The Lexicographer's Rules

"'Yeah, yeah. For $25, you can't guarantee she's not an ax murderer,' he muttered. 'I understand. I was married to one of those once.'"

—Sacramento Bee. Kevin Smith signs a legal waiver at a speed-dating event, releasing the dating agency from all responsibility should a future relationship turn sour. Speed-dating involves spending eight minutes per person in a room full of candidates, then having the agency follow-up on interested parties. Corine Littlefield uses her eight minutes to ask questions: "Are you married? Are you fully and completely divorced? Do you have the paperwork? Have you claimed bankruptcy in the past year?"'

"Your average American kid grows up in Cleveland, marries a girl from Texas and settles in Kansas. Your average Cajun boy grows up in Crowley, marries a girl from Ville Platte and settles somewhere close to her mama. In Eunice. We tend not to stray so far."

—New York City. It is generally agreed that the census figures reporting a drop in Louisiana's Cajun culture from 407,000 people to 44,000 is due to wording changes on the census forms, and not an actual drop in the population itself.'

"I'm concerned about my state of mind. I've been wondering what it would be like to have a kid. Picturing myself with a kid. Checking into my medication to see what risks there are. Imagining discussing the possibility with my neurologist. I'm not sure how to deal with this. Have I lost my mind? Am I just going through a 'Oh, it's such a cute puppy, let's bring it home' phase? Where hopefully I'll realize that the cute puppy grows into an annoying needy dog *before* I take it home."

—Eatonweb. "Not wanting children, dealing with the avoidance of parenthood by default, and then passionate gratefulness about having kids. It seems to be a recurrent statement amongst former disinterested parents."'

"Age and outmoded purity and patience may kill sometimes. Old lady writers, without means, without Social Security, reading in bed all dayÑdear old Sibyls, almost forgotten, hardly called upon except perhaps at midnight by a drunken couple from a pad down the street. Failure is not funny. It is cockroaches on the service elevator, old men in carpet slippers waiting anxiously by the mail slots in the lobby, neighborhood walks where the shops, graphs of consumption, show only a clutter of broken vases, strings of cracked beads, dirty feathers, an old vaudevillian's memorable dinner jacket and decades of cast-off booksÑthe dust of ambition from which the eye turns away in misery."

—New York Review of Books. "The young, the active, rely upon themselves, or perhaps they are desperately thrown back upon themselves, literally. The drama of real life will not let down the prose writer. He can camp for a while in the sedgy valley of autobiography, of current happenings, of the exploration of his own sufferings and sensations, the record of people met, of national figures contemplated. There is beauty to be torn out of the event, the suicide, the murder case, the prize fight. The 'I,' undisguised, visits new regions for us and pours all his art into them. Life inspires. The confession, the revelation, are not reporting, nor even journalism. Real life is presented as if it were fiction."'

"Until recently it was a nightmarish experience entering these villages messed with excreta, with swarms of flies coating the village yards. But of late a sea of change has taken place as a result of which walking from village to village is now a pleasant experience."

—Newindpress. The practice of squatting outdoors rather than using an indoor privy or toilet is decreasing in the Himachal Pradesh region of India due to the availability of heavily subsidized toilets and plumbing materials. "The toilet construction fever has caught on in the majority of the households here."'