Sigh, and huzzah!

[pecunium]

The most recent update to the OED has come out.

Me, I am neither a prescriptavist, nor a descriptivist. I am a cranky iconoclast. I know what I like, and why I like it. I suppose, were I to be pressed, I am a precisionist; with a splash of throwback.

This comes, I think, of being a widely read auto-didact. I am aware of strange words, long out of fashion. Add to this a mix of friends who are much the same, and toss in fluency in three other languages, and the mix of things I have strong opinions on (often at odds with mainstream usage) is long.

I am among those who are appalled that the most recent update includes chaise lounge.

But that is just the dictionary looking at what is (because the vast majority, seem to me, to be better able to recognise the proper use of the subject/object declensions of the interogative personal pronoun than to take issue with chaise longue being morphed into lounge [esp. because lounging is what people do in them). I would rather see that be a lounge chair/chaise longue, but there you go.

On the other hand, what warms the cockles of my miserly little heart is this addition.

"prozine: Chiefly science fiction, a professional magazine, as opposed to an amateur fanzine"

My ghetto has made a small piece of the big time.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

There's much to be said in favor of first-draft writing -- when the only other choice is not writing anything (or putting it off until there's time to Do It Right, which usually amounts to never getting around to it, for me), which is the common situation.

I frequently thank the Shade of Miss Schroder (Hoover Highschool, in the '40s), who took the time to sit me down and have me write two three-paragraph essays -- one immediately upon being given the topic, one (on another topic) after thinking about it for five minutes (along the lines of the Outlining we'd covered in class). Even before she drew out The Dreaded Red Ink Pen, I could perceive that the second one was much /b/e/t/t/e/r/ less bad than the first.

Frequently -- even generally -- my second-draft is the opposite of an improvement, as I think of more possible bases to cover, more potential objections to subvert, and more extensive Byzantine complexities for sentences already over-long for the taste of many modern readers. By the third- or fourth- draft Total Re-write some cutting and genuine improvement might take place, but it's difficult to remember back to the last time that happened. And for years most of my writing was composed-on-stencil first-draft APAzine material, with a couple of minutes to think about what each paragraph was going to contain ... if I wasn't crowding the deadline _too_ closely. Mostly, however, I think it was adequate communication for the genre, and the milieu.

You've covered all the points that I can recall having caused me to bobble for a moment when reading your postings ("Easy writin's demmed hard read'n") but I've found them mostly trivial bobbles/glitches -- more like personality characteristics that are, on balance, more engaging than annoying. The only one that's caused me actual trouble (several times) has been the (excessive, IMHO) density or compression that sometimes leads to a need to request explication (or to await someone else doing so, or misunderstanding you). Not actually a Real Problem, but ....ummm... the Reader has an obligation to do _some_ work, yes, but the Writer who requires too much of this runs the risk of seeming to be a tad arrogant.

Human verbal communication -- especially written communication -- often seems to me to be subject to the same observation I sometimes apply to the Internet: "As with a dog walking on its hind legs, one doesn't expect it to be done well, one marvels that it is done at all". (That's adapted, of course, from Dr. Sam: Johnson's comment anent female preachers.)