Tuesday, April 01, 2003
;I was talking to a friend of mine recently, a man who I will—for the sake of anonymity and my own personal satisfaction—refer to as Hernando Innocent Atlatl III. He sings with me, and has been singing most of his life. I asked him why he hadn’t ever taken singing lessons. He prevaricated (Atlatl has turned prevarication into an art form, let me tell you). He said that he didn’t have enough time—he was too busy. As we talked more and more he eventually told me that he had decided not to take singing lessons because he had been singing for years and years. He was an excellent amateur singer, but taking lessons made him a serious singer, a professional. He’d been singing too long to risk finding out he wasn’t any good at it if he ever really tried to make a go of it. There were some opportunities in life, he had decided, that you should chose to miss. (Source Link)
This is the personal weblog of Grant Barrett, editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a collection of words from the fringes of English. More about this site...
Recent Entries
- The American Dialect Society seeks 2008 word-of-the-year nominations
- Where would we be without “ass”?
- Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours
- What a bitchin’ word!
- Don’t forget about the dialect: dauncy/donsie, faunch, and jockey box
- Wilf? Yuffer? Get real!
- Lexicographer Laurence Urdang Dies at 81
- A thesaurus can be harmful
- Can bad language punditry be stopped? Can false attributions for classic quotes be fixed?
- There’s one in every country
- Scottish Language Dictionaries fundraiser
- SouthWest Writers
- Disfluencies: What do they mean by “I mean”?
- A hearty endorsement of shout quotes: scare quotes used for emphasis
- How to buy a dictionary
Recent Catchwords
- antihomonuptial adj. (11/30)
- cellblock n. (11/30)
- cut and shut n. (11/30)
- photoporation n. (11/30)
- dry powder n. (11/30)
- phytocapping n. (11/30)
- toe pick n. (11/30)
- smokepole n. (11/30)
- heavy furniture n. (11/29)
- gulch n. (11/24)
- hyper-edit n. (11/24)
- doga n. (11/24)
- hot body n. (11/24)
- wovit n. (11/24)
- boyat n. (11/23)
- KLM n. (11/23)
- governist n. (11/23)
- wirehouse n. (11/23)
- mockolate n. (11/23)
- detailer n. (11/23)
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