After noting important information from the plastic tag of a newly purchased plant, I sometimes use the tag as a bookmark.
Recently, though, I had a very sad thought: people who buy an ebook and read it on a Kindle or similar electronic reader can’t use a colorful plant tag as a bookmark. They’ll not experience pleasant gardening memories when they remove a plant tag at the page where a chapter begins. They’ll not wonder why they’re wandering in the kitchen and looking for a blueberry muffin to snack on.
Sad thought indeed. I think I’ll continue buying “old fashioned” books in which I can place real bookmarks. How frugally quaint, but those ground-up trees don’t ever need recharging, and you can pass them on to a friend to read after you’ve enjoyed them or give them to a charity for recycling.
For curious readers, despite the book cover in the posted photo, I am a grammarphile, not a grammarphobe. I also smile at my own, spell-check’s, and other writers’ misspellings, such as the recent Internet news story by a Baltimore TV station calling the clients of physicians “patiants.”
So logical, I thought as I smiled, so wye knot? It could have been “patience.”
But back to “grammarphile” and “grammarphobe.” Do you fit yourself into one of those classifications? And why?
'mornin', Bob!
ReplyDeleteI guess as a writer, too, I must be a grammarphile, though having studied the craft at great length and now preparing to teach writers about the elusive and sometimes mystical craft of 'finding voice', I realize that a writer must first know all the grammar rules, but be willing to break them often, or their work will be overlooked by agent and editor, and scoffed at by publishers, for those fellas and gals look for the unique and brave souls willing to unmask, be authentic, and even create run-on sentences for pacing, and incomplete ones for emphasis, for writers have literary license to do so. Voice is style, genre and character specific, too. Not easy. But I digress.
If you digress, Gladys, please continue! I think you're "right on." A writer can have "perfect" grammar and still create nothing that anyone wants to read. As the iconoclast, editor, and sometimes replusive H. L. Mencken wrote many years ago, "What is in the head inevitably oozes out of the nub of the pen." It's what oozes out that interests people. From your Comment, I suspect you are an "oozer." If so, two thumbs up! Should we start a club: "Oozers Club." Hey, I'm not sure that idea has much potential.
ReplyDeleteThanks :)
ReplyDeleteXtreme No