The Englishist

[writing-in-the-grave]

Hey y'all why are writers always cold?

[run-remi-run]

...why?

[writing-in-the-grave]

They're always surrounded by drafts!

How many mystery writers does it take to change a lightbulb?

[run-remi-run]

Oh god.

How many?

[writing-in-the-grave]

Two! One to change the bulb, and the other to give it an unexpected twist at the end!

What do writers have for breakfast?

[run-remi-run]

Coffee?

[writing-in-the-grave]

Synonym buns!

Where do all the struggling writers live?

[run-remi-run]

How are you coming up with all these?

Where?

[writing-in-the-grave]

Writer's Block!

What do writers suffer from each spring?

(I've heard a lot of them over the years.)

[run-remi-run]

Allergies. Next question.

[writing-in-the-grave]

you were close; A case of allegories

Why are writers always in great shape?

[run-remi-run]

Circular prose

[writing-in-the-grave]

Nope! It's because we're always running out of ideas!

Did you hear about the famous writer who turned out to be a fraud?

[run-remi-run]

I did not

[writing-in-the-grave]

His life had it's prose and cons...

Why is editing a better job than writing?

[run-remi-run]

It's more rewording?

[writing-in-the-grave]

Correct! I am out of jokes. :(

[vernacular-science]

@the-englishist

[seal-of-unknown]

me, begging, tears in my eyes: please. please just tell me what the book is about. the plot. please

a book annotation on the cover, unfazed: A Subversive Masterpiece. A Deep And Touching Story. The New York Times Bestseller. Go Fuck Yourself

[wellthatsjustgreat]

A good take on why Trumpkins don’t hear what the rest of us hear when President Trump spews incoherent word salad.

Also why I have limited interest in, or energy for, trying to persuade them through rational debate.

[stilljewelss]

I have been baffled by this all along - I could not for the life of me imagine what his supporters were hearing when they listened to him babble incoherently. He’s like a political Rorschach’s test.

[itsathought2]

I feel like I’ve had the curtain drawn back.  

I realized I do this to him too. I’m always trying to figure out WHAT THE FUCK HE MEANS.  Only because I don’t like him and what he stands for,  I’m actually trying to parse reality from it, so it strikes me as insane.  

But if I was predisposed to him, my mind would decide on something that filled out my preconceived expectation.  

Humans Brains are so fucking weak and wrong. 

[spoonmeb]

If you’ve paid attention to the way racist/generally bigoted white people have talked literally since the dawn of time, this wouldn’t be a surprise to you, but I like the way OT phrased it.

But really people often talk like this when they want to say horrible things about other human beings they know they shouldn’t be saying, it’s just with Trump it suddenly matters can’t he’s flushing our country down the toilet.

See: the way white people have always talked about the mysterious inner city and the infamous black on black crime. Or just black women in general. There are always unfinished sentences about black people/POC and ya’ll never have trouble completely them in your own heads.

[audreynical2]

It’s like their very own “auto-complete” for searches they know have already been done by their supporters time and time again.

[fishnbanjos-deactivated20180901]

By the way, Fox News has been doing a similar version of this for years. A local columnist pointed out that they often ask absolutely ridiculous questions, but because they ask it in question form, they get wiggle room.

“Does Obama want to kill your grandparents when they go to the doctor?”

Now, the question in itself is open ended, but obviously, you’re set up to believe that, yes, your grandparents will die because of Obama. The onus is on the station to disprove a question like this, but instead they throw a vague, twisted statement out and have two opposing people argue as if both sides of the conversation are equal in value and truth. The subject of the question then the non-clear rebuttal makes the answer seem obvious that Obama is killing your sweet granny and grandpa when they go for a flu shot.

I say all this because this network has been grooming their followers to fill in the blanks from vagueness this entire time. Trump just knows how to fill in just enough words to start the thought process down that way. He’s taken what Fox News started and perfected it.

[dandiliiontea-deactivated202105]

It’s INSANE to me how controversial romance novels are. Romance novels. Like, being openly a fan of them immediately opens you up to people constantly coming at you like “but don’t you think it’s ~limiting- and ~juvenile~ to have a genre of books with happy endings for women?”

Like.

No?

Why is it such a big deal to want to read stories where women have sex and then don’t die at the end? Jesus Christ.

Why is the concept of female characters being happy seen as less creative than female characters suffering? (Trust me, creating a world where women win in the end takes a lot more creativity and artistic vision lmfao)

Anyway, literary bros will pry my romance novels with their happy endings from my cold dead fingers.

[jennyredford]

Or die in the very beginning of the book. But no one calls out James Patterson for writing another formulaic thriller in which a woman is horrifically killed after getting laid and then some man solves her murder. Every. Damn. Time.

But hey, those romance novels where women get happy endings are so limiting, eh?

[dandiliiontea-deactivated202105]

Real talk: realizing how common it is for female characters to be punished for on-the-page sex with death was a big part of my embracing the romance genre. Once I noticed it I couldn’t unnotice it. It’s everywhere. A woman having sex in literature or non-romance genre fiction is the literary equivalent of a red shirt on Star Trek.

[roo-bastmoon]

It’s not just the sex thing, though that’s a key element. It’s that, in romance novels, the heroine gets to be cared for the way she normally would care for everyone else. It’s wish fulfillment in that her romantic partner will do emotional labor, spend a great deal of time thinking about her, or sacrifice his desires or fortune or reputation to be with her, or spend days nursing her back to health, or risking his life to save hers. In romance novels, you’ll find men taking care of children, talking about their feelings, putting effort into their appearance—even if they are adorably bad at it. Watch how many romance novel protagonists fall in love with a man who happens to be rich or handsome, but she didn’t give in until his behavior changed and he starts mentoring her, or providing for her, or being gentle toward her, nourishing her, listening to her, appreciating her… I suspect romance novels are looked down upon not for being juvenile formulaic “beach reads” but because they paint a fantasy world that leaves men feeling uncomfortable or even emasculated. But whether you’re a Midwest housewife or a big city CEO, women who read romance novels just want to read about men loving women the way women are expected love everyone else—with a nurturing and protective form of unswerving loyalty. Great sex they don’t have to die for is also a huge bonus, but the *romance* part of the novel is genuinely more about the woman being appreciated (for her beauty or spunk or intelligence at first, and then for all of her by the end).

[codenamecesare]

“women who read romance novels just want to read about men loving women the way women are expected to love everyone else—with a nurturing and protective form of unswerving loyalty.”

[obsessionisaperfume]

THANK YOU.

[lyricwritesprose]

According to the website smartbitchestrashybooks, which analyzes romance novels to a great degree, one common element of the average romance novel is what they call the grovel.  That is, there’s a turning point near the climax of the book where the leading man says, in effect, “I hurt you.  I had my reasons, but they don’t make it right.  I am devastated that I hurt you, and I will do whatever it takes to make it okay again.  Leaving you is completely on the table even though I find the prospect horrific.”

And that’s a very important fantasy.  To have your feelings, your pain, be made so absolutely central to the narrative, to someone else’s world.  You could call it a power fantasy, but I don’t think that’s exactly right.  It’s a significance fantasy.  A romance story is a story in which the woman is the most significant damn thing in the book.

And when you think of it like that, you realize why some people are really, really threatened by it.

[sandersstudies]

Guess who is now in charge of “meme Mondays” for my job’s social media?

[sandersstudies]

I work at a university writing consultation center so

[sandersstudies]

Since you guys actually liked this post (sorry for the super-low quality)

[sandersstudies]

Here have my trash

[theartofangirling]

no one:

me: here’s a flow chart of 41 lgbtq+ book recommendations, have fun!

disclaimer: this is a very non-comprehensive list since I’m only including books that I’ve read

[egberts]

im really pissed that palindrome isnt palindrome backwards

[viridiscrow]

Ah, yes but emordnilap is a word!

An emornilap is any word that, when spelled backwards, produces another word. Examples of emordnilap pairs include:

desserts & stressed

drawer & reward

gateman & nametag

time & emit

laced & decal

regal & lager

And therefore “emordnilap palindrome” is an emordnilap palindrome.

Which I, for one, think is really frickin’ cool.

[egberts]

dude

[seti-fan]

You know that bothered someone else in history so much they had to make the word emordnilap something so that palindrome could be used in a palindrome.

[great-tweets]

wait WHAT

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Wait, so… does -copter come *from* helicopter? 

[reverberereration]

Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.

[priestessamy]

I love etymology!!!!!

[madlori]

The word “blog” is another example. It’s a rebracket and subsequent shortening of “web log.”

Another good one is alcoholic (comes from “alcohol” and the suffic “ic” but has been rebracketed such that the suffix “holic” is used to indicate affinity for other things - chocoholic, etc).

[allthingslinguistic]

An interesting thread about the discursive function of “waslike”.

Technically speaking, I wouldn’t say that this construction is really a compound verb “waslike”, because it still conjugates like you’d normally conjugate the verb “to be”. (I’m like, you’re like, s/he’s like; I was like, you were like, s/he was like - not I waslike, you waslike, s/he waslikes.)

The linguistic term for it is quotative “like” and there have been several academic papers about it, including this early one from 1990 and this extensive survey of functions of “like” by Alexandra D’Arcy.

[bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190]

“our teeth and ambitions are bared” is a zeugma

and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND

[tuesdayisfordancing]

I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody: 

zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/

noun

a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

ISN’T THAT AWESOME??

[professorsparklepants]

#in english class in high school my teacher had us write our own zeugmas in class#and one guy came up with ‘he fell from her favor… and the window’#i am forever looking for opportunities to use that one

[siesiegirl]

She dropped her dress and inhibitions at the door.

[crumbvulet]

What’s this? My favorite rhetorical device showing up on my dashboard?

[thranduilland]

IT HAS A NAMEEEE!! OH MY GOD!!!

[pluckyredhead]

My high school English teacher always explained it with: “He took his hat and his leave.”

[theclonewriter-blog]

“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.

[onewordtest]

“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement. 

[joehywheelah]

“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”

[tenoko1]

“True.” She glanced at the others. “You can also end with a period if you include an action between two separate statements.”

[cj-amused]

Things I didn’t know

[prismatic-bell]

“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”

[jawnwats-deactivated20160713]

You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.

[writers-hq]

Accurately-titled novels - part 1

(Part 2)

Writers’ HQ

[hallownest-archive-deactivated2]

imo the best way to interpret those “real people don’t do x” writing advice posts is “most people don’t do x, so if a character does x, it should be a distinguishing trait.” human behavior is infinitely varied; for any x, there are real people who do x. we can’t make absolute statements. we can, however, make probabilistic ones.

for example, most people don’t address each other by name in the middle of a casual conversation. if all your characters do that, your dialogue will sound stilted and unnatural. but if just one character does that, then it tells us something about that character.

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

[surprisebitch]

absolutely stellar

[hyperazraphael]

A girl at my school tried to seduce one of our (super straight-laced) math professors. She ACTUALLY sat on his desk and had a super low-cut shirt on and everything and actually leaned over to him and according to eye-witnesses:

Girl: “Oh professor, I’m really struggling but I would do ANYTHING to pass this class.”

The professor leans in until his face is just inches from hers and whispers in the same seductive tone:

“Study”

Before promptly getting up and walking away just leaving her on the desk.

[xubbs]

“Then study”

[stfueverything-deactivated20230]

[being-john-malkobitch]

Every book in the History of Literature summed up in a single sentence

[jenny-hanniver]

I ugly-laughed at several of these.

[myjetpack]

for yesterday’s @guardian review