1. On two occasions today, I wished I could divide myself into two persons, temporarily. For quite a while now since Debbie went back East for extended family visits and to be of help, in her absence, Gibbs has begun to velcro himself to me more often. If I'm sitting in the living room in a chair with Gibbs on my lap or pressed against the outside of my thigh, I can't be with Copper.
Around midday today, I decided to take a nap and Copper joined me. He pressed against my lower legs for a while, then made his way north to around my shoulders, careful not to initiate contact (heaven forbid) but lay close enough to me that I could pet him and rest my hand on his midsection and feel the vibrations of his purring.
If only I could have (temporarily) become two of me and been with both Copper and Gibbs at once, I think it would make all three of us happy.
2. I am slowly working my way through Lonesome Dove by listening to it on audible. It's about thirty-five hours long.
Today, I added to this problem of only being able to do one thing at a time when I ordered an audible copy of The Great Courses: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. This course is about thiry-six hours long.
If I could divide myself into two of me, one of me could be in the bedroom with Copper listening to Lonesome Dove and the other one could be in the living room with Gibbs either listening to classical music on the radio or learning more about music by listening to the Great Course I downloaded.
Instead, since I can't divide myself, I have to divide my time.
And opt.
3. Deborah and I have been friends since we first met at Whitworth just over fifty years ago.
We've had running conversations ever since, whether it was the European Enlightenment when we were in the same class taught by Dr. Duvall or the ins and outs of the Chaplain's Office where she worked for a year after she graduated and where I worked the following year, or about football teams, our kids, books, movies, travel, what our views of current events are, and a long list of other subjects.
We don't see each other face to face often, but on occasion what I write in this blog moves us to discuss things by texting or sometimes discussing things by email.
I've been writing off and on lately about what I observed in how people speak and write English.
I hope I haven't sounded frustrated. Yes, I do experience misuse of language as hearing a wrong not sung or played, but I'm more fascinated by these misuses than frustrated by them.
I also hope I haven't made it seem like it's young people who employ odd capitalizations, confuse "every day" and "everyday", write or say "me and the kids" instead of ""the kids and I".
Just in the last week I've read sentences written by people I used to teach with who hold doctorates in English make such mistakes. No one is immusne. Besides, I don't spend much time around young people. I spend most of my time around people my own age who were taught proper English and often don't employ it.
No problem.
I'm observing, noting, seeing trends, not judging.
I thought a lot today, after a wonderful exchange with Deborah, how, when it comes to writing, writers use both prescriptive grammar, usage, and punctuation and they also use rhetorical grammar, punctuation, and usage.
Prescriptive grammar, usage, and punctuation follow the rules of English.
Rhetorical grammar, usage, and punctuation break the rules for effect. The effect might be emotional. It might be to create an effect of another kind.
I'll bet you a spin or two on the In Search of the Holy Grail machine at the CdA Casino that I come back and write more about this subject another time.
For now, I'd like to trot out one of my favorite examples of Shakespeare breaking the rules of punctuation for rhetorical, in this case, emotional effect.
By Act V, Macbeth is broken. If you don't know the play, trust me.
He's in a state of despair.
He takes a moment in Act V to take us, as audience, into his confidence, and express this despair in his final soliloquy.
In his despair, Macbeth experiences time as a slow moving, burdensome slog. We can feel how wearisome time feels to Macbeth in a single line from this soliloquy, one of the slowest wails of despair I've heard or read in literature.
It's simple.
Macbeth, drained of feeling, drained of hope, drained of purpose moans:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
On the level of music, this line is what someone like Beethoven or Mozart would describe on his sheet music as Largo, the very slowest tempo in music. It's the long vowel sounds that slow down this line and in these long vowels of the repeated "tomorrows" we can hear the "Awhh, Ohhh, Awhh, Ohhh, Awhh, Ohhh" of Macbeth's agony.
Shakespeare slows down this line even more with his use of rhetorical punctuation. He inserts commas after each "tomorrow".
An English teacher not tuned in to the emotion of this line would prescriptively remove those commas.
The rules of punctuation say they aren't needed. The two "and"s, by rule, sufficiently separate the "tomorrows" from each other.
But Shakespeare employs the commas rhetorically to further slow down the line and to further magnify Macbeth's feelings of hopelessness.
Because I enjoy this stuff and it's my blog (!), I'll probably trot out some more examples of how not doing what our teachers taught us to do in our writing can lead to some of the most powerful and effective writing of all.
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