What Could Happen
Salvador Dali once said, "So little of what could happen does happen." He also said, along the same lines, "Why, then, when I order a lobster, does the waiter not bring me a flaming phone book?"
Have you seen this?
It's one of the things that could happen: a video of a half-dozen seemingly normal passengers on the London tube who all of a sudden perform a perfectly choreographed version of the zombie dance from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. And the passengers just sit there like a bunch of bourgeois Marcel Duchamp stiffs! And then they applaud as if they were at Covent Garden with kid gloves on!
I don't say "Whoo!" but I would so be saying "Whoo!" because how could you possibly just sit there and not be reacting to that little jolt of surrealist joy?
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What could happen if you can't tell one part of speech from another?
We sell a lot of things in the store in which I work, including a bunch of metal signs, some vintage-looking, some just decorative. Some of them are just kind of cute, kitcheny things:
Some of them are things that I can't imagine anybody without some sort of mental defect wanting to own, but hey, it's a big world:
And then there's this.
Can you read the text? No? It says this:
friends: 'frendz: n 1: people who like each other and/or are helpful to one another. 2: Lucy & Ethel 3: supporters or sympathizers - friend li ness adj - friend ly adj - friend ship n.
Well. According to whichever dictionary it was that the production company got its definition from, "friendliness" is an adjective. And here I thought everything ending in "-ness" was a noun!
Grammar is not an idle pastime. It's work, dammit!
Have you seen this?
It's one of the things that could happen: a video of a half-dozen seemingly normal passengers on the London tube who all of a sudden perform a perfectly choreographed version of the zombie dance from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. And the passengers just sit there like a bunch of bourgeois Marcel Duchamp stiffs! And then they applaud as if they were at Covent Garden with kid gloves on!
I don't say "Whoo!" but I would so be saying "Whoo!" because how could you possibly just sit there and not be reacting to that little jolt of surrealist joy?
+
What could happen if you can't tell one part of speech from another?
We sell a lot of things in the store in which I work, including a bunch of metal signs, some vintage-looking, some just decorative. Some of them are just kind of cute, kitcheny things:
Some of them are things that I can't imagine anybody without some sort of mental defect wanting to own, but hey, it's a big world:
And then there's this.
Can you read the text? No? It says this:
friends: 'frendz: n 1: people who like each other and/or are helpful to one another. 2: Lucy & Ethel 3: supporters or sympathizers - friend li ness adj - friend ly adj - friend ship n.
Well. According to whichever dictionary it was that the production company got its definition from, "friendliness" is an adjective. And here I thought everything ending in "-ness" was a noun!
Grammar is not an idle pastime. It's work, dammit!
posted by pyramus | 12:02 AM
1 Comments:
That is a cool video! At least one woman was laughing behind her hand, though, so not everyone was being stiff & bourgeois.
My mom had an encounter where she came out of a subway in Vienna right into the middle of a huge chorus performing the Carmina Burana. She remembers that to this day as a piece of delightful serendipity.
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