Wednesday, January 19, 2005

like Michael Jordan

Endorsing lots of things, that is.

*Below Dunster further endorses the acceptance of ain't as Standard English.*

Being able to collapse am not, is not, have not, or has not into a single syllable is prosodically valuable; the ability to preserve ambiguity between those four forms is also worthwhile. For instance, a poem I once wrote ("On To R") depended on it.

*Below Dunster further endorses double negatives, the splitting of infinitives, the stranding of prepositions, beginning sentences with conjunctions, the use of the passive voice and the first person in formal writing, and the spelling of both yes and hurray as A--Y-I-Y--Y-I-Y.*

Oh a yiy yiy. And I motion for it to quickly be decided by the hoi polloi, who I ain't on bad terms with.


Below Dunster does not endorse the interchangeability of you're and your or of they're, there, their and ninja. Below Dunster discourages the use of the word obviously and the mixing of fruit and grain products.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sarge:
It's not a bad idea to use double negatives, but as for split infinitives, one must take care to appropriately split them. Stranding prepositions can be acceptable, it just depends on the context you are writing in. And occasionally sentence variation can be enhanced by the use of passive voice or by beginning a sentence with a conjunction. First person in formal writing, though, I believe is in bad taste.

But seriously folks, thanks Sarge for the heads up on this site. I'll admit that I've never cared for those people who write blogs, but in this case, I will make an exception. I look forward to more good reading.

Bison

Justin Slocum Bailey said...

Well put, Bison.

You know my exhortation: "Love the blogger, hate the blog."

But seriously (if I may borrow your phrase), I have found some good ones, though I prefer to refer to them as web logs, which is the original term. You will have noticed, for instance, that Below Dunster endorses To Wit.

Thanks for the pithy comment, buddy, and I hope you will continue to be happy Below Dunster.