The Lexicographer's Rules

"More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true Gentleman. A mask."

—Broadway Online. In a letter, playwright Samuel Beckett offers insight as to why he chose not to write in his native English.'

"I heard the shots, then I saw them with the dead gorilla and I saw them eating the meat and I said 'How can you eat an old man like that?' And then I thought if they can eat a gorilla maybe they can eat me and so I ran away."

—BBC. Guerrillas in the Democratic Republique of Congo and Rwanda are known to eat bush meat, including gorillas. There are about 600 mountain gorillas left in the world.'

"Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire."

—The Atlantic. S. L. A. Marshall recounts the unsanitized story of Able and Baker companies, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, on the beach at Normandy, France, as part of the D Day Invasion of World War II.'

"He didn't plead to the potato."

—Hartford Courant. Alpha McQueen is charged with using a potato as a gun silencer, a charge which, if he is convicted of it, could lead to a mandatory 25-year sentence.'

"I'm a New Yorker. This is where I want to be. The less time you spend in LA, the more movies you're getting made. LA is very development driven; it's all about studios that develop hundreds of projects for a senior executive who can say 'yes' 13 or 20 times a year. The further away you get from that, the more likely you are to getting the movie made. And New York is as far as you can get before the ocean."

—IndieWire. Steven Haft and other panelists answer questions from movie industry hopefuls at the "Hollywood on the Hudson" panel of the New York Women in Film and Television organization, this question concerning whether the industry panelists preferred to work in Hollywood or New York. Amy Robinson: "New York is where I feel comfortable and creative. But it's also about luck. You have to look at yourself and decide. I think all of us, or some of us here, are slightly outside the system. If we really wanted to embrace it, we would have to go there [L.A.]. And it's very lucrative. It supports all of these mid-level executives. I don't say, 'Don't do it,' if that's what you want to do. But it's a much more iconoclastic system living and working here in New York."'