Random thought

[tahnan]

So I'm not going to do the current LJ meme, the one involving answering ten questions like "Are you male or female?" and "Describe your boy/girlfriend" using only the lyrics of a single artist, because I don't really listen to enough music to do it, certainly not enough of any one artist's corpus. (Of the ones I might actually know well enough, there's the Nields, which seems unlikely to apply; the Beatles, in which case I'd mostly just cite "Revolution #9," to be ornery; and Boiled in Lead. Do you really want me to discuss my personal life with quotes from "Fück the Circus" and "Hook 'Em Cow"?

However, I did want to post this, since I bothered to think it up last week. Online, people were discussing mistakes in formal writing, specifically, if I recall the phrasing, "Things Not To Do Unless You Want to Look Like an Idiot" or something like that; and the serial comma came up (you know, the one before "and" in a list). Now, myself, I use the serial comma, but I also recognize that frankly it's an arbitrary question of style and not using it is not the horror some people make it out to be.

One argument for the serial comma (the one that appears before the "and" in lists) is that, without it, you get apocryphal book dedications like "To my parents, Ayn Rand and G-d." Yes, yes, all right, leaving out the serial comma here leads to absurdity. But I said that you could come up with the same sort of thing for a sentence with a serial comma, and when challenged, I hit upon: "To my parents, Abbott and Costello, and my dog, Fluffy." So there.

In unrelated news, my other journal has been updated. But you may already know that.

Comments

Heh.

[silkblade.livejournal.com]

I did mine using Dorothy Parker poems.