I was very recently reminded of a one-page story that appeared in the New Yorker some years ago. It drops the prefixes or otherwise negates the meaning of some common words and phrases. The bridled style is very settling.
Thanks to the wonder of the intertubz, it appears online.
How I Met My Wife by Jack Winter
“Is that what you want, Mary? A farter?” Tucker/Norman, “There’s Something About Mary”
To the Royal Academy of Farting, Benjamin Franklin, c. 1781.
That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.
That so retain’d contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present Pain, but occasions future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c. often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.
I wonder what the impact would have been on social norms if certain gases weren’t invisible.
Update: Another, erm, voice heard from. Science World toots up on the matter.
Photographers being treated as security threats, because that’s how Hollywood portrays things
A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.
And we overreact, because we respond irrationally when faced with unusual risks. We can’t properly assess them.
Mechanization and Standardization
. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.
Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.
(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring news from the rest of the world: It’s cold out here, cold as death. The vast majority of business in this country is done in the exact same way your forward-thinking uncle did his taxes in 1986. “That machine? Oh, that machine has the client billing Access database. Don’t touch it.”)
I’m stuck somewhere in that nightmare.
Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.