Author Archives: Lynn
Believing Stuff
When you are asked what you “believe” about any subject, do you have to “look it up,” or do you have to do “research?” If someone has to consult a book (even the Bible) or some other authority to be … Continue reading
Scary Words
Years ago I worked with a young female colleague whose upbringing made her squeamish about certain words. On separate occasions, I learned that merely saying one of the words made her squeal. Her trigger words: spiders, snakes, underpants, and vomit! … Continue reading
Human Expectations
“How am I supposed to be able to bench press 250 pounds ten times?” you may ask, apparently thinking this is something that is expected of you. The answer? You’re not. You are a human, not a gorilla. Your ability … Continue reading
Just Learn to Write!
In the twenty-first century, any person who does not know how to write clearly is not completely educated. To this end, given present technology, keyboarding ability is an advantage. The person who can type eighty words a minute is able … Continue reading
Pronoun Perplexity
It’s necessary for authors to be careful and explicit regarding the use of pronouns when more than one person is present in the context of a discussion. The antecedents of pronouns may be perfectly clear in the writer’s mind, but … Continue reading
Nosing Around
This article is from the series Meditations from the Track Changes Column In the course of copyediting, I often find it useful to nose around in (aka research) what great authors of the past did. The sorts of points I seek … Continue reading
Meditations from the Track Changes Column
In the course of editing the writing of clients, I encounter much in the way of ticks and bad habits, not to mention sheer ignorance, particularly in the writing of beginners and illiterati — of which I edit more than I’d … Continue reading
Aerial Gynectomy
Based on a true personal experience … Trying to avoid eye contact with anyone, I chose the side of the street with shadows, but was approached by a woman who decided that I was the cause of all her life’s … Continue reading
The Goldfinch — A Review
Last night I finished listening to the audio recording of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which won a Pulitzer in 2014. Both before and after the award, it garnered a mixture of reviews, some praising it highly, some hating it. … Continue reading
Words and Pictures — A Review
Words and Pictures, while perhaps not perfect, is a movie that is much better than its 6.6 user rating on IMDB would suggest, a rating earned probably because it’s not a Hollywoodish movie. It demands your close attention, and may … Continue reading
Unbroken — Laura Hillenbrand
Recently, in part because of some books that have come my way as an editor, I’ve spent more time than I normally would have becoming acquainted with the experiences of men who have gone to war and returned from it. … Continue reading
Doing Their Job?
A review of Redeployment by Paul Klay. Substantially the same text I posted on both Amazon and Goodreads. Five stars if you can handle it. I can’t conscientiously recommend this book for everyone. It’s a book for grown-ups. Its author, … Continue reading
Schwanengesang
Ted Williams had been saying he would quit baseball every year for four years. By September 28, 1960, it was finally time, and Ted wanted more than anything to do something memorable at the end. In his last major league … Continue reading
Above and Below
Don’t you hate it when you see above and below used as nouns? This lumpy construction usually occurs when the author wants to refer to material within text in a position relative to where the monstrosity occurs. (More precisely before … Continue reading
Sympathy Vote — A Review
Monsters exist in this world. They walk among us, and they sometimes hurt us and those we love. On September 18, 1966, twenty-one-year-old Valerie Jeanne Percy was brutally murdered in her bed in Kenilworth, Illinois. She was the daughter of … Continue reading
Swan Song Is As Swan Song Does
Motivated by the principle that no news gets old faster than sports news, I figured I’d better bang out this race report for the NorthCoast 24-Hour Endurance Run that I ran in two days ago, before even I don’t care … Continue reading
Footnotes Versus Endnotes
My favorite magazine, The Watchtower, has a series of study articles in the July issue that uses endnotes rather than the footnotes it has used almost if not entirely exclusively in my forty-three years of reading the journal. A friend, … Continue reading
There Are Not All Types of People
“There are all types of people in the world.” So claims an author I’ve been editing. Sounds like a truism, right? No there’s not. To say there is sounds as though there’s some master catalog of types, and that someone … Continue reading
A Letter to One’s Copyeditor
Dear Ed Itor. Please to find in file word proces is many words of Story, Is very very funny hilarious freinds say (ha ha!) Please to choose salubrious and make nice sentinces with sound is Good English. If maybe some … Continue reading
A Late Quartet — a Review
It’s not often that I see a movie on subject matter that I think I know something about. But A Late Quartet in some respects touches very close to home. The story is about a famous string quartet struggling to … Continue reading
Annie Leibovitz at Wexner Center
Tonight we went to the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University to see the magnificent new exhibit of Annie Leibovitz photos. The evening was highlighted by a conversation before a near capacity crowd (nearly 2500) in … Continue reading
The Longest Race—Ed Ayres
Runner and writer Ed Ayres has written a new book about ultrarunning and the things ultrarunners think about: The Longest Race, lengthily subtitled A Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance. I had the pleasure of … Continue reading
Uncircling, Unfriending, and Unfollowing
Though I don’t maintain an ironclad bullet list of rules about who I follow in my social networks, certain annoyances move me to uncircle, unfriend, or unfollow persons posthaste. (All three italicized words are social networking neologisms.) Give me full … Continue reading
Pressing the Elevator Button
Now and then I notice the way naive people make fun of more enlightened individuals who press elevator buttons repeatedly in an effort to make them arrive sooner. I’ve been known to beat on the call buttons of a few … Continue reading
Chronicles: Volume 1 — Bob Dylan
Contrary to implications from the title, and also to the customary method of presenting biography, Bob Dylan’s book Chronicles: Volume 1 is not a traditional “Born on a mountaintop in …” chronologically-told tale. We learn bits of the back story … Continue reading
Ulysses by James Joyce — a Reaction
To quote a famous old Alka-Seltzer commercial, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” That was a long song. If you are searching for an intelligent review of the James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, look elsewhere. The book has been … Continue reading
A Former al-Qaeda Leader?
Recently, I read a news story that referred to Osama Bin Laden as the “former leader of al-Qaeda.” Former? Ha! Perhaps so in the same way that Hitler is a former Nazi, or Ted Bundy a former serial murderer, if we … Continue reading
Simple Signage
In the venerable British tradition of estate naming, we call our house Haddon Hall. We named it that because we live on Haddon Road in Columbus, Ohio, also in tribute to a beautiful English medieval castle by that name. We … Continue reading
Looking It Over
While I was an engineer at Motorola, I began editing the written work of others on a regular basis, and in doing so, discovered my ability to tear into someone else’s writing and make it better without making the author … Continue reading
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln: Remedial Reading
Most reading for the purpose of taking in information is remedial — don’tcha think? After all, if you already know a subject, why read about it again? By the time a man gets to be my age, the scope of … Continue reading
Keith Richards and Eric Clapton Autobiographies
In January 2011 I read Life by Keith Richards. In April I followed that with Eric Clapton’s earlier book: Clapton: The Autobiography. It was inevitable that readers who read both will see comparisons between these two icons of rock and … Continue reading
Fry Street Quartet, Southern Theater
On Saturday night we had the pleasure of attending a concert by the Fry Street String Quartet at the Southern Theater in downtown Columbus, which we had not yet visited in our three-plus years of living in Ohio. The Southern … Continue reading
Soft Pedal vs. Soft Peddle
Once I used the phrase soft pedal in e-mail to an erudite friend, in a form like this: “I intend to soft pedal my idea so as not to stir up controversy and resistance.” The friend corrected me, claiming that … Continue reading
Right Ho, Jeeves!
Among P.G. Wodehouse’s most popular novels is the 1934 work Right Ho, Jeeves!, featuring recurring luminaries, the young English gentleman Bertie Wooster and his ingenious and far-cleverer-than-his-boss valet Reginald Jeeves (whose first name is not given in this novel). One measure … Continue reading
Keith Jarrett — Paris / London: Testament
Music reviews are typically descriptive, but because words never adequately describe music, I rarely review music recordings. Nonetheless, for Keith Jarrett’s 2008 album Paris / London: Testament I’ve made this exception. But first some background … People who know me … Continue reading
Taking a Drink
When we speak of taking some substance, in the sense of ingesting it, the verb take carries connotations of need, of measured and countable doses designed to satisfy a perceived deficiency. Most people would not think of taking medicine unless … Continue reading
Taking Remedial English
Note: This post is a duplicate of the article by the same title on my Neologistics Blog, but here is where I originally intended to put it. I decided that rather than moving it, I would just allow the duplication … Continue reading
Stephen King and David Foster Wallace Compared
What do authors Stephen King and David Foster Wallace have in common? As authors, other than having been successful — very little. Their work emanates from about as far from opposite sides of the universe as can be.
Their commonality from the perspective of this neologistician is that they are two writers about whom I know far more personally than I do of their written works. Continue reading
Reading in Installments
At any given time I have between one and seven books in my Recent Reading stack marked as current. These are books that I really am reading at present. At this writing there are six on the stack: Washington: A … Continue reading
The Creative Habit — Twyla Tharp
As a sometime composer and writer, I have always been fascinated by listening to creative people of all types discuss their work, especially how they go about doing it. Therefore, when I recently bumped up against the title The Creative … Continue reading