A little chalk poem

This very short poem, chalked on the pavement, won me third prize in the Mayhem Pavement Poetry competition yesterday:


Unfortunately  
vodka
cannot erase
you from
my brain
as easily
as rain
breathes
a half-
chalked
poem
back into
nothingness

I won a book of poetry.  Not bad for a quick ten minutes' chalking!  Admittedly the last line was one I had written previously, but not found a home for, so recycled it for this purpose.  It worked well for the medium. Yay poems!

Nauseous or nauseated - and does it matter?

Readers of my blog will know that I'm a logophile - I love words. I'm also passionate about grammar, punctuation and syntax.  Many people glaze over at this point, but I'm certainly not alone, as evidenced by the numerous grammar debates, jokes and memes cropping up all over the internet. (If you've never watched one of the Jack's Films Your Grammar Sucks videos, you are missing out!)

What I'm not yet sure about is how much of a purist I am. While I, like many others, nearly wept at the announcement that the Oxford Dictionary was adding to the definition of "literally" to allow it to also mean "Used for emphasis while not being literally true", I do accept that common usage changes over time, and sticking rigidly to archaic conventions is unnecessary. In saying that, the day that "would of" or "yous" gets added into common usage is the day I stop speaking English.

Working at a University I am particularly careful about my grammar, even in emails and informal documents, and can spend hours (ok, maybe minutes) deciding whether to use "forums" or "fora" as the plural.  There are also all kinds of debates about this on internet. Even so, there are times I come across something I haven't previously heard of and then it gives me pause - if I have been using a word incorrectly for 30-odd years, and most other people use it incorrectly without obfuscating their meaning, is correct use of the word necessary?

Loquacity

This is a piece I wrote for a creative writing paper, but I thought it would work quite well on here.

I have an addiction. A semi-secret delight. Hello everyone, my name is R and I’m a logophile.

I have always loved words, and although most of the time I agree that simple is better, there’s nothing I like more than the mouth-filling sweetness of a multi-syllabic expression that captures precisely what I want to say.

I realise now that my early experiments were not always efficacious, but at the time I couldn’t understand why my mother chuckled quietly at her birthday card addressed “to my beloved mother”, or why my standard four teacher tactfully suggested that four adjectives per noun was a little excessive. By high school though, my verbiage was becoming more accomplished, and I recall the evil delight of making an annoying boy in my class blush by asking him, loudly, whether he masticated.

Queer semantics

I'm a bit of a logophile (ok, a lot of a logophile) and collecting words is one of my hobbies. (I have a thing about that I will post another time).

Several times in my life I have been introduced to brand new vocabularies, notably (for example) during my own medical dramas, and during my daughter's cancer journey.  When I first began dabbling in the online lesbian world (I'm talking about support communities, forums and blogs, not porn, just to be clear!) I discovered a whole new lexicon, with which I'm still coming to terms.

Personally, I now refer to myself as gay.  Old school gay women seem to prefer lesbian, but there's something weird about that word for me.  I will describe myself as a lesbian (and I'm still not sure whether I'm supposed to say "lesbian" or "a lesbian") but it feels uncomfortable, whereas "gay" feels more natural.  I wonder if part of that is that I object to unnecessary gender-specific nouns like 'actress' and 'fireman', and can't see the need for two different words to describe a gay man versus a gay woman.  There is of course the whole spectrum of other gender identities and sexualities - bisexual, asexual, pansexual etc, but I'm not going to venture into that territory just now.

When I first joined Pink Sofa and was setting up my profile, there were a number of options I could tick to define myself, including femme, butch, lipstick, sporty dyke, leather, and androgynous.  Thankfully there was also a 'just me' box, and feeling rather overwhelmed, I ticked that and moved on.