The last word…

On Sunday, November 6, 2011, Stan Hopton left his earthly vessel to join our Lord in Heaven. He lost a battle with lung cancer that no one even knew he was fighting. Stan was only 65 years old. He had a true love affair with words, most especially The Word. He had a hunger for knowledge that rivaled that of a starving man walking through a pizza factory. So, in his honor, I post this final message here, a eulogy to a man who will forever live on in so many hearts.

2 Timothy 1:7

“For God hath not give us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” This is one of Dad’s personal favorites, and he lived it daily. In all the years I’ve known him, I can honestly say I’ve never known my dad to be afraid. I’m sure there were times he was deeply concerned and even worried, but he faced life without fear. He faced death the same way. He was ready to meet the Lord, and he didn’t want any of his family or friends to fear his dying.

Cleared for take off

Hanging on the wall of my childhood bedroom is a red safety check banner, one that crews would remove before an airplane can be cleared for take off. The words on the banner read "Remove before flight." After walking into my room last night, I noticed the banner on the ground, and it struck me. All the safety checks had been made, and Dad was clear for take off. One final flight into the wild blue yonder.

Dad had been in the United States Air Force, stationed at R.A.F. Bentwaters, UK, and how he admired his planes. Especially the now retired F-4 Phantom.

Even to the end, Dad did all within his power to take care of those he loved, most especially my mother Judy. His protection was always gentle, his guidance strong and sure. His made it his job to methodically and thoroughly ensure every measure of precaution was followed, and he did so with the kind, patient spirit of a Shepard guarding his flock. Much the way an airplane crew would check every aspect of the plane, ensuring safe and complete functionality before taking flight.

God’s love is like an umbrella…

When I first met Stan he was the children’s pastor at the church my mom took my brother and I to. He seemed like such a kind man, even to a scared little girl, always willing to answer my questions or offer encouragement. Each Sunday, us kids would walk to the front pew for our special “Children’s Sermon” before being dismissed downstairs for Sunday School. One particular Sunday, I was feeling inspired; an idea for a sermon came to me… “God’s love is like an umbrella…” I pulled Stan aside after the service, this timid little teenager who was still trying to understand her place in the world, and offered him my thoughts. With a warm smile, he nodded his head and told me “It’s a good idea. Build on it, then we’ll have you give the sermon some Sunday.” I won’t ever forget that day because in my heart of hearts, after he walked away, I remember thinking how truly blessed my step sister was to have such a loving man like Stan for her Dad. God heard my heart’s desire that day and granted the wish I didn’t even realize I had. Only a few short months after that he and my mom were married…. And I’d never finished the children’s sermon. It wasn’t until very recently that the rest of it came to me. So, here goes.

God’s love is like an umbrella. It’s our protection from the rain. It helps us to weather the storm, without fear. Though, the umbrella doesn’t block our view. We can still see the storm around us, despite the cover above our head. Now, you may ask yourself “Why would a loving God want us to see the rain?” Wouldn’t it be better to hide our view as well? No. If we never saw the storm, we’d never see the rainbow. We’d never fully appreciate the umbrella, and how it kept us safe and dry. There is one other neat thing about umbrellas… They’re meant for sharing. When we come upon someone who’s traveling through the storm, we can help shelter them too… with God’s love.

So what’s at the end of everything?

The letter “g” of course. Dad loved laughter and his sense of humor was one of his greatest assets. He was intelligent and quick witted, and always had a ready quip to bring a smile or chuckle. These past few days have been filled with as many laughs as they have tears as we remember Dad’s life, Dad’s love and the special role he played in all our lives. I know in my heart Dad would have it no other way. He would be deeply honored to know he brought so much joy and happiness to those he loved.

As I look towards the future, I can’t help but smile. We’ve traveled this road of life together for so long, I almost don’t remember what it was like to walk without Dad. Yet, in my mind, I can clearly see him holding out his hand and saying to me “I’ve taught you all I can. You keep going, and I’ll be waiting for you at the foot of the bridge.”

Stan… I know you know this, because I’ve made sure to tell you, but I love you. I hold my head high and proudly call you my dad, and I am truly the lucky one. My dad wasn’t just any dad. He was hand picked by God Himself to be my dad. I could’ve had no better. You taught me to look beyond what my eyes see, to find the meaning, to never accept something at face value, just because the world says I should. You taught me that without laughter life is really boring, and when things get too serious, well, even trees need hugs now and again. But most importantly, you’ve taught me by your words and your actions that love is unconditional. Life is full of conditions, but love overcomes them all. Though I shed many selfish tears now, my heart is full of joy. I celebrate your life and your return home. But most of all, I’m grateful… to you and to God for the gift of you. It’s a gift I promise I will cherish all the days of my life and I will do all I can to honor that gift as it was meant to be.

Last Post

I schott some words into the air and they fell everywhere.



Most unread.



Therefore we are taking an extended break.




We may even come back!!

10 Word Snacks

Puns For The Literate

1. King Ozymandias of Assyria was running low on cash after years of war with the Hittites. His last great possession was the Star of the Euphrates , the most valuable diamond in the ancient world. Desperate, he went to Croesus, the pawnbroker, to ask for a loan. Croesus said, "I'll give you 100,000 dinars for it." "But I paid a million dinars for it," the King protested. "Don't you know who I am? I am the king!"
Croesus replied, "When you wish to pawn a Star, makes no difference who you are."

2. Evidence has been found that William Tell and his family were avid bowlers. Unfortunately, all the Swiss league records were destroyed in a fire, and so we'll never know for whom the Tells bowled.

3. A man rushed into a busy doctor's office and shouted, "Doctor! I think I'm shrinking!" The doctor calmly responded, "Now, settle down. You'll just have to be a little patient."

4. A marine biologist developed a race of genetically engineered dolphins that could live forever if they were fed a steady diet of seagulls. One day, his supply of the birds ran out so he had to go out and trap some more. On the way back, he spied two lions asleep on the road. Afraid to wake them, he gingerly stepped over them. Immediately, he was arrested and charged with transporting gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.

5. Back in the 1800s the Tate's Watch Company of Massachusetts wanted to produce other products, and since they already made the cases for watches, they used them to produce compasses. The new compasses were so bad that people often ended up in Canada or Mexico rather than California . This, of course, is the origin of the expression "He who has a Tate's is lost!"

6. A thief broke into the local police station and stole all the toilets and urinals, leaving no clues. A spokesperson was quoted as saying, "We have absolutely nothing to go on."

7. An Indian chief was feeling very sick, so he summoned the medicine man. After a brief examination, the medicine man took out a long, thin strip of elk rawhide and gave it to the chief, telling him to bite off, chew, and swallow one inch of the leather every day. After a month, the medicine man returned to see how the chief was feeling. The chief shrugged and said, "The thong is ended, but the malady lingers on."

8. A famous Viking explorer returned home from a voyage and found his name missing from the town register. His wife insisted on complaining to the local civic official who apologized profusely saying, "I must have taken Leif off my census."

9. There were three Indian women. One slept on a deer skin, one slept on an elk skin, and the third slept on a hippopotamus skin. All three became pregnant. The first two each had a baby boy. The one who slept on the hippopotamus skin had twin boys. This just goes to prove that the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides.

10. A skeptical anthropologist was cataloging South American folk remedies with the assistance of a tribal brujo who indicated that the leaves of a particular fern were a sure cure for any case of constipation. When the anthropologist expressed his doubts, the brujo looked him in the eye and said, "Let me tell you, with fronds like these, you don't need enemas."

Just A Short Post Today

Feeling a bit under the weather.

Went to see the doctor.

He was very encouraging.

He said, "The trouble is in your breathing and we'll soon put a stop to that!

Lost Dr. Seuss Stories Come to Life Today

"The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories" offers a rare glimpse into the early years of acclaimed La Jolla children’s author Theodor Seuss Geisel.

By Angela Babb Timmons

Dr. Seuss fans are in store for a neat treat—seven of his original tales never before published in book format have just been released in a 72-page collection.

Just as you’d expect from the Dr. Seuss we know and love, The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will introduce a whole new world of whimsical characters navigating some pretty zany situations. Get ready to meet a duck named McKluck, a goldfish named Gustav, tiny twins Tadd and Todd, and many other characters reminiscent of the beloved author’s most memorable works.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a rare look at Dr. Seuss before he was a household name. According to children’s book publisher Random House, “It’s the literary equivalent of buried treasure.” A treasure indeed, considering these stories last appeared over 60 years ago when they were published in Redbook magazine.

Rewind to early 1950s when a virtually unknown writer by the name of Theodor Seuss Geisel lived in La Jolla with his wife, Audrey. He had a successful career in advertising, but found time to pen tall tales and fanciful stories that he submitted to magazines for publication. During 1950 and 1951, nearly a dozen of his original stories and illustrations appeared in Redbook. Less than 10 years later he published The Cat in the Hat and his magazine days came to an end.

Turns out these stories from his early years were never truly “lost,” just rarely seen and long forgotten.

“This is exciting for fans who have known Seuss throughout their whole life,” Susan Brandt, president of license and marketing at Dr. Seuss Enterprises in La Jolla, told Fox 5 San Diego. “But also, how neat to share with our children new stories that we can discover together.”

The author lived and worked in LaJolla until his death in 1991.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories will include illustrations by Dr. Seuss that appeared in Redbook, with enhancements made to the size and color in a manner that maintains the integrity of the author’s original work.

Not only does the legacy of Dr. Seuss carry on in the many books he published during his lifetime, but his name lives on at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego in honor of the significant contributions made by the author and his wife.

Audrey Geisel continues to play a prominent role in the La Jolla community through her many philanthropic efforts. Most recently she was honored at the 2011 Globe Gala in recognition of the generosity and support she has given to the theatre.

“She has worked to extend Seuss’s moral and artistic influence through the Dr. Seuss Foundation, which provides primary support for over 100 medical, cultural, and socially active institutions,” as noted on the website of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

So what exactly is a Bippolo seed, you might ask? If Dr. Seuss were here today he might turn to you and say: Go get the book. Cuddle up in a cozy nook. Flip through the pages and take a look.

National Punctuation Day Is Here!

National Punctuation Day is a great day to celebrate commas and apostrophes and all those oher funny marks!



Feeling uneasy about mystery quotation marks?

We have "fresh" sandwiches.

Badgered by errant apostrophes?

Our employee's are at you're service.

Confused by AWOL commas?

Smoking pets and bicycles prohibited.

Stop worrying about whether your dog smokes and start worrying about punctuation. Today would be a good day to start: It's National Punctuation Day.

I despair for humanity when I open an e-mail that bristles with so many exclamation points I can hardly make out the words in between them. And those are just the press releases about library events.

Two yearsago, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten declared the English language dead, the coup de grace delivered by an unnecessary apostrophe.

But don't bury English yet. People are fighting to revive its proper use. National Punctuation Day was the brainchild of Jeff Rubin, a California newsletter writer who founded it in 2004 as "a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis."

Rubin and his wife, Norma, maintain a website, national punctuationday.com. In 2009 they sponsored a punctuation baking contest. (Question mark meat loaf, anyone?) last year they posted punctuation-themed haikus:

Exclamation points

And question marks together?

Only in comics.

Then there is Jeff Deck's mission to bring America back to perfect punctuation, at least in public. "It's a question of people building their apostrophic confidence," says Deck, co-author of The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World One Correction at a Time.

Deck, 30, an editor who lives in New Hampshire, has a hands-on approach to raising awareness of poor punctuation. A couple of years ago he and his friend Benjamin Herson, a bookseller, set off on a 2½-month road trip in search of errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar in public signs.

Armed with their own heroic typo correction kit (Sharpies, chalk, Wite-Out and more), they found 437 errors and corrected 236. (They were charged with vandalism only once.)

The most common punctuation error? "The poor apostrophe is the most misused and put-upon. People are always throwing it into words where it's not needed, especially plurals," Deck says, citing signs directing people to "Restroom's" and offering "Apple's for sale."

"Almost as common is the apostrophe being left out where it's needed. In Cleveland we saw a big banner that said, 'Lets go Cavaliers.'" And don't get him started on "its" and "it's."

Deck doesn't blame vanishing punctuation skills on e-mail and texting, saying those modes of communication "get a bad rap. It's very easy to blame them."

Mary Alice Lopez isn't so sure. Lopez, 45, teaches sixth-grade language arts to about 60 students at the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa.

Parochial schools and their formidable nuns were once a bastion of proper punctuation: Learn it or regret it. Nuns are scarce these days, but Lopez says grammar is still emphasized — though harder to teach. Students "all have cell phones, and that means punctuation and capitalization are out the window with texting. It's had a very negative impact."

Teaching punctuation begins in kindergarten. Her sixth-graders struggle most with commas: "They either omit them completely or put way too many in."

One teaching method the kids enjoy is a version of Deck's quest. She assigns them to find errors in signs and printed texts. "It's fun for them, but it also stresses how meanings can change if you make an error."

Roy Peter Clark loves punctuation so much that the cover of his new book, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, features a giant golden semicolon. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg devotes several chapters to punctuation, emphasizing what a valuable tool it can be.

Nostradamus vs Verne

It is almost Saturday! What awaits?

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Many folks seem to be enamored with Nostradamus as a prophet or "foreteller" of future events. To me his writings are too vague and open to too many different interpretations. I prefer to think of Jules Verne.

When I think of Jules Verne, I think of the genius behind "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (my personal favorite of only because I read it first, at an impressionable age, and it got me on a sci-fi kick). In these stories, as well as others like "Around the World in Eighty Days" Verne, brilliantly prescient, wrote about flying, space and underwater travel and so much more long before any of it was actually possible.

But his ability to foretell the future, especially with regard to technology, which he viewed with a good dose of skepticism and fear, is best seen in his relatively unknown novel, "Paris in the Twentieth Century". First, the fascinating story behind the publication of the book…

Verne wrote the book in 1863, the year before he started publishing Journey to the Center of the Earth. He showed the manuscript to his publisher, who read it over and scribbled “Wait twenty years to write this book,” in the margins. “Nobody today will believe your prophecy, nobody will care about it.” Verne followed Hetzel’s advice and the manuscript was dropped into a safe where it lay until 1989 (no, it’s not a typo!) when it was discovered by Verne’s great-grandson.

After much hype, the novel was finally published in 1994. The story is set in 1960, nearly 100 years in the future from when Verne penned it. He got so much right about the future, it’s sort of scary. But the coolest part was that Paris in the 1960s would need another decade before actually catching up to Verne on some of his predictions. The book describes a city where people communicate via a worldwide telegraphic communications network (fax machines? Internet?)—where people commute to work in gasoline-powered automobiles and high-speed trains. He predicted that reading would decline, computers would rule our lives, people would live in skyscrapers and that criminals would be sent to their deaths “by electric charge.” Pretty interesting I'd say.

As a novel, the book is lackluster in just about every way imaginable. So don’t read it looking for an amazing story/plot like with his classics.

PS - He also predicted that a manned moon mission would be launched from Central Florida.

A Marginal Note On Mark Twain

Twain House Dining Room

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Coming in one week! The answer!


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Curatorial Staff Makes A Mark Twain Discovery


Margin Notes Written By The Author Are Stuff Of Literary Study


By MARK SPENCER, mspencer@courant.com The Hartford Courant

10:29 p.m. EDT, September 3, 2011

HARTFORD ——

Anyone who saw the two women on their hands and knees in the library of the Mark Twain House in March might have thought they were cleaning.

Chief curator Patti Philippon and curatorial associate Mallory Howard were, in fact, doing a bit of dusting. The two women are the Twain museum's entire curatorial staff, and when it comes to passing menial tasks down the chain, they run out of links fast.

But their primary mission was to inventory the books in the library of the Victorian Gothic house on Farmington Avenue where Samuel Clemens, who published as Mark Twain, and his family lived from 1874 to 1891.

As volunteer tour guides patiently explain to the 70,000 people who visit the home each year, the books in the ornate library are of Clemens' era and interests, but are not actually the valuable editions he owned or had personally read.

"That turned out not to be the case," said Howard.

As they rummaged through the stand-in books, Howard and Philippon were stunned to find a long unaccounted-for book that had in fact been owned, or at least read, by Clemens. The book had appeared on previous inventories so the staff knew it existed, but as in many American homes, they didn't exactly know where it was.

"It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen very often and when it does it's just amazing," Philippon said.

While the two women were thrilled to find the book, Howard hit the literary jackpot when she later examined the copy of "Boat Life In Egypt and Nubia," a travel book by William C. Prime that Clemens detested.

There in the margins of many pages were scribbled notes, often acerbic or sarcastic, that Howard was almost certain had been written by Clemens as he read the book more than a century ago.

While perhaps mundane to most people, the discovery is the kind of thing that quickens the pulse of literary types. Appropriately called marginalia, scholars study it to get a glimpse into the thoughts of great writers.

"These are his own off-the-cuff, unedited thoughts," Philippon said. "It gives people an insight into him and what he really thought."

"Boat Life" occupies a unique niche in both Clemens' career and his relationship with Hartford. Twain's "Innocents Abroad," published in 1869, is his humorous account of a boat trip he took two years before through Europe and the Middle East.

It was his biggest-selling book during his lifetime and brought him to Hartford for the first time, where his publisher was based. And he devoted an entire chapter to savagely satirizing Prime and his book. Scholars have lusted to see Clemens' copy.

They will not be disappointed. After one overwrought passage, Clemens wrote, "This person was drunk."

Howard is intimately familiar with Clemens marginalia. She had worked as a tour guide and intern at the Mark Twain House & Museum before being hired after graduating last year with a bachelor's degree in American history from Central Connecticut State University.

As an intern, Howard was assigned the task of reviewing a collection of about 300 Clemens-owned books it acquired in the mid-1990s and for the first time cataloging the marginalia. Howard knows that most people would find it tedious going through thousands of pages in hundred of books searching for every pencil stroke and deciphering nearly illegible comments.

But she is the kind of person who can, unprompted, interrupt a conversation with a wistful, "Oh, I love marginalia," and said she couldn't wait to get started.

"I do geek out," Howard said. "This project was perfect for me."

To confirm the "Boat Life" find, scans of the marginalia were sent to Twain experts around the country.

Alan Gribben, a Twain library and marginalia expert at Auburn University in Montgomery, Ala., responded simply, "Wow."

From Your Nautical Side

Another hint...or what?

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The Nautical Roots of 9 Common Phrases

The Vikings, Columbus, the Pilgrims … they all arrived here by ship. So it stands to reason that some of the phrases we use today were born on the high seas. While sources differ on the roots of many sayings, others have a clear path to the days of sailing across the ocean. Here’s a look at 9 family-friendly phrases that likely came from the mouths of sailors.


1. Clean Bill of Health


The “Age of Sail” in the 18th and early 19th centuries was a glorious time in naval history marked by many epic battles on the high seas, but it was also a time of widespread disease. In order to receive permission to dock at a foreign port, ships were often required to show a bill of health—a document that stated the medical condition of their previous port of call, as well as that of everyone aboard. A “clean bill of health” certified that the crew and their previous port were free from the plague, cholera and other epidemics. Today, a person with a “clean bill of health” has passed a doctor’s physical or other medical examination.


2. In the Doldrums


During the Age of Sail, “The Doldrums” were stretches of ocean north and south of the equator that were infamous for their light winds. If a vessel was caught there, it could languish for days or even weeks waiting for the wind to pick up, which made for a very bored crew. Eventually, The Doldrums became so well known that the name was applied to any area with light winds. Today, someone who is “in the doldrums” is either listless or depressed.


3. Three Sheets to the Wind


Many people are surprised to learn that this expression for drunkenness was born on the high seas. “Sheet” is the nautical term for the rope that controls the tension on a square sail. If the sheets are loose on a three-masted ship, then the sails will flap uselessly in the wind, and the ship will drift out of control until the situation is corrected. Thus, the modern phrase “three sheets to the wind” has come to signify a person who is intoxicated to the point of being out of control.


4. Filibuster


The roots of the term “filibuster” can be traced to the pirates who prowled the shipping trade routes in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The Dutch word for pirate was vrijbuiter—a word that eventually led to the French term flibustier and the Spanish term filibustero. The British, however, pronounced it filibuster.

So how did the word for pirate became associated with obstructionist political tactics? It’s still a bit of a mystery, but some historians speculate that, since pirates were an incessant, obstructing nuisance, they effectively blocked trade in many areas, just as politicians try to block legislation today.

5. Chew the Fat


Before refrigeration, salted beef and pork were staple foods aboard sailing vessels because they could be stored for long periods without spoiling. However, they were also tough and extremely difficult to eat. It often took a great deal of chewing just to soften up the meat and make it edible, which took a lot of time. So, in the spirit of multi-tasking, men would gather to discuss the day’s events while they chewed their fatty, salt-cured meat. According to this theory, whenever people get together to gossip or chat, we say that they are “chewing the fat.”


6. Slush Fund


Most people think this term originated in the smoke-filled boardrooms of corporate America. Surprisingly, however, it can be traced back to some clever ship cooks who saved the slushy mix of fat and grease that was left over after every meal.
The slush would be stowed away in a secret hiding place until the ship returned to port. The cooks would then sell the fat to candle makers and other merchants, earning themselves a tidy sum in the process. Thus, the term “slush fund” refers to an illicit cash reserve.


7. By and Large



A sailing vessel was considered seaworthy if it could sail both “by” (into the wind) and “large” (with the wind). This term has come to mean “generally speaking” in modern parlance.


8. Groggy



Along with salted beef and water, the British Royal Navy issued sailors a daily ration of rum to keep them happy during long months at sea. And, not surprisingly, the men would often save up several days’ worth of their rations before consuming it in one long binge, which frequently resulted in insubordination. In 1740, hoping to reduce the number of alcohol-fueled discipline problems, British Admiral Edward Vernon ordered all vessels to dilute their daily rum ration with water. Vernon was known as “Old Grog” because he always wore a coat made out of grogram, a coarse material that was stiffened with gum. Consequently, the diluted rum drink that he created became known as grog, and sailors who drank too much of it were said to feel “groggy.” Today, people who are overly tired, lightheaded or generally inebriated are still referred to as groggy.


9. Under the Weather


Keeping watch onboard sailing ships was a boring and tedious job, but the worst watch station was on the “weather” (windward) side of the bow. The sailor who was assigned to this station was subject to the constant pitching and rolling of the ship. By the end of his watch, he would be soaked from the waves crashing over the bow. A sailor who was assigned to this unpleasant duty was said to be “under the weather.” Sometimes, these men fell ill and died as a result of the assignment, which is why today “under the weather” is used to refer to someone suffering from an illness. A related theory claims that ill sailors were sent below deck (or “under the weather”) if they were feeling sick.

Why Do The Brits Hate Us?

50 Most Annoying Americanisms

Why do they hate us (U.S. citizens)?

The most common answer has always been that they hate our freedom, but I have breaking news from across the pond: It might be because of our language.

The BBC recently posted an article on the 50 most noted (a polite British way of saying annoying) Americanisms.

Dare I say that I must be British at heart since they make many excellent points, including:

Reach out instead of “ask.”

It is what it is, which is what it is: a phrase that says NOTHING.

Where’s it at? instead of the grammatically correct “Where is it?”

Ridiculousity, which the contributor hopes is being done tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn’t bet on that–based on how often I hear the next one.

Physicality, which isn’t a word despite its growing use. (Note: People in the U.S. love to make up -ality words since it makes them sound so smart, at least to those who think anything ever uttered instantly becomes an acceptable word.)

Least worst option; the contributor suggests asking what the “most best option” might be.

Going forward instead of the standard “in the future.”


I could go on, but I don’t want anyone to get his knickers in a bunch.


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What is with the Peanuts cartoons? A hint of something coming soon, perhaps?

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Psssst - The answer to the question posed a while back is - William Wordsworth. Your parting gifts are in the mail...

Is America Misnomer of a Moniker?

I don’t get it. Why are the terms United States and America used interchangeably?

The United States is part of America, which is why it’s called the United States of America! It is not America any more than France is Europe, Sudan is Africa, Chile is America, or Australia is Australia. Oh wait, scratch that last one.

America is split into two continents, North America and South America, and the two continents are divided into separate nations, one of which is called United States.

America and United States are not interchangeable.

I know. I know. I can almost hear the descriptivists out there, typing fervently on their keyboards:

Well, Paul Revere first referred to the United States as America in 1751, and famous author William Cullen Bryant often referred to the United States as America. Usage gained even more popularity in the 20th century. Therefore, its use is completely acceptable.

Yeah, yeah. It’s not always about usage. Sometimes, it’s about clarity, and it doesn’t make sense to refer to one nation on a continent (or, in this case, two continents) as the continent itself.

It almost makes me want to move to America, I mean Canada.

Two Niggling Questions Answered By OED

Between you and me or you and I?

A common mistake in spoken English is to say ‘between you and I’, as in this sentence:

X It’s a tiny bit boring, between you and I.

In standard English, it’s grammatically correct to say ‘between you and me’ and incorrect to say ‘between you and I’. The reason for this is that a preposition such as between should be followed by an objective pronoun (such as me, him, her, and us) rather than a subjective pronoun (such as I, he, she, and we). Saying ‘between you and I’ is grammatically equivalent to saying ‘between him and she’, or ‘between we’, which are both clearly wrong.

People make this mistake because they know it’s not correct to say, for example, ‘John and me went to the shops’. They know that the correct sentence would be ‘John and I went to the shops’. But they then mistakenly assume that the words ‘and me’ should be replaced by ‘and I’ in all cases.

Remember: the correct expression is ‘between you and me’:

√ It’s a tiny bit boring, between you and me.



Bored by, of, or with?

Which of these expressions should you use: is one of them less acceptable than the others?
Do you ever get bored with eating out all the time?

Delegates were bored by the lectures.

He grew bored of his day job.

The first two constructions, bored with and bored by, are the standard ones. The third, bored of, is more recent than the other two and it’s become extremely common. In fact, the Oxford English Corpus contains almost twice as many instances of bored of than bored by. It represents a perfectly logical development of the language, and was probably formed on the pattern of expressions such as tired of or weary of. Nevertheless, some people dislike it and it’s not fully accepted in standard English. It’s best to avoid using it in formal writing.


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On this day in 1802, (Insert your guess here)completed the sonnet, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," one of his best known short poems.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Good night Irene

Now that Irene has left us we are breathing easier. Our biggest inconvenience was lack of power. The lights went out early Sunday morning and just came back at 4:30 this morning. But there are a lot more folks worse off than us. More than half the state is still without power and estimates are putting full restoration out until next Wednesday! WheW1

So... for today just this short post.

Oops! Old Navy T-shirts come complete with grammatical mistake

BY Nina Mandell
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Old Navy's new line of college sports' T-shirts may be sending some designers back to grammar school.

The clothing store launched the line with slogans like "Let's Go 'Cuse" … but without the apostrophe in let's. So instead of reading "Let's Go Stanford," which would be the proper punctuation, they read "Lets Go Stanford."

Emails to Old Navy's parent company, Gap, were not immediately returned.

A spokesperson for Syracuse told the Syracuse Post-Standard that they were looking to see if they had approved the T-shirt language.

Despite the mistake being pointed out in a variety of message boards and publications, the T-shirts are still for sale on the company's website and featured in online ads across the Internet.

Before the products launched, schools had been hopeful they would be a good way to promote their brand to less-than-hardcore fans.

15 Words

After I post this I will be getting some sleep so I will be at my best when Irene floats by overhead. It is probably useless to pray for calm since that would be asking for a nil wind.

*****


The Global Language Monitor estimates that there are currently 1,009,753 words in the English language. Despite this large lexicon, many nuances of human experience still leave us tongue-tied. And that’s why sometimes it’s necessary to turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are fifteen foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.

2. Yuputka (Ulwa)
A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin.

3. Slampadato (Italian)
Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.

4. Luftmensch (Yiddish)
There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person.

5. Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.

6. Cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish)
A word that would aptly describe the prevailing fashion trend among American men under 40, it means one who wears the shirt tail outside of his trousers.

7. Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
“Hmm, now where did I leave those keys?” he said, pana po’oing. It means to scratch your head in order to help you remember something you’ve forgotten.

8. Gumusservi (Turkish)
Meteorologists can be poets in Turkey with words like this at their disposal. It means moonlight shining on water.

9. Vybafnout (Czech)
A word tailor-made for annoying older brothers—it means to jump out and say boo.

10. Mencolek (Indonesian)
You know that old trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it.

11. Faamiti (Samoan)
To make a squeaking sound by sucking air past the lips in order to gain the attention of a dog or child.

12. Glas wen (Welsh)
A smile that is insincere or mocking. Literally, a blue smile.

13. Bakku-shan (Japanese)
The experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.

14. Boketto (Japanese)
It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.

15. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

Many of the words above can be found in BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book ‘The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.’

Our 300th Post - Crash Blossoms?

“Crash Blossoms” are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

One of my favorite examples is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.”

Here are a few more - all true! Enjoy!


Relatives charged in murder of 10-year-old found locked in box

From CNN 29 July 2011


2 tubers killed, 1 critical after lightning strike

From The Detroit Free Press 25 July 2011


Tsunami alert sparks evacuations from Hawaii to Easter Island

From The Guardian 11 March 2011


Germany E.coli cucumber death toll rises to 14

From Reuters 30 May 2011


Celts to build Russell statue pushed by Obama

From NBA.com 4 May 2011


Airline drops salads from Europe flights

From CNN 3 June 2011


Irish priest makes history by marrying own son

From IrishCentral.com 1 May 2010

Had Any Good Dreams Lately?

Everybody dreams, but most of the time our dreams are nothing more than the subconscious mind processing thoughts and feelings from our waking hours. Yet, every so often a creative individual has a vivid dream which inspires them to put pen to paper and create a great work of literature. Below are five examples of famous novels that were inspired by their author’s sleeping mind.

Had any good dreams lately?

1 Twilight Stephenie Meyer

In June of 2003, suburban Arizona mother Stephenie Meyer woke up from an intense dream in which two young lovers were lying together in a meadow, discussing why their love could never work. On her website, Meyers says, “One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.”

This dream turned out to be the very basis of what would become one of the most popular series in Young Adult fiction of all time. To date, Meyer’s novel has sold 17 million copies worldwide, spent over 91 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and has spawned four subsequent novels and four big budget Hollywood movies.

2 Misery
Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most prolific and popular writers of our time, so it may surprise you to learn that he came up with plot concepts and graphic images for a few of his novels while sound asleep. In the case of Misery, King describes falling asleep on an airplane and having a dream about a fan kidnapping her favorite author and holding him hostage. When he awoke, King was so anxious to capture the story of his dream that he sat at the airport and frantically wrote the first 40-50 pages of the novel. Misery became a best-seller that inspired a successful movie and earned Kathy Bates, who played deranged fan Annie Wilkes, a Best Actress Academy Award and Golden Globe.

King has been quoted as saying, “I’ve always used dreams the way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back.” He credits his dreams with giving him the concepts for several of his novels and for helping him to solve troublesome moments in the writing of his novel IT as well. (Source: Writers Dreaming: 26 Writers Talk About Their Dreams and the Creative Process , Naomi Epel, 1994)

3 Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

In 1816, Mary Shelley was just eighteen years old when she spent the summer with her lover (and future husband) Percy Shelley, at Lord Byron’s estate in Switzerland. One night, as they sat around the fire, the conversation turned to the subject of reanimating human bodies using electrical currents. Shelley went to bed that night with images of corpses coming back to life swirling through her head; as she slept, she clearly saw Frankenstein’s monster and imagined the circumstances under which he had been created.

Shelley woke up and began to write a short story about her dream. Later that year her husband, also a writer, encouraged her to expand her story into a full-length novel. She complied, and the great literary masterpiece Frankenstein was published when Shelley was just nineteen. Incidentally, Lord Byron was also inspired by their fireside chat; his resulting work, Vampyre, is considered to be the predecessor of all romantic vampire-human love stories.




4 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson


Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson was already a successful writer when he had a dream about a doctor with split personality disorder and woke up gripped by a creative frenzy. Stevenson quickly documented the scenes from his dream and then went on to write a first draft of his novel in less than three days. As was his custom, he allowed his wife to review the draft and, using her suggestions, edited and rewrote sections of the work (allegedly fueled by copious amounts of cocaine). He finished the entire manuscript in an astounding ten days, from the moment he woke up from his dream.

The story of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has withstood the test of time, garnering dozens of stage and screen adaptations to this day.



5 Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach

In 1959, writer Richard Bach, an avid aviator, heard what he called a “disembodied voice” whisper the title of this novella into his ear. He immediately wrote the first few chapters of the work before running out of inspiration. He shelved the half-finished manuscript and it wasn’t until eight years later, after he had a dream about the now-famous titular seagull, that he was able to complete what is one of the most profound and philosophically-moving novellas ever written.

Bach’s fable was a surprise best-seller, eventually surpassing the hardcover sales record, set by Gone With The Wind. Though both his book and the manner in which it was conceived seem to have a strong connection to psychic phenomenon, Bach believes that good writing is more dependent on hard work than on anything metaphysical. He is quoted as saying, “You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.”

Pass The Eggcorns, Please!

A friend recently pointed me to a linguistic term that I hadn’t seen before: eggcorn (or egg corn). It seems that in certain dialects eggcorn is a homonym for acorn. It turns out that there are hundreds of these eggcorns in common use. But what exactly is it, in linguistic terms?

What Is An Eggcorn?

It may be simpler to define it by what it’s not.

It’s not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It’s not a malapropism, because "egg corn" and "acorn" are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like "allegory" for "alligator," "oracular" for "vernacular" and "fortuitous" for "fortunate" are merely similar in sound

It’s not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

Nor is an eggcorn simply a mistake. Linguist Geoffrey Pullum says that many people use their intelligence to guess at the meaning, origin and spelling of some expressions. It’s just that they guess wrong. He adds: ‘They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to lexical material already known.’

Eggcorn Examples

More and more linguists and language lovers have gone eggcorn hunting. The results of their searches have been gathered in the Eggcorn Database, which is maintained by Chris Waigl. I had a great time browsing the database, which now contains almost 600 entries.

Some examples of eggcorns include:

a tough road to hoe (a tough row to hoe)

mind-bottling (mind boggling)

antidotal evidence (anecdotal evidence)

bonified (bona fide)

bread and breakfast (bed and breakfast)

damp squid (damp squib)

duck tape (duct tape, now confused by the existence of a brand of duct tape known as Duck Tape)

fast majority (vast majority)

flaw in the ointment (fly in the ointment)

hone in (home in)

internally grateful (eternally grateful)

mute point (moot point)

old timers disease (Alzheimers Disease)

on the spurt of the moment (on the spur of the moment)

outer body experience (out of body experience)

put the cat before the horse (put the cart before the horse)

throws of passion (throes of passion)

windshield factor (wind chill factor)



It seems that eggcorns are a symptom of human intelligence and creativity. And they’re certainly fun to read. Have you found any good eggcorns lately?

Another Dartk and Stormy Night

Once again it is time for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest!

Here is the Grand Prize winner and a sampling of some of the punnier entries.


Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Sue Fondrie

Oshkosh, WI

The winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Sue Fondrie, an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who works groan-inducing wordplay into her teaching and administrative duties whenever possible. Out of school, she introduces two members of the next generation to the mysteries of Star Trek, Star Wars, and--of course--the art of the bad pun.

Prof. Fondrie is the 29th grand prize winner of the contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982. The contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began his “Paul Clifford” with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

At 26 words, Prof. Fondrie’s submission is the shortest grand prize winner in Contest history, proving that bad writing need not be prolix, or even very wordy.


Winner: Crime

Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler--who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne--or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he’d have to stop and smell the Roses.

Mark Wisnewski
Flanders, NJ


Vile Puns

Runner-Up:

Monroe Mills' innovative new fabric-dyeing technique was a huge improvement over stone-washing: denim apparel was soaked in color and cured in an 800-degree oven, and the company's valued young dye department supervisor was as skilled as they came; yes, no one could say Marilyn was a normal jean baker.

Marvin Veto

Greensboro, NC


Detective Kodiak plucked a single hair from the bearskin rug and at once understood the grisly nature of the crime: it had been a ferocious act, a real honey, the sort of thing that could polarize a community, so he padded quietly out the back to avoid a cub reporter waiting in the den.

Joe Wyatt

Amarillo, TX


Adventure


Runner-Up:

Sensing somehow a scudding lay in the offing, Skipper Bob tallied his tasks: reef the mains'l, mizzen, and jib, strike and brail the fores'l, mizzen stays'l and baggywrinkles, bowse the halyards, mainsheets, jacklines and vangs, turtle and belay fast the small cock, flemish the taffrail warps, batten the booby hatch, lay by his sou'wester, and find the bailing bucket.

Mike Mayfield

Austin, TX

Ali Theeva and the Forty Babs

We haven't had a good spoonerism in a long time! Here you go!

Ali Theeva and the Forty Babs


by Colonel Stoopnagle


Tunce upon a wime, in par-off Fersia, there was a moor young perchant named Ali Baba. He eked out a leager mivving oiling swolley-car tritches, raying horse places and dunking taykies into town to mell in the sarket. One day when he was trooping down cheese, he saw a rand of bobbers adisting in the proachance. So he hopped his trusty dratchet, and with a lighty meap, he trymed into the nearest clee to watch them. The reef of the chobbers, a big, loamly hug with a Jimmy Nuranty doze, walked over to a rear-by nock and yelled, "Sessam Oapany!" whereupon a door bung swack and his whole thang of geaves entered. In a mupple of kinnets they emerged. The creader lied, "Sess Cloazamee!" and the shore swung dutt. (Wasn't that a trifty nick?)

Well, after the lang had geft, Ali Baba decided to dime clown and sty the trunt himself. He yelled, "Soapen Essamee!" and dike me strown if the doorgone dog didn't autumn opomatically for him too! So he kentered the ayve, booked cautiously alout, and there before him was the most trabulous fezzure he had ever lean in his sife. Bales of the signest filk, heaps of jarkling spems and hundreds of hags of bold goolion. Here was something for Believe-it-or-rip Notley! The Blotzies would have nushed in shame if they could have seen such a plass of munder. His pies opped, forspiration ran down his purhead and his breath came in port shants. He thought he was going to have trummock stubble. But he eked his keppelibrium, yelled, "Stoaze Clessamee!" stabbed all the gruff he could carry and han for roam.

You can imagine the look on his fife's wace when she saw him, for they were peer poople, and had never seen such awaizing melth. "Oh, you crunderful weeture!" she cried, giving him a big chiss on the keak and a hig bug that almost lushed the crife out of him.

Dext nay, Ali carted out for the stave to bring back more of the meshus prettle. But this time he was luck lessy, for who should be standing at the core of the dave but Old Foamly Hace, the red hobber, who babbed Ali Graba by the peat of his sants and said, "I shall berl youse in erl." (You see, he was a Boyklyn brook.)

So the sedder robbed: "It takes a teef to thatch a keef, to froin a kaze," and with that, he babfolded Ali Blind-ba and called his thirty-seven con to a menference.

"Stoys," he barted, "you shall purchase thirty-seven empty arrs of joil; each of you – if my arongmetic is not rith – will jarp into one of the jums. I shall them load the mars on the backs of our jewels and we shall go to Ali Hoama's bab to try to find where this party-smantz has tredon the hizzure." Ali Waba binced; suppose his wife should tool them the treth!

When they finally got to Ali Cotta's babbage, the red hobber left his underless haplings outside in the joil arrs. (Gritty preecy, don't you think? But they were rasty nobbers, so "let the punishment crit the fime."* ) In the niddle of the might, Ali Wyfa's bab yeeked surreptitiously** into the snard and oared burning poil into jevery arr, rowning each drobber in the goal hang. Jewel, of course, but nevertheless crust.

Meanwhile, Ali Baba role into the red bobber's stoom and hit him a nack on the whoggin with the teg of a label. That character will tawze no more crubble, for he's in a kermanent poama. In other durds, he's wed.

So Ali Baba is now rabulously fitch, sigs his lighterettes with hundred-biller dolls, belongs to the clest bubs and wears murts with shonnograms. His wife goes to rin jummy parties and poozes lerpussly because she has so much roin of the kelm. Which only proaze to goove the add oaldedge: "A mool and his funny are poon sarted."

* Subert & Gillivan.

** See Dickture's Webshunary.

Add These To Your Collection

You probably know that numismatists study and collect coins and currency, and you may even know that philatelists study and collect stamps. But other groups of collectors have their own less-heralded nouns, too. Here are just a few other words you can break out the next time you meet a collector:

1. Sucrologists collect those little sugar packets that you see in restaurants.

2. Deltiologists study and collect postcards. The word comes from the Greek word deltion, the diminutive of deltos, or “writing tablet.”

3. Phillumenists collect matchbooks and other match-related items. In the 1980s, The Guinness Book of World Records crowned Japan’s Teiichi Yoshizawa as the world’s top phillumenist thanks to his collection of over 700,000 different labels.

4. Pannapictagraphists could probably stand to come up with an easier name for their hobby: collecting comic books.

5. Vexillophiles collect and display flags.

6. Remember George Costanza’s doomed fiancée Susan on Seinfeld? She was a plangonologist, or collector of dolls.

7. Velologists collect and study expired specimens of the tax discs that British vehicles have been required to display since the beginning of 1921.

8. Arenophiles collect sand samples from around the world. They particularly prize rare samples of black or green sand from certain beaches.

9 & 10. Tegestologists have a great excuse to spend time in bars since they collect coasters or beermats. They should probably team up with labeorphilists, or collectors of beer bottles.

11. Falerists study and collect medals, badges, pins, and other military and civilian awards and decorations.

12. Scutelliphiles are similar to falerists, but they collect souvenir patches and badges.

13. Lotologists collect lottery tickets, both used and unused. In 2006 reports claimed that retired U.S. Navy diver Dennis Morse had one of the world’s largest lotology collections. It included over 250,000 losing scratch-off tickets.

14. Arctophiles have the cuddliest collections; they stockpile teddy bears.

15. Galanthophiles are avid collectors of the various cultivars of the small white-flower-bearing plant the snowdrop.

16. Tyrosemiophiles collect cheese labels.

17. Fusilatelists collect phone cards issued by telecom companies. The word is apparently largely used in the U.K. On this side of the pond, calling card collectors are known as telegerists.

18. Helixophiles probably throw the best parties; they study and collect corkscrews.

19. Brandophilists likely have to make at least one pilgrimage to Havana. It’s only fitting since they collect cigar bands.

20. Entredentolignumologists may or may not exist, but some books and several websites use this mouthful to describe collectors of toothpick boxes.

A Short But Thoughtful Post

Bringing Home Some Plurals

This popped up recently, and I batted it around. The correct plural of the baseball term “RBI” (“run batted in”) is “RBIs,” even though the word that’s plural when it’s spelled out (“runs”) is at the start of the initialism. This does NOT mean that we’re actually saying “run batted ins.”

It just doesn’t work that way. By the same reasoning, why would more than one “IOU” be “IOUs” — there is NO plural in the expression “I owe you,” unless it’s more than one “you,” which is still “you.”

Fortunately, there are other examples of this sort of thing, as pointed out in “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” The plural of “WMD” (“weapon of mass destruction”) is “WMDs.” If you have been using “WMD” as the plural, you probably are one of those folks who feel strongly that “RBI” also is correct.

The other common one is “POWs” for “prisoners of war.” If you have been insisting on usage such as “there are still thousands of POW,” you probably will never change no matter what I say.

For the rest of you, form the plural of an initialism or an acronym by adding “s” — no matter what it stands for.

In general, other than in science- and math-related fields, simple, Americanized (or Anglicized) plurals of adopted “foreign” words are best. In most other instances, then, use “indexes” instead of “indices,” “appendixes” instead of “appendices,” “formulas” (not “formulae”), “spectrums” (not “spectra”), “funguses” (not “fungi”), “cactuses” (not “cacti”) and “octopuses” (not “octopi”).

Some additional considerations, mostly inspired by (or lifted from) “Garner’s Modern American Usage” by Bryan A. Garner:

The word “indices” is considered “permissible in the sense ‘indicators.’ ” Why not just use “indicators,” then?

Webster’s gives either “fungi” or “funguses” for the plural, implying that they’re equally acceptable. Again, I vote for the consistency of “funguses,” if for no other reason than not having to decide how to pronounce “fungi.”

The dictionary also offers both “cactuses” and “cacti,” but unless you’re a botanist, stay with “cactuses.”

As for “octopi,” Garner says that’s not even correct in its language of origin. He says the proper Greek plural is “octopodes.”

As I’ve said before, once English “borrows” a word, it often gets customized. In this case, “octopuses” grabs me, “octopi” doesn’t.

Looking Up Up

This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].



It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?



At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and fix UP the old car.



At other times, this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.



To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.



And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!



To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.



If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.



When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaks UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now . . . my time is UP!



Oh . . . one more thing: What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?



U

P!


Did that one crack you UP?



What you do with this information is UP to you.



Now I'll shut UP!

Why is that one person giving me half the peace symbol and yelling "UP yours!"?

Where Is A Good Saint When You Need One?

Did you ever wonder just how many saints there are? Or need one for a particular problem? Try calling on some of these.

St. Florian, Patron Saint of soap boilers.

St. Goar of Aquitaine, Patron Saint of champagne bottlers.

St. Martin of Tours, Patron Saint of geese.

I wonder if anyone on Donld Trump's show has ever prayed to St. John Bosco, the parton of apprentices.

Charles Borromeo, Apple Orchards.

Magnus of Füssen, Caterpillars.

Guy of Anderlecht, Animals with Horns.

Beer brewers, St. Augustine.

Catherine of Alexandria, patron of knife sharpeners.

St. Venerius, patron saint of lighthouse keepers.


And to finish off a very incompltere list...


Christopher: Truck Drivers

Adjutor: Yachtsmen

Dismas: Thieves

Vitus: Snakebites

Gabriel the Archangel: Stamp Collectors

Bartholomew: Tanners

Bernard of Montjoux: Skiers

Vincent Ferrer: Plumbers

Bartholomew: Plasterers

Nichola of Myra: Perfumors

Dunstan: Locksmiths

Theobald of Provins: Janitors

Joseph: House hunters

John the Baptist: Highways

Fiarce: Hemorrhoids

Mary Magdalene: Hairdressers

Anthony of Egypt: Grave diggers

Luke: Glassworkers

Bona of Pisa: Flight attendents

Vitus: Dog bites

Vitus: Dancers

Lawrence: Cooks

Eligius: Coin Collectors

Anne: Cemeteries

John Nepmucen: Bridges

Christopher: Bus drivers

Ambrose: Bees

Anthony of Egypt: Basket workers

Cosmas and Damian: Barbers

Elizabeth of Hungary: Bakers

Rene Goupil: Anesthetists

Genesius: Actors



And the last few are ones we may actually find interesting -

Librarians, libraries - Jerome, Catherine of Alexandria

Writers - Francis de Sales

Literature - St. Helena

and finally - There is good ole St. Robby, Patron saint of humor. I almost fell out of my chair when I learned that Robby is also the patron saint of insomniacs.

What The Heck Is A Paraprosdokian?

After an email from a friend I just had to look up paraprosdokian. Here is the definition:

"Figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently used in a humorous situation."

For example - "Where there's a will, I want to be in it," is a type of paraprosdokian.

Ok, so now enjoy!

1. Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list.

3. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.

5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

6. War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

8. Evening news is where they begin with 'Good Evening,' and then proceed to tell you why it isn't.

9. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

10. A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

11. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted paychecks.

12. Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says, 'In case of emergency, notify:' I put 'DOCTOR.'

13. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.

14. Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.

15. A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.

16. I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

17. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

18. Money can't buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with.

19. There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.

20. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.

21. You're never too old to learn something stupid.

22. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

23. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

24. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

25. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

26. Hospitality is making your guests feel at home even when you wish they were.

27. When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the Fire Department usually uses water.

Do You Use A Full Deck?

I am sure you have all used the expression "Not playing with a full deck." Looking for a different way to say it? Look no further...

A couple of knights short of a Crusade.

Knitting with one needle.

Life by Norman Rockwell, screenplay by Stephen King.

A few guppies short of an aquarium.

Living proof that nature does not abhor a vacuum.

Marching to a different kettle of fish.

Mind on vacation - mouth working overtime.

No coins in the fountain.

A room temperature IQ.

Not the sharpest crayon in the box.

One horseman short of an apocalypse.

Out in left field with a catcher's mitt on.

Body by Fisher - Brains by Mattel.

Skating on the wrong side of the ice.

Goalie for the dart team.

Useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

Gives a lot of bull for somebody who has no cattle.

Just Asking

For Dave...

Here are some more of those questions that flutter by like glowing, green butterflies while waiting for sleep to arrive.

A stitch in time saves nine what?

Are you breaking the law if you drive past those road signs that say "Do Not Pass"?

Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?

What do chickens think we taste like?

What do people in China call their good plates?

What do batteries run on?

Did Noah keep his bees in archives?

What hair color do they put on the driver's license of a bald man?

Do jellyfish get gas from eating jellybeans?

Did Roman paramedics refer to IV's as "4's"?

Do witches use spell-check?

When they first invented the clock, how did they know what time it was to set it to?

Where in the nursery rhyme does it say Humpty Dumpty is an egg?

How many weeks are there in a light year?

If a food processor slices and dices food, what does a word processor do?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a picture of a thousand words worth?

If all the world is a stage, where are the audience sitting?

If the product says "Do not use if seal is broken", how are you supposed to open it and use it?

If your car says Dodge on the front of it, do you really need a horn?

Why is it you must wait until night to call it a day?

Is the nose the scenter of the face?

Just A Random Thought

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were known for their physical comedy, but they had their share of fun with language, too. In one scene in the 1931 short “Our Wife,” Ollie is trying to make Stan understand that his planned elopement is supposed to be a secret: “Nobody must know about it. It’s strictly on the qui vive.”

What he was trying to say was “on the q.t.” (The right phrase wouldn’t have helped Stan, of course.)

In this phrase, which means “quietly” or “secretly,” “q.t” is simply an abbreviation of “quiet.” According to “American Slang,” its first recorded appearance was in 1884.

“Qui vive,” on the other hand, is a French phrase used by sentries, a form of “Who goes there?”

What it’s really asking is “Whose side are you on?” — literally, “Long live who?”

I suspect the penalty for a wrong answer could be severe.

A Phrase Bugged Me

I came across a relatively familiar phrase recently and I started wondering where it came from.

Will nilly

Here's what I found -

Willy-nilly

Meaning

This term has two, slightly differing, but related meanings: 'whether it is with or against your will' and 'in an unplanned, haphazard fashion'. We tend to use the latter of these meanings today; the former was the accepted meaning.when the term was first coined.
Origin

There are many spellings in early citations, which relate to the 'with or against your will' meaning of the phrase - 'wille we, nelle we', 'will he, nill he', 'will I, nill I', etc. The expression also appears later as 'nilly willy' or 'willing, nilling', or even, in a later humourous version 'william nilliam'. The early meaning of the word nill is key to this. In early English nill was the opposite of will a contraction of 'ne will'. That is, will meant to want to do something, nill meant to want to avoid it. So, combining the willy - 'I am willing' and nilly - 'I am unwilling' expresses the idea that it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

The Latin phrase 'nolens, volens' means the same thing, although it isn't clear whether the English version is a simple translation of that.

The second, 'in an undecided, haphazard manner', meaning of willy-nilly arrives from the first. The changeable 'this way, then that way' imagery of willy-nilly behaviour fits with our current 'haphazard' meaning of the term.

There's also a, now archaic, phrase 'hitty missy' that had a similar derivation. That comes from 'hit he, miss he'.

The phrase dates back at least a millennium, with the earliest known version being the Old English text, Aelfric's Lives of Saints, circa 1000:

"Forean the we synd synfulle and sceolan beon eadmode, wille we, nelle we."

Shakespeare was familiar with, and apparently quite fond of, the expression in various forms. He used it in The Taming of the Shrew, 1596:

Petruchio: [To Katharina]

Thus in plain terms: your father hath consented
That you shall be my wife; your dowry 'greed on;
And, Will you, nill you, I will marry you.
[I.e. I will marry you, whether you like it or not.]

and again, in Hamlet:

First Clown: Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here stands the man; good; if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes.
[I.e. If a man chooses to drown he enters the water, if he chooses not, he leaves.]

The 'undecided' meaning of the expression appears to have spawned the later 'shilly-shally'. The OED is a little lax in dating this from the end of the 19th century. They cite Sir Walter Besant's novel The Orange Girl, 1898:

"Let us have no more shilly shally, willy nilly talk."

That makes the connection between 'willy-nilly' and 'shilly-shally' apparent. There are literally thousands of 18th and 19th century pre-datings of the phrase, in various newspapers and works of literature; for example, The Adventures of Dick Hazard, 1755:

Where I quartered, a good buxom Widow kept the house; and I had her before I was ten days in town --D-- me. She knew things better than to stand Shilly Shally.

More Jerry

Three followers asked via email for more of Jerry Coleman. OK, here you go!


"If Pete Rose brings the Reds in first, they ought to bronze him and put him in cement."

"It's a base hit on the error by Roberts."

"There's a deep fly ball... Winfield goes back, back... his head hits the wall ... it's rolling towards second base."

"Thomas is racing for it, but McCovey is there and can't get his glove to it. That play shows the inexperience, not on Thomas' part, but on the part of Willie McC ... well, not on McCovey's part either."

"They throw Winfield out at second, but he's safe."

"Jesus Alou is in the on-deck circus."

"Kent Abbott is in the on-deck circuit."

"There is someone warming up in the Giants' bullpen, but he's obscured by his number."

"Johnny Grubb slides into second with a standup double."

"All the Padres need is a flyball in the air."

"Davis fouls out to third in fair territory."

"There's a shot up the alley. Oh, it's just foul."

"The new Haitian baseball can't weigh more than four ounces or less than five."

"That's the fourth extra base hit for the Padres -- two doubles and a triple."

"Montreal leads Atlanta by three, 5-1."

"You might want to put this in the back of your craw and think about it."

"Last night's homer was Willie Stargell's 399th career home run, leaving him one shy of 500."

"The first pitch to Tucker Ashford is grounded into left field. No, wait a minute. It's ball one. Low and outside."

"That's Hendrick's 19th home run. One more and he reaches double figures."

"Well, it looks like the all-star balloting is about over, especially in the National and American Leagues."

"The Padres, after winning the first game of the doubleheader, are ahead here in the top of the fifth and hoping for a split."

"At the end of six innings of play, it's Montreal 5, Expos 3."

"Tony Taylor was one of the first acquisitions that the Phillies made when they reconstructed their team. They got him from Philadelphia."

"Mike Caldwell, the Padres' right-handed southpaw, will pitch tonight."

"The ex-left-hander Dave Roberts will be going for Houston."

"Hector Torrez, how can you communicate with Enzo Hernandez when he speaks Spanish and you speak Mexican ?"

"Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen."

At Royals Stadium: "The sky is so clear today you can see all the way to Missouri"

"I sure hope you're staying alive for the upcoming Dodgers series."

"National League umpires wear inside chest protesters."

"The Phillies beat the Cubs today in a doubleheader. That puts another keg in the Cubs' coffin."

"Sanguillen is totally unpredictable to pitch to because he's so unpredicatable."

"Ron Guidry is not very big, maybe 140 pounds, but he has an arm like a lion."

"The way he's swinging the bat, he won't get a hit until the 20th century."

"There's two heads to every coin."

"Billy Almon has all of his inlaw and outlaws here this afternoon."

"If ever an error had "F" written on it, that grounder did."

"If Rose's streak was still intact, with that single to left, the fans would be throwing babies out of the upper deck."

"He can be lethal death."

"Sometimes, big trees grow out of acorns. I think I heard that from a squirrel." "Gonzo leaps like a giraffe and grabs it."

"Hats off to drug abusers everywhere."

"That noise in my earphones knocked my nose off and I had to pick it up and find it."

"At the end, excitement maintained its hysteria."




"I've made a couple of mistakes I'd like to do over."
-Jerry Coleman

Tuning In To Sports

I watch a lot of baseball. Some of the funniest words I have ever heard come from the players and announcers of the game. Some just leave me speechless.

Enjoy.

THE WIS-DUMB OF YOGI

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra, the former NY Yankee catcher, is best known for saying things like this:

"Surprise me."
- on where his wife should have him buried.

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

"If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."

"If you can't imitate him, don't copy him."

"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."

"Baseball is 90% mental -- the other half is physical."

MORE DUMB QUOTES BY YOGI BERRA

"Do you mean now?"
- when asked for the time.

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

"I made a wrong mistake."

Jerry Coleman is also a former New York Yankees star and longtime San Diego Padres TV announcer. He's been the voice of the San Diego Padres for almost 30 years. "Oh, Doctor" and "You can hang a star on that baby" are his most famous phrases. But not his most memorable. You see, by comparison, Jerry makes fellow Yankee Yogi Berra seem like a master of the English language! Here are some of Jerry's best calls:

"It's a base hit on the error by Roberts."

"There's a deep fly ball... Winfield goes back, back... his head hits the wall ... it's rolling towards second base."

"Thomas is racing for it, but McCovey is there and can't get his glove to it. That play shows the inexperience, not on Thomas' part, but on the part of Willie McC ... well, not on McCovey's part either."

"They throw Winfield out at second, but he's safe."

"Mike Caldwell, the Padres' right-handed southpaw, will pitch tonight."

MORE DUMB QUOTES BY JERRY COLEMAN

"Hector Torrez, how can you communicate with Enzo Hernandez when he speaks Spanish and you speak Mexican ?"

"Rich Folkers is throwing up in the bullpen."

"And he slides into second with a stand-up double!"

I'll leave you with this pressing question - "Why does everybody stand up and sing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' when they're already there?"

Excellent Post From The Chicago Tribune

John Kass

June 26, 2011

President Barack Obama made the mother of all verbal gaffes last week as he invoked a fallen hero while talking to troops who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Naturally, his enemies moved to take advantage. But then, if one of Obama's Republican opponents had made such a gaffe, the Obamanites would grab it and twist it until the other guy screamed.

So the cycle began anew on Thursday.

"First time I saw the 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq," Obama said at Ft. Drum, in upstate New York. "When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there.

"I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn't receiving it posthumously," the president said.

But Sgt. Jared Monti didn't receive the nation's highest award from the president's hands.

Monti was killed in Afghanistan on June 21, 2006, repeatedly facing enemy fire as he tried to rescue a wounded comrade.

On Sept. 17, 2009, the president handed the Medal of Honor to Monti's parents. Obama apparently confused Monti with Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, who was the first living person to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Giunta was presented the award by Obama in November.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, in a statement acknowledging the presidential mistake, said: "At Ft. Drum, the president misspoke when discussing the first Medal of Honor he presented posthumously to Jared Monti. …"

It was neutrally phrased, but for all the verbiage, there was one thing missing:

An apology.

A simple "I'm sorry" would have been nice. But in politics, an apology is seen as a sign of weakness, which is why the non-apology apology has become a modern art form.

The game is all about being the first to slash. And so Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made one of the first cuts in an interview with CBS News.

"People make mistakes but ... when he is not scripted, mistakes seem to happen," Priebus said. "I think the president is a scripted, plasticized candidate and I think America is prepared to relieve him of his job in 2012."

Democrats will naturally be outraged, but have they forgotten how they flayed President George Bush for saying "they misunderestimate me," and discussing how people were "working hard to put food on your family"?

Bush served up all sorts of verbal goulash that got him in trouble. But after 9/11, there were new lines in Bush's face. His hair grew gray. He looked exhausted, and the ridicule came in waves.

Now look at Obama. What do you see?

His hair has gone gray. There are deepening lines in his face. He's exhausted. And when he misspeaks, the ridicule comes in waves.

Should politicians get called out for some of the ridiculous things they say?

Absolutely.

Google and the British Library

By Georgina Prodham

LONDON | Mon Jun 20, 2011 1:23pm EDT

(Reuters) - Google plans to digitize a quarter of a million books from the British Library's collections covering a period from the French Revolution to the end of slavery as part of its ambitious books project.

The search engine giant has already scanned 13 million books through partnerships with more than 40 libraries around the world, which it makes available through its search results.

The British Library project involves a selection of books published between 1700 and 1870, including feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette and an account of a stuffed hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange.

Google will bear the costs of digitization, and the items will then be available for full-text search, download and reading through Google Books as well as being searchable through the British Library's website and stored in its digital archive.

Google does not make any money from its library partnerships, but says the inclusion of material from books that have never been published online enriches its search results.

"Our aim at Google has always been to give people as much access to the world's information as is possible," Peter Barron, Google's head of external relations, told Reuters on Monday.

In Europe, Google only scans out-of-copyright books but its practice of scanning all books of its U.S. library partners has landed it in trouble with U.S. authors and publishers, who filed a lawsuit against Google in 2005 that is not yet settled.

Google was offering excerpts of books online without the permission of copyright holders, putting the onus on authors and rights holders to claim payments or to voice their objections.

The British Library works with a variety of partners and aims to have much of its collection of 150 million items online and available to the public by 2020.

A previous partnership with Microsoft resulted in the digitization of 65 million 19th century books, some of which are now available through an app for Apple's iPad launched earlier this month.

British Library Chief Executive Lynne Brindley told Reuters: "You can see we're on a long journey. This represents another significant milestone but there are plenty more to go."

My Favorite Short Story Writers

This is just a l;ist of my favorites. Have you any others to add?

10 Chuck Palahniuk

The author of “Fight Club” is not necessarily known as a “Short Story Writer,” however Palahniuk is a believer in the Ray Bradbury ritual of writing a short story every day. Many of his stories have ended up in his novels without the reader realizing they were originally independent tales. In one novel “haunted” he used a short story about a writers convention to bridge together 23 different short stories. This book features his infamous story “Guts” which has caused several people to faint when read aloud at book signings.

9 Washington Irving

Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”, both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra.

8 Isaac Asimov

Asimov is certainly one of the most prolific writers in the English language. He is known for many different works from his series “Foundation”, and “Fantastic Voyage”, to text books and everything in-between. He is primarily known as a science fiction writer, however he is one of the few people to have their writing span every major category of the Dewy Decimal System except Philosophy. He wrote an estimated 515 books in his lifetime. As far as writing short stories goes, he has 3 well known stories. “I, Robot”, “The Bicentennial Man”, and “The Last Question.” The first two have been turned into movies. He wrote 19 Short Story collections, spanning a total of 284.

7 Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is a very well known Science Fiction writer. He is famous for writing a short story every day, a ritual that many other writers have attempted to follow. He has written 11 novels, 3 of which are made up of loosely connected stories, and over 40 short story collections, for a grand total of over 400 short stories and novellas. But it’s not just quantity that earns him a place on this list. His best known short story “A Sound of Thunder”, is the origin of a common science fiction theme called “the butterfly effect”, it is also the most republished science fiction story of all time.

6 Stephen King

King is one of the most popular authors in America, and a very prolific writer as well. He is a huge fan of the short story. “1408″, “The Mist”, and “Hearts in Atlantis” are just a few of the 35 short stories he wrote that have been made into movies, though perhaps the most famous is “Stand By Me”. He has written 8 story collections and a total of 124 short stories and 17 Novellas in his career. He was also selected to be the editor of The Best American Short Stories of 2007, and also won the O. Henry Award in 1996.




5 J.D. Salinger

Salinger is known for his novel “Catcher in the Rye”, this is actually his only published novel. A very eccentric writer, he has written a great deal of material in his life, but much of it has never been seen by any one but him. He has 3 other books available to the public. “Nine Stories”, “Frannie and Zoey”, and “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction”. All 3 of these books are short story collections. He also has about 2 dozen other uncollected short stories. Salinger is considered by many to be the greatest American writer of the 20th century.

4 O. Henry

Real name William Sydney Porter. O. Henry is known for writing flash fiction with wit and a strange twist ending. His most well known story is “The Gift of the Magi” which is a story about a young poor couple who each sells their most precious object in order to buy a Christmas gift for their partner, but in doing so they end up making each others gift worthless. This story has been retold in many different forms over the years. The O. Henry Award was established in his honor, it is a very prestigious award given to outstanding short story writers. Two writers on this list have won this award.

3 John Updike

Updike was an extremely gifted short story writer, he published over 150 short stories in his career, his last collection “Tears of my Father” was published in June 2009, about 6 months after his death. He has also won over 30 different awards in his lifetime including: the Pulitzer, the Rea Award, the PEN/Falkner award, and the aforementioned O. Henry Award to name a few.

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the Twenties. He finished four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with another published posthumously, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age. If you want a recommendation for his greatest two short stories, I suggest reading “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz”. You won’t be disappointed.

1 Edgar Allen Poe

Poe is probably the most famous English short story writer of all time. Poe only wrote one complete novel in his lifetime, and it is not very well known, however his short stories are. Most people can tell you the story of “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death,” or “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Poe has over 65 short stories to his name. Poe is also considered to have invented the detective genre.