4.29.2004

I googled myself today. What a disappointment. There were six pages of results, and none of them were about me. Who knew that there were so many people with my name out there in the world. Of course, my last name is incredibly common, but my first name isn't. There was even another person with my name working in theatre. Luckily, we work in different areas of theatre, so I doubt that there will ever be any confusion. At least, I hope there won't ever be any confusion.

I read a book about historic English-language autograph manuscripts. Well, I mostly looked at the photographs and read the detail-rich captions. It was very interesting. I discovered that there was one almost universal characteristic to great English-language authors: none of them had nice penmanship.

What an old-fashioned concept, I know, but I'm old-fashioned in an odd way. I am a liberal politically, but a conservative grammatically. I hate when people use apostrophes to make nouns plural. I dislike finding grammatical errors in publications (though I was once thrilled to find one in the New York Times several years ago). Hell, my school paper in college often had typos and errors in the headlines. I still think of language as prescriptive rather than descriptive, even though I doubt many schools still promote that idea. I'm in love with the printed word. I'm in love with words, full stop. I learned the word in French for "the clap" this week, and it gives me a little intellectual thrill. The beauty of collecting words or ideas or knowledge is that they don't clutter up your house. There is a seemingly infinite supply.

0 comments:

 
Blogger design by suckmylolly.com