Phrases That Baffle

There are so many adages and common turns of phrase in the English language that add confusion to our daily lives. Here are my enlightening opinions about some of them:

A stitch in time saves nine. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a relatively young child who has never heard this phrase before but has just read A Wrinkle In Time. You may guess why I was so confused. Wrinkle and stitch are fairly similar if you are thinking of distortions in time, so my mind immediately led me to a disruption in the space-time continuum or a tesseract. A tesseract saves nine? Was this some arbitrary number of endangered lives that tessering could ultimately save from death or dismemberment? Or could one tesseract save nine other tesseracts? And how was this possible? While the rhyming nature of this adage makes it cute and easily remembered, it adds confusion to the interpretation, especially for young children, who can often most benefit from regurgitated wisdom. I give it an A-.

For all intents and purposes. This one never confused me but I discovered many years ago that multitudes of people are mistaken about the actual phrase. If you have never read this phrase anywhere, you may think that people are saying, "for all intensive purposes". Now, there is nothing inherently contradictory or absurd about this translation, but it is, nevertheless, incorrect. It is, however, hard to prove this to people. It's really not the phrase's fault. It gets no penalty. A.

Hollaback girl.  Still waiting for an epiphany on that one. Incomplete, but leaning towards F.

Coup de grace. First of all, there is no way to reason this one out if you don't speak French. So we all feel like idiots when we have to nod along when someone says it in conversation, desperately waiting until we can get home to our dictionary or subtlely look it up on our smartphones (it means stroke of mercy, by the way. The final deathblow, usually a mercy kill). Next, no one says it correctly, apparently. We pronounce it 'coo de grah', when the French say it more like 'kude gras'. This puts us in a predicament, though, doesn't it? If we try to be intelligent and say it correctly, as native French speakers do, we are perceived as snobby and pretentious. If we say it like everyone else does, we are spineless worms who give in to peer pressure and says things incorrectly for no reason. Plus, the French will hate us even more. B-/C+.


Literally. This is more what you might call a "word" than a phrase, but it has been the subject of much anger and comedic writing lately, so I'm going to give it a stab. We all know the meaning of the word "literally": to take something at face value, with no metaphorical interpretations. With this nifty meaning, "literally" was prime material for comedians and amateur hyperbolists to add a subtle element of the absurd by prefacing extreme exaggeration, or hyperbole, with a word that would normally negate the hyperbole, but instead pronounces it. For example, "I could literally eat a horse right now." What I probably mean is simple that I am very hungry, but the addition of "literally" adds a special emphasis by jokingly taking away the possibility of hyperbole.     I love it, but some people take the use of "literally" much too literally. So boo on them. I find it a nifty, if overused, comedic device. A-.


More to follow.

Writing Pains

Being relatively talented at writing, that is, being able to form sentences that make sense and sometimes even look different than the surrounding sentences, is a mixed blessing. In school, all the teachers rave about your writing, and you feel pretty cool. Hey, I'm talented! Then you get a rep among the other students for being some prodigy writer. They ask for tips on their essays. You read their essays.

And thus discover why your teacher thinks you're such an amazing author. Most people just suck at writing and  you're a welcome, mediocre reprieve from sentences that have no commas, twelve commas, lower case proper nouns, or three subjects and no objects. I don't even know if that last one is even possible. But you get my point: it's a major downer to realize you're only talented by dismal comparison. But still, you can't shake the feeling that you're the next Dickens or Rowling; I mean, your teacher couldn't have been exaggerating that much, could she?

So you go to college and take a creative writing course and your work, which you had fancied witty and charming, gets to ripped to shreds by people who wrote stories that ended in suicide instead of finding out your secret girlfriend was actually your cousin the whole time. Apparently that was a stupid and "manipulative" ending, but suicide is just peachy. All the other students' stories had deeper meaning and were allegorical. Some were even surreal. Yours are just...stories. In fact, you can't even decipher the meanings of the other students' stories half the time. Am I an idiot??

Then your husband gets it into his head that it's your life dream to be a famous novelist (which it is, but no one's supposed to know that), and he's so supportive it's nauseating. "Of course you can be a bestselling author! You're an amazing writer! Of course you can get published! No plot or even tagline? No problem, I'll make it for you. You don't want me to write your book for you? Sheesh. Well, then just spend more time writing. What do you mean 'Writing what?'- writing your book, silly! Well, you won't have a plot and a book until you to get to work, now will you?" Thanks. Real helpful.

So you start a blog as a release valve for the pressure of wanting to write and having no plot or ideas to write about, and at first it's great, but then no one reads it and you're depressed and want to write even less. Just dandy.

Then your last resort is constantly rereading reviews of stories you posted to fanfiction.net, which is a major ego boost, until you start to read a story because, hey, it has 80 reviews, which must mean it's good right? And then you think the story's horrible so you read all 80 reviews, assuming they're flames, but they're all glowing. Each and every review praises the story for its originality, masterful execution, and stunning characterization. Then your last bastion of hope crumbles when you realize that only a tiny percentage of fanfiction.net readers can tell a third-grader's work from MacBeth, and they're not reading your story because it doesn't have enough reviews.

Bollocks.