I've Got a Mouse...

...I don't know why I call him Gerund. (Name the song, win nothing.)

Yes, it is time for the word gnomes to crawl out of my hole and make me admit, that I had an unpleasant thought today as I was thinking about the weaning of e. I thought, it is a difficult period of transitioning for... what the fuck? Transitioning? Am I planning to grow e's opportunities next, on a go-forward basis? I sure past-good-intentioned, um, wished I had accessed the logic bank that would have informationed me about that transitioning of transition, lest I had merely idead about the changes my daughter was going through, or some other non-Orwellian word which would have been double-plus ungood anyway. As for the weaning, I know I am 37 and married, but I still need mom's tits. When she's dead- then I'll wean, and let her out of the basement.

Subordinations run riot through the preceding. The author has begun to read Mr. DF Wallace's essay entitled "Authority and American Usage" with no small amount of concern. The author (the pro, not this one) refers to his tendency to "sneer/wince" at bad writing which I take to mean writing which sucks the pouch or which contains grammatical or syntactical errors and his corresponding fear that those reading his material may sneer/wince in the reading of same and so on. (As an aside, a self-conscious confession, the essay is preceded by a page of usage errors collected by the good author over the course of but a few days, a number of which I make routinely. My grasp of the rules of usage is weak - I still do not understand half the errors identified.)

Where I am led by these considerations (besides the ritual intoning of the evil opposite of the anti-Stewart Smalley mantra) is to the conclusion that, if only I understood more of these rules, the better and more often I would enjoy sneering/wincing at advertisements, newspaper articles, letters from my 'learned friends' who doubtless sneer/wince at my malapropisms, run-on sentences, and ever-widening search for new ways to tell them to fuck off. These and the various spelling errors introduced to my work by my assistant, which errors I am sometimes too lazy to identify and correct (ok, not often, but sometimes these letters come back, I need to rely on their contents, and they aren't fit to line a birdcage).

Your mission, dear reader, should you (firstly) exist; and (secondly) choose to accept it, is to locate some particularly amusing or egregious errors in usage (German Ice Rink Kills Skaters) and send them to me. Weird modern verb-making or gerundifying counts. If you are uncomfortable in knowing I will sneer/wince at the errors of others, then consider your efforts as a assisting in my Sisyphian self-improvement project. If you don't care about that, because you are concerned any future output from this writer may be less likely to give you the pleasant thrill only a good sneer/wince can provide, consider it an act of charity. Please, for the purposes of this exercise, do not use as illustrations the various errors present in this post. You would sneer/wince, I would cry, sure it sounds good, but still...

I must now leave my taking to getting fooded and perhaps starbucked before at others chairing, desking, and dictation machining.

PMO