The 13th Sucks

First thing this morning in my email was a rejection for “Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing”:

Dear Writer,

Thank you for your interest in our magazine and for sending your piece to the Santa Clara Review. We regret to inform you that we will not be extending an offer of publication to you at this time.  

Thank you for your interest in the Santa Clara Review, and we wish you every success in finding a publisher for your work.

Sincerely,



The Editors

Miserable day at work. The left knee may become more of a problem, but the real problem was getting overwhelmed at the end of the day.

Then it was 2 hours getting home - missed one bus, then late for the Whitely bus.

Beans and lamb for dinner. Worked on getting me a doctor.

One thing from this afternoon's email. This may amuse, or it may put you at ease. The King’s English? Forgeddabouddit! a review of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland.

Take intensifiers like ‘totally’, ‘pretty’ and ‘completely’. We might consciously believe them to be exaggerations undermining the speaker’s point, yet people consistently report seeing linguistic booster-users as more authoritative and likeable than others.

Then take ‘um’ and ‘uh’ (or ‘umm’ and ‘uhh’, and their consonant-multiplying siblings). Both receive an undue amount of flak for being fillers, supposedly deployed when the speaker is grasping for words, unsure what they want to say or lacking ideas. But this is not so. Fridland explains that they typically precede unfamiliar words or ideas, as well as complex sentence structures. Such non-semantic additions do what silent pauses and coughing can’t: they help the speaker speak and the listener listen. Similarly, the widely abhorred free-floating ‘like’ does not cut randomly into a ‘proper’ sentence but rather inserts itself, according to the logic of the language, either at the beginning of a sentence or before a verb, noun or adjective. It’s a form of ‘discourse marker’, used to ‘contribute to how we understand each other by providing clues to a speaker’s intentions’, writes Fridland. She points out that Shakespeare used discourse markers frequently, while the epic poem Beowulf begins with one (Hwæt!).

I worked on reformatting "The Dead and The Dying". I am opening with a bit of "Theresa Pressley" then distributing bits between the other stories. Tweaking "Theresa" a little, doing nothing to the other stories. I got the idea at work today. So far, it seems like a good idea. Better than what I started with, anyway.

With Advent coming up, there will be no more of this:

CC keeps popping up in my mind. I still incline to let sleeping dogs lie.

sch