InDefinition - 51

cantus infirmus, n. senior persons' choral society

Fact!

The distance between inspiring and manipulating is sometimes only an exclamation mark.

- AA Gill, Sunday Times

Keystroke twins - 16

Jaffna
Laden2

Stonking

comment appended to Martin Amis' re-review of Ballard's The Drowned World, 50 years on:

jsh23

13 July 2012 10:29AM

Brilliant book, and quite remarkable for a first novel.

I don't really have anything to add to Martin Amis' article!

Keystroke twins - 15

wood
zone

Mistake!

The other day, in order to facilitate a bit of Facebook banter, I had cause to look up Madeline [sic] Miller's Song of Achilles on Amazon... with the result - notwithstanding every other perfectly erudite volume I have ever purchased from the great book supermarket in the sky - that I am now being bombarded with offers for watery-looking paperbacks by authors called Georgina, Victoria, Cynthia and Ann.

G-damn.

Chuckles

[With thanks to RDE, noch einmal.]

OMG

This book, apparently, is not a joke.

Too many writers... (?!)

Hard to credit.

[But nonetheless: courtesy Pleated-Jeans]

Query

What happens if you take a trip up Memory Lane - or even just walk down it backwards?

'Oink.' (Rhymes with 'oink'.)

[Courtesy of BaconPop. With thanks to LS.]

Ouch.

'Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis's headstone.'

- David Markson, The Last Novel

On the urgent necessity of the question-comma: 1

Where are my Frosties,* you arsehole?

Here it is clearly seen that the question (concerning the whereabouts of the Frosties) is over and done with by the time we get to the vocative flourish at the cadence.

One's intonation would, equally obviously, make that plain; but the way it is traditionally written means that it appears a) that the arseholeishness of the Frostie-thief is also somehow in doubt, and b) that the speaker's voice should keep going up in pitch until the end of the sentence - e.g. in the manner of an Australian?

* this being the place where the question-comma should go

Keystroke twins - 14 (triplets, actually)

ASAP
cras
crap