SCIENCE: The Decline of Western Civilization

My cousin Cindy, who teaches biology in a midwestern college, occasionally sends me reports of her students. Longtime readers may remember the student who stubbornly insisted that fire was a living creature. If they’re typical, we should view the future with trepidation.

Yesterday I had at least 6 students (there were only 5 groups!) come and say, “so what do we do now?” after they had picked up their supplies (step 1), even though I had just handed out the written procedure to them.

Step 2 was “Put the strawberries into the ziplock bag.”

Halloween or Easter?

Alan Bostick reminds us of what can be done with those leftover marshmallow peeps, assuming the candy is possessed by the devil. But then people have always done unwholesome things with peeps: “It’s medical experiments for the lot of you!”

Genuinely . . . Lovecraftian.

Unnatural Writing Quirks

Tod Goldberg, novelist and blogger of Natural Selection, has been reading students’ manuscripts. Since the students are trying to gain entry to an advanced novel writing course, they are, one presumes, sending their best work. He really shouldn’t be forced to tell them:

If any of your dialogue regularly has the following tags, please consider a lower division course: interjected, retorted, perked, chided, elaborated, huffed, declared, admonished, clarified, ejaculated, defecated, spurted, sputtered, blustered, feigned, forced, exclaimed, condemned, purported, reacted, cautioned, cajoled, stated, lauded, or lambasted. Also, if you find yourself placing adverbs alongside any of those words — like, “I hate to read poorly written dialogue,” Bob blustered angrily — perhaps pick up any of your favorite novels and check to see how many times anyone says something, you know, furtively.

Of course, I am jaded by too many years wielding a red pencil. The other day, I got a call from an editorial friend. She was whimpering, barely coherent. “The possessive form of it,” she moaned.

“Yes, it’s spelled without an apostrophe.”

“I know. It doesn’t have an apostrophe. But– but– it certainly doesn’t have two apostrophes.”

“Your author spelled it with two apostrophes?”

“He spelled it it’s’. And this is the guy who sends around the grammar suggestions. Today’s was a warning against using cliches.”

“At least he followed his own advice. That’s the most original misspelling of its that I’ve run across.”