Archive for category Grammar

Good Morning, Tiger Blooded Winning Warlocks. Charlie Sheen had Some Words for You

Posted by mistergroonk in Comics, Grammar, Intertube Madness, Interviews, Twitter on March 2, 2011

Charlie Sheen has done his best to capture all the attention from the true world changing events of late. We did our best to ignore his noise. And our avoidance success rate was pretty high until some Internet engineer drew up this single serving site: http://www.livethesheendream.com/

A few choice Twitter snarks and a LATimes Charlie Sheen Dictionary post later and we were wrapped up in the uninspired downward cycle of yet another celebrity falling, falling, falling to the ground where the rest of us morlocks have to live every day. And what a delicious feast the MaSheen is providing our recession-addled brains.

Quickly, check out the rest of what we lazily gathered on The Warlock’s relapse of drug-fueled inanity below the cut before the MaSheen returns to irrelevancy.

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Wherein Stephen Fry Puts Pedants in Their Place and We Love Him for It

Posted by mistergroonk in Animation, Books, Grammar on October 19, 2010

“Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it?” –Stephen Fry

We don’t believe they do, Mr Fry. Our knowledge of the execution of the written word is strong but not entirely kingly. We know there are places we could do better in being more “grammatically correct.” But, more often than not, we damn those ways in order to find new ways.

We are not immune to pedantic qualities that live inside. We typically try to limit the chastising to our own incorrect usage.

But now, most importantly, when friends turn up their noses and snidely accuse us of killing the English language, we no longer choose to smile and ignore their immovable imaginations.

Now we will simply state, ‘Stephen Fry says you can kindly ‘fuck off’ with that.’

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Alaska: Last Speaker of the Eyak Language has Died

Posted by mistergroonk in Grammar, People Who Died, USA on January 24, 2008

A woman believed to be the last native speaker of the Eyak language in the north-western US state of Alaska has died at the age of 89.

Marie Smith Jones was a champion of indigenous rights and conservation. She died at her home in Anchorage.

She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary, so that future generations would have the chance to resurrect it.

[…]

Ms Jones is described by her family as a tiny chain smoking woman who was fiercely independent, says the BBC’s Peter Bowes in Los Angeles.

“To the best of our knowledge, she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive,” her daughter Bernice Galloway told the Associated Press news agency.

“She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it. She was about as tenacious as you can get.”

(via warrenellis, bbcnews)

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Norman Mailer 1923 – 2007

Posted by mistergroonk in Grammar, People Who Died on November 12, 2007

And I didn’t know until now but, Norman Mailer died.

Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant terrible.” Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

(via aol news)

Another author that I failed to get around to reading while he was alive.

The word “fug” is thrown around quite a bit on the Internet. But did you know that it was Norman Mailer who coined the word in 1948 in his first book, The Naked and the Dead?

(via writer’s blog)

No, I did not know that Writer’s Blog. I did not know.

On the other hand, he said, writing was now easier for him in at least one respect. “The waste is less,” he said. “The elements of mania and depression are diminished. Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always terribly affected by the fear that they’re not as good as they thought and why are they doing it, what are they up to?”

After reading The New York Times obituary of Mailer, I’ve come to decide that Norman Mailer was quite mad and possibly an impossible man to know. But it’s the mad ones that have all the unique and, at times, forward thinking ideas.

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Political Ghost Whispering

Posted by mistergroonk in Grammar, USA, Video on November 6, 2007

This is President Eisenhower‘s complete (audio only) 1961 farewell speech:

“The Military Industrial Complex”: part 1 and part 2


part 1


part 2

Everyone please note how this statesman – this Leader – addresses his people. Notice his clear diction. Notice how he talks “to you” and not “at you?” Soak that in for a minute.

Prof. Emanuel Pastreich of George Washington University compares the current state of affairs to Japan’s occupation of Manchuria rather than Vietnam. He also mentions Eisenhower coined the term, “Military-Industrial Complex.”

huh.

(via political you tube)

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Aussie Slang Dictionary is Not a “Bush Bash”

Posted by mistergroonk in Grammar on September 19, 2007

I assumed wrongly that I already had a link to an Australian Slang Dictionary.

It wasn’t easy but we’ve tried to include uniquely Australian slang here and to exclude British and American slang even though these are commonly used in Australia. We see no point in informing the world that “fridge” is Australian slang for a “refrigerator”.

(via aussie slang dictionary)

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Has It Really Come Down to This?

Posted by mistergroonk in Grammar on August 7, 2007

(via digg)

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