Although a commanding and powerful speaker, Harding was notorious for his verbal gaffes, such as his comment “I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.” His errors were compounded by his insistence on writing his own speeches. Harding’s most famous “mistake” was his use of the word “normalcy” when the more common word at the time was “normality.” Harding decided he liked the sound of the word and made “Return to Normalcy” a recurring theme. Critic H. L. Mencken disagreed, commenting on Harding’s inaugural address, “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” Upon Harding’s death, poet E. E. Cummings said “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”
1 year ago
i saw a picture of jamie foxx with this big tribal tattoo all over his shoulder areas/back. wanted to know if it was recent—and if it really is that easy for hollywood make-up to make it a non-issue.
“The search jamie foxx shirtless may return explicit adult content and has been filtered by your Bing SafeSearch settings.”
1 year ago
The Twitter Holdouts
Why is more than half of Congress still not on Twitter?
By Christopher Beam
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.Rep. Barney Frank is an outspoken guy with a knack for word craft—in other words, a born tweeter. Frank, though, has decided not to use the microblogging service…
(Here’s a link if you want to continue reading this gem: http://www.slate.com/id/2237243/ Colin says I shouldn’t provide a link, I’m just doing what they want, getting drawn in by a ridiculous headline and then telling people how much I hate it.)
2 years ago
Conversation this morning w/ my 2 year old daughter… [from an old ILX thread]
E5: What this?
E3: Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky.
E5: What Dusty-dusty about?
E3: A man who’s sad because he can’t make any friends.
E5: Him sad in his room?
E3: Yeah, pretty much.
E5: Where him friends?
E3: They went away because he was mean to them.
E5: Him get mad?
E3: Yes, sometimes he gets mad.
E5: (thinks for a moment) Read to me?
E3: …
I like how the story was just genuinely appealing to the little girl. Like, kids stories often deal with circumstances and character psychologies that just have nothing to do with real life, whereas this deals with something real that, as a two year old, she probably hasn’t confronted before.
Ok see yall again in three weeks or something.
2 years ago
