In the American Prospect, Harold Koh writes: In no small part because of its promiscuous failure to ratify a convention with which it actually complies in most respects, the United States rarely gets enough credit for the large-scale moral and financial support that it actually gives to children’s rights around the world. [emphasis added] I […]
Promiscuous Failure
Posted by Ben on November 16, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/promiscuous-failure/
Aw, that’s just gorilla dust
Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is […]
Posted by Ben on November 12, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/aw-thats-just-gorilla-dust/
A napkin’s a napkin’s a napkin
There are people you’d like to thank, but you’ve forgotten the list (again) and so you’ll have to hack together an impromptu speech, something cobbled together on white and faintly stained napkins from that laughable coffeehouse down the street. But: a napkin’s a napkin. (Of course, there are variations in size and quality and color […]
Posted by Ben on August 8, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/napkin/
Homeland Security’s get-tough policy on bad writing, maybe?
“I know this is kind of a bomb” is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to […]
Posted by Ben on August 1, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/homeland-securitys-get-tough-policy-on-bad-writing-maybe/
Word-of-the-Month: REGREETS
Regreets. It’s listed in MW101 as obsolete, which is worse even than archaic (which means a word’s used only sporadically); that it’s declared as obsolete means there hasn’t been an observance of the word since 1755. But regreets (n) has a certain ring to it, a wild and crazy cry of freedom. Let regreets ring. […]
Posted by Ben on July 6, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/regreets/
But They’ll Grow Back
“All of a sudden—it certainly wasn’t gradual—Magahet’s act of graciousness dissolved away into a cheap spectacle, and for no reason in particular.”
Posted by Ben on June 27, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/but-theyll-grow-back/
Bureaucratic Administrative Crap
Two things of note. If you tried to access this site in the reasonably recent past and failed, good for you. There were “technical difficulties,” which were vastly compounded by human stupidity (mine). The technical difficulties have passed; the stupidity, sadly, has not. A reminder that the recently-penned story, In Reality (about a reality show […]
Posted by Ben on June 23, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/crap/
So it’s a select group
I realize that the following is going to strike an incredibly small percentage of people as in any way humorous (and is going to strike most people as, at best, worthless), but I’m going to post it anyway, in the hopes of humoring those people. My apologies in advance to everyone else. amphiboly, amphibology. In […]
Posted by Ben on June 20, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/amphiboly/
Phrase of the Day
“Take a walk up ladder lane and down hawser street: a humorous old nautical term for [being] executed by hanging, a hawser being a thick nautical rope.” (via QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, by Robert Hendrickson)
Posted by Ben on June 16, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/hawser-street/
What Happened, Is
You know how it is when you write something, some kind of journalish thing on a piece of paper, that, in a matter of months becomes completely incomprehensible? traveling allows you to be abstracted from the landscape you’re an anomalous critter. …you don’t know what item doesn’t fit, because you don’t understand enough about the […]
Posted by Ben on June 6, 2004
https://www.swordbilled.com/not-fiction/