt would quarrel that it's merely an affectation), I liked the verbal equivalent of an indifferent or dismissive shrug. The Urban Dictionary makes note of it, and I have seen it in print, including some online fiction. For a close to home example, the boys in Forever on a Tree, listed on The Best of Nifty, are heavy users. For me, at any rate, this aids in establishing the somewhat overly-precocious, smart-alecky nature of their personalities. But again, I don't think "meh" in this sense fits in the noises-of-hesitation category, as it expresses a specific concept or attitude rather than being a mere pothole in the conversational roadbed.
  12. Paul

    An idea

    Me neither. I was just trying to cram as much blather in as possible.
  13. Paul

    An idea

    I think that one of the reasons you encounter so many run-on sentences in amateur writing is that the authors are listening to their words in their heads and unconsciously "hearing" the various pauses and full stops that occur in natural speech without realizing that these demarcations do not automatically exist in written text and must therefore be specifically indicated by means of commas, semi-colons and periods, though in all fairness, the inability to realize this principle may be beyond their inherent capabilities and in truth reflects a lack of education in the fundamentals of written prose, though on the other hand I suspect in many cases it's a willful and deliberate attempt to represent oneself as an iconoclast, a free spirit unwilling to have their creativity straight-jacketed by obsolete and arbitrary rules, similar to the practice of other individuals to so posture themselves by gratuitous employment of sentences that, though punctuated, run on nevertheless.
  14. Another variation of the verbal shrug of indifference is "Meh." Here, though, we're getting close to word formation.
  15. Paul

    TLAP Day

    A pirate gets shipwrecked. When he wakes up, he's on a beach. The sand is dark red. He can't believe it. The sky is dark red. He walks around a bit and sees that there is dark red grass, dark red birds and dark red fruit on the dark red trees. He's shocked when he finds that his skin is starting to turn dark red too. "ARGHHHH!!" he says, "I think I've been marooned!!"
  16. I don't think "argh" is actually supposed to be pronounced, unless you're trying to be cute. It's really the verbal approximation of a guttural sound - mouth parts not involved. "Eh" also has another meaning: the auditory version of a dismissive shrug.
  17. You'll see Brits using "Erm... " a lot. Usually the context is one in which the speaker is somewhat taken aback by something the other person said, perhaps accompanied by a soup?on of embarrassment. "Nigel, you seemed to be staring at that young man quite a bit." "Erm..."
  18. Be ye familiar with Disney's "Treasure Island," young Master Civil? People couldn't talk like pirates if it hadn't been for Robert Newton.
  19. That use of "prudent" brought me up short too when I read it. Thinking about it a moment, I figured out what the author probably actually intended, that the old man was chiding him for what he (the old man) thought was, in light of their past history together, an unwarranted and not-too-believable display of scruples. But simply saying "prudent" isn't the way you'd expect someone to express that. Missing is the sense of skepticism and scorn. If he was going to use the word and still get the meaning across (to us the readers as well as to the character), it should be phrased sarcastically, like "Now don't go getting all prudent with me all of a sudden."
  20. Yeah, I just got a "You don't have permission to view the blogs" message. Probably still being worked on or something.
  21. I knew there had to be a logical explanation.
  22. I'm trying to place that penguin graphic... there's something ineffably Miyazaki about it.
  23. I think EleCivil should try to work this into one of his stories, but in the meantime, the rest of you can have a ball watching it.
  24. Just recently I got this weird idea of taking the plot from an opera, Verdi's Rigoletto (which is itself based on the 1832 play "Le roi s'amuse" by Victor "Hunchback of Notre Dame" Hugo), and making the central characters gay. I'd be up front about what I was doing; f'rinstance, I figured on calling the title character "Rick Letto." His boss, The Duke of Mantua in the opera, almost begged to be called Duke Mantee, but Humphrey Bogart beat me to it with that name 70 years ago. I wasn't sure whether to make it an outright parody or to maintain the tragedy of the story. It has possibilities - in the opera, Rigoletto, a physically deformed court jester, keeps the existence of his beautiful virginal daughter a secret, especially from his womanizing boss. In the gay version, his motivation would be to avoid outing his secret son to protect him from gay-bashers. Or, if I made the kid young enough, from pedophiles, and turn his boss into one. What finally kept the project from coming to anything remotely resembling fruition was the realization that I'd have to turn into a real writer to pull it off, with all the effort and dedication that entails. I am, in essence, a lazy person.
×
×
  • Create New...