GIDE (1951): ‘I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect.’

Your result for Howard Gardner’s Eight Types of Intelligence Test…

Linguistic

31% Logical, 20% Spatial, 61% Linguistic, 18% Intrapersonal, 8% Interpersonal, 41% Musical, 16% Bodily-Kinesthetic and 39% Naturalistic!

Take Howard Gardner’s Eight Types of Intelligence Test at HelloQuizzy

These weak chapters show up the worst of Meyer and Brysac’s writing style, which is sometimes pretentious to the point of incomprehensibility and becomes more so when they seem to lack interest in their subject matter. The thesaurus takes a battering: Meyer and Brysac will not have half of something if they can have a moiety; they will not give a gift if they can give a lagniappe; they will not quote a saying if they can quote an apothegm.

Sometimes it’s almost impossible to make out what they mean, as when Gladstone is said to have “habitually lofted oratorical rockets into the unassailable empyrean,” when all the poor man actually did was to answer a few questions. Or when the British agent St. John Philby is said “to glare at the world through his owlish shrubbery.” What is owlish shrubbery? A shrubbery full of owls? A shrubbery shaped like an owl? A prop from Monty Python? As to what glaring through such a thing might signify, this reviewer is at a loss to imagine.

But in the realm of books I might actually pick up, this one looks right up my, er, alley:

For similar reasons, S.U.V.’s are more dangerous than cars. Not just because they’re slower to stop and harder to maneuver, but because — by conferring a sense of safety — they invite careless behavior. “The safer cars get,” Vanderbilt says, “the more risks drivers choose to take.” (S.U.V. drivers are more likely to not bother with their seat belts, to talk on cellphones, and to not wear seat belts while talking on cellphones.) So it goes for much of the driving universe. More people are killed while crossing in crosswalks than while jaywalking. Drivers pass bicyclists more closely on a road with bike lanes than on one without.

I might postulate, however, that the careless behavior of SUV drivers is less cause/effect than such people are simply more likely to be assholes. But I’ll reserve judgment until after my library stocks the book.

Or if you hear that Royals manager Trey Hillman KIND of wants to have Ross Gload hit in the No. 3 spot, you hope that’s a velleity.

Another amateur site that the pros turn to is the Wordlustitude blog, written by Mark Peters (see “How Wordlustitude feeds my obsession”). He has tracked the use of infixes – words inserted into the middle of other words. Some of the best-known examples come from the TV cartoon series The Simpsons, where the eternally cheerful character Ned Flanders has coined phrases such as “in-diddly-different” and “wel-diddly-come”. Peters’s collection of “diddly” words caught the attention of Michael Adams, a linguist at Indiana University, Bloomington. According to Adams, infixes have been used in poetry for centuries but spoken infixes have appeared only in the last few decades. Peters’s collection provides further evidence that this is true.

Anywho, off to see U2 in 3-diddly-D tonight. All reports so far being that it is Bonolicious.

12/22/2007: This is the day of my gym locker code (12-22-07).
12/27/2007: PELF = WSJ Law Blog word of the day
12/28/2007: I attend a Mayday concert where the song Pelf Help is performed.
1/10/2008: I forget my lock at the gym.