: Radar LARB →

lareviewofbooks:

• Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street by Spring Warren

• Experimental fiction as genre and as principle by A D Jameson

• The Real Karl Marx by John Gray

• Writers’ Second Thoughts by Liz Jobey

• All Cozy Now: On the marathon by Christopher Kempf

• “Clueless”…

My little pop culture footnote on Bronson Alcott’s cameo in Clueless, appearing on Avidly, linked by La Review of Books.

Working alone does suck—and so does writing alone, sometimes. For company, and to stretch my legs a bit, I’ve been posting a bunch over on Medium, which has quickly become one of my favorite places to write.

I also have a longer piece forthcoming on Avidly, my go-to site for smart, eloquent writing on all things literary and cultural.

Carry on.

At the corner of Mission St. and what?: the world’s most permanent typo. 

Hyphens, hyphens everywhere, and nary a phrase correct

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who learn about the hyphenated compound adjective, shrug their shoulders, and move on with their lives, and people who learn about the hyphenated compound adjective and proceed to insert hyphens everywhere. Everything is better with a hyphen! 

I love this doggy daycare—it’s constantly surrounded by adorable dogs thrilled to be reunited with their owners after years hours. Also, this place has its grammatical ducks in a row: “self-serve” is a compound adjective modifying “grooming.” “Self” changes the meaning of “serve”; the words create a new, compounded adjective. The hyphen makes explicit the fact that they are working together. Without any punctuation, one could read this phrase all kinds of wrong: “Self, serve grooming!” 

Yup, that is my green kombucha smoothie thing. I was ill enough to spend $7 on such a beverage but not ill enough to be OK with the gratuitous hyphen. The flu makes you feverish, not crazy, people. 

Here, “annually” is an adverb modifying “renewable,” which is an adjective modifying “resources.” We don’t need a hyphen to clarify the phrase “annually renewable.” That’s what the -ly is for.

Yes, some adverb-adjective pairings require hyphens: are you a well-meaning person or a well, meaning person? Only the punctuation can decide. Contrary to hyphen-hater belief, compound adjectives make communicating easier. Save valuable interpretive milliseconds! Contrary to the practice of hyphen zealots, gratuitous hyphens are distracting. Case in point: I spent thirty minutes writing this post when I could have been out spending another $7 on kale kombucha. Think of the smoothies. 

"Complexity lies within social reality and not in a somewhat decadent desire to say complicated things."

Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” 1989.

What the phrase “binders full of women” tells us about the grammar of Romney’s beliefs.

Presidential debates tend to be a stylistic gaffe a minute, at least from a linguistic perspective. We all just have to sit there and let the subject-verb disagreement and labyrinthine sentence structure happen to us.

Last night’s debate contained a stylistic gaffe of a completely different order: Mitt Romney, responding to a question about pay equity, proclaimed that in an effort to bring more women into Massachusetts state government he sought out women’s advocacy groups, which obligingly provided “whole binders full of women.” As most of us know by now, this version of events isn’t precisely true. 

However—and this discussion remains in the margins, despite Jena McGregor’s lucid WP piece and its characterization of the “tone-deaf” phrase as “revelatory”—the HR solution of “whole binders full of women” was really just a cap on the regressive stance that flex-time is more important to women because they need to be home doing women’s work.

Why, exactly, is a stance that has yet to be implemented as policy in most workplaces, and that many working women would undoubtedly welcome, regressive rather than progressive? Because there is no reciprocal expectation that professional men will perform a substantive share of housework and child care. This expectation is less likely to define men’s career trajectories and professional choices. For many women, the expectation, like the work, is two-fold: they are expected not only to perform more domestic labor but also to consider, painstakingly, the consequences of a profession on their performance at home. This conversation is one that we continually gloss over, though rarely with such unfortunate phrasing as Romney’s.

“Binders full of women” constitutes perhaps the most significant stylistic gaffe of yesterday evening not only because it inadvertently objectifies working women but also because it reveals a profoundly limited sense of “equity.” Debates are all about language, and we know that Barack Obama can command language. What we didn’t know was the extent to which outdated and close-minded notions of gender roles inform the grammar of Romney’s beliefs. Please proceed, Governor. 

(Source: bindersfullofwomen)

Caution: watch out for dangling prepositional phrases. They might accidentally imply that vendors deliver your weekly supply of coffee beans, paper cups, and employees.

*Note*: I might be finishing a PhD at the moment, so I might be doing the same thing every single day, which means I might be seeing nothing new, ever, to post to this blog. This state of affairs might, but definitely will, come to a celebratory end on December 7. 

Having waited up to ten minutes for a well-crafted latte, I suppose a cafe might brag about its “fast coffee” and “express espresso,” but they should expect refrigerator- and Prince Albert-esque jokes.

Is your coffee fast? Well, you better go catch it.

Also, isn’t the proximity of “fast coffee” to “fast food” a little troubling? Last time I checked, no one actually likes McDonald’s coffee. 

Far be it from me to hate on this wonderful taco truck that is so conveniently located between home and work. Just, however, to answer its question: yes, I would. I really would. I would like this truck all up in my party.

The genial clip art saves this sign. It implies that, literally, the registrar is going to whip out some kind of speaking smiley-face puppet and wave to you with it.