The Lexicographer's Rules

"My mother has dog hair in her house dating back to my childhood and the family beagle. One can find a stray hair resting on the chandelier, stuck between the paneling in the wall, lying inside a wine glass stored high up in a cabinet, protruding from a cushion on the sofa, among the dirt under the plants, hiding between the cables of a knit sweater, stuck to the end of a roll of cellophane tape, on the bottoms of shoes, pasted to the honey jar, adhered to the lamp shade, or resting in the corner of the pantry."

—Amy Chavez. Free get-rich tip for the day: invent a fabric that while black, comfortable and all-natural, sheds animal hair as easily as the animals shed it themselves. You'd sell it by the ton in New York.'

"Obits are, in a sense, arguments. They make the case for why we should care about a particular life. The more space devoted to the obit, the better the argument has to be."

—National Journal. How newspapers handled the deaths of Dale Evans and Anne Morrow Lindbergh reveals as much about those organizations, that is, how they serve their interests and those of their readers, as they do about the dead themselves.'

"She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the pastŃI'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential troubleŃrecognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."

—National Review. John Derbyshire, witless and heartless troll, rips into Chelsea Clinton for being, well, a Clinton.'

"Commercially made organic food is not commensurate with quality. You lose the care, the traceability, all the things you believed were intrinsic to the organic manifesto. The giants start whittling away at the corners, because quality is not their prime objective. I'm not saying that the organicness is the problem; more that it's the cynical abuse of something people have worked hard at because they believe in it, and which is now being exploited purely for financial gain."

—Telegraph. The quality and healthy reputation that the small farmers, markets, butchers and other organic producers have struggled to build for decades is being undermined by clearly non-organic products and immense marketing budgets of companies that care nothing for prinicple. "The meat, as in organic, mass-produced sausages, has probably been pasted through a grinder and could consist of gristle, ears, skin and all the extremities you can imagine."'

"'Card Declined', read the display. My lungs collapsed. I had Gabriel Garcia Marquez standing in front of me and all I could say to him was, 'Your credit card has been declined.'"

—Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. Jon Michaud worked at the Rizzoli Bookstore on 57th Street.