What is the anser?
OK, so I am an engineer, and as a class we are famously detail-oriented. Good thing, too, 'cause that's how you keep bridges from falling down. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
So today, let's see if we can stretch the imagination of the editor, his style manual and/or the automatic text correction software the Times-Call uses. For example, American usage puts a punctuation mark inside quotation marks, even when that mark is not actually quoted. British usage is more logical, and the occasional American technical manual will get it right when disaster could ensue from literally following erroneously included punctuation, as in a computer program. Look up the punctuation error that ended the Mariner 1 mission in 1962.
I accuse a coffee buddy of stretching his jokes out too long. I once ran a contest for shortest joke. The winner: "I wonder if this rhinoceros is male or ... " Here's my counter, the shortest I know: "Brevity soul wit." Another: "If Helen Keller fell in the forest,"
An editor might wish to add an ellipsis at the end of that previous paragraph, but I think the implicit question deserves to end right there. Another example of a sentence that's usually carried out too long begins "People who live in glass houses shouldn't." However, actually that's enough.
My elder daughter said to me one day, "This sentence no verb." And it was she who told me of the current misuse of "gender." The term strictly refers to only words, not to people. It's words that have gender, whereas people have sex. And she should know; she has a university degree in English. We have now subverted "gender" to mean sex, just with less intense connotations.
In the comic strip Frazz, an improper use of punctuation to make plurals was described thus: Too often we see incorrect apostrophe's. Doesn't that just make your teeth hurt? Here's a correct use: The dog knows its master. The cat knows it's master.
When someone leads out an exposition with "Back when I was younger..." I often interrupt with "It would really have had to have been." In that I am following Larry King, whom I heard mutter one night to a caller who said something about a Jewish rabbi. "That's the best kind," King said.
John Lyon said to me one day, "I spell my name J-OH-AITCH-FOUR-EN. The aitch and the four are silent." I liked that, and told my son. "Well," says my son, "he could have spelled it J-OH-AITCH-FOUR-(quiet moment)-EN, with the aitch, the four, and the (quiet moment) all silent." How does one spell a quiet moment, anyhow? And that leads us to Stan Monroe.
My longtime friend Stan said he had a sentence one could say but not write. It went something like "There are several ways to spell 'two'." Or was it "too"? Or "to"? You see the problem that is the base of his claim. Ah, I miss Stan. If ever anyone exemplified a reason to quit smoking, it was he. Gentle, bright, human, loving, moral, of highest intellectual standards, a complete pleasure to be around. But when his cancer ate through the pulmonary surface, it was all over for Stan. In his obituary I wrote that he was my toughest sell; when I had a new technical idea, I'd take it to Stan. If I could sell him, I knew it was a solid notion and had been logically presented. Many times my preparation to lay out an unsolved problem to Stan led to an exchange such as "Stan, I have a problem," and in describing it in the organized detail he demanded, the solution would occur to me. "Thanks, Stan!" "Glad to help, Richard." We all need friends like that.
(Did you ever begin a parenthetical remark, lose your place in its exposition, forget where you were coming from or where you were trying to take it? I do that sometimes.
Anser is a waterfowl genus including geese and swans. So here we have the interesting situation in which "goose" is the anser and the answer. Did we pass the spell check?
And isn't it nice we are through the elections?
Richard Juday is, for his age, a comparative newlywed at 12 years. Also a woodworker, beekeeper, badminton player, hiker, kayaker, photon mechanic and nit-picker.