Saturday, January 20, 2007

Word games

Ian of Shades of Grey pointed me in the direction of the Imagined Community who, in turn, has borrowed this parlour game from elsewhere.

The idea is to read down the spine of a book to make a sentence from the title and author combined. Some of the ones listed on Imagined Community are:
Fear L. Ron Hubbard;

Byzantium Endures Michael Moorcock;
The Cider House Rules John Irving;
The Plague Dogs Richard Adams.

The best I can come up with at the moment - and it involves cheating a bit - is: I, Claudius, rob graves.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Going back to my previous post about punctuation, last night, in Writers' News, I read a snippet, taken from the Guardian. In it, Simon Jenkins says, 'Young people have evolved both a new script and a cost-effective reason for using it. They are breaking free from spelling dogma and expanding the alphabet with emoticons.'

Bah, humbug.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I rather like the semi-colon; it's a useful little tool.

I am often guilty of overusing the the hyphen - other punctuation marks would often work better.

How much difference would it make, if any, if the ; and - (above) were swopped over? I have no idea.

Liz Hinds said...

According to Ms Truss (may her name be praised), the dash signifies a dramatic phrase.

'"Wait for it," the single dash seems to whisper.'

Lee said...

My take on Jimmy Buffett's bio., "A Pirate Looks at Fifty"...

"Pirate Jimmy looks at fifty at a buffet" (poetic licence on the spelling of 'buffet').

Anonymous said...

I see the emoticons all of the time, but don't know what they mean. Must be a listing of them somewhere.

Shades said...

I must dig out Truss again- my brain age is rapidly increasing and I'm starting to struggle over remembering some subtleties of the humble raised tadpole.

However, inappropriate apostrophe use is now widespread. I saw a witty slogan on a van that just didn't read right-

"200 Horses', One Stallion!".

200 Horses' what? I wondered.

p.s. The word verification just now was fkucc- I did a double-take on that one...

Liz Hinds said...

Ian, I'm sure there's someone there making up the word verifications sometimes!

We should make up our own definitions for emoticons ...