WordWacky

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain….

So begins the first poem in Poets & Writers’ National Poetry Month celebration, which could also be called “A Dead Poet a Day.” This first one is by T. S. Eliot (who, if you believe the story told in the movie Tom and Viv, wasn’t such a nice guy), “The Burial of the Dead.”

Writer’s Digest blogger Robert Lee Brewer is holding a Poem-A-Day Challenge: write a poem every day in April using his daily prompt, post it in the comments section, and you’ll earn a badge for your blog or website and a certificate. There’s also some other prizes, which I’m unclear on because I didn’t read the myriad rules & blah blah blah.

For me poetry can be painful (if you don’t believe me, try reading all of the first day’s entries on Brewer’s site). Not just other people’s poetry, either. My own is perhaps the most painful, since not only do I have to read it, but I bear some responsibility for it, too. And I’ve done nothing but failed at these NaWhateverMo challenges so far. So maybe I will or maybe I won’t participate, but I can almost guarantee that all 30 of my poems (or however many I do manage to write) will not be available for public consumption.

Other poetry month activities include Poem in Your Pocket Day, which not only seems a little silly to me, but also invites that tried, tired joke, “Is that a poem in your pocket….” On the Academy of American Poets’ website, I learned that they’ve trademarked the whole poetry month business (not cool), and made a celebratory poster (pretty cool).

I guess when everyone thinks poetry, they think T. S. Eliot, who, though he might have been a cruel month himself, was in fact a darn fine poet.

In a month there is time… to write 30 poems.

Not since the Vagina Monologues has such a comprehensive list of words for the female parts been assembled. It showed up on my Twitter stream, via The Blogess.

See the whole list at the Vagina Lady.

It’s an old trick, the dictionary hack. Hook up a server login page with a dictionary file and run all the words as passwords until you hit something. In this case, the program got to “H” for happiness, before the server opened up and all of the Twitter goodies fell out.

It’s not that impressive to me that the perpetrator was 18. Who else has all that time to spend, just to misspell Bill O’Reilly’s name on the FOX Twitter stream and let us all know he’s gay. What is impressive to me is that the security was so lax at Twitter that this was able to happen.

Via Twittown:

The details of the rudimentary hack reveal a startling lack of essential security within Twitter’s halls, and raises eyebrows about the potential for Twitter to be marketed as an internal collaboration tool for business use. The so called dictionary-hack has been a mainstay of hackers for decades, and the servers should have been configured to recognize the repeated login attempts. A lack of strong password enforcement (ensuring that passwords are complex) and a failure to “lock out” accounts after multiple failed attempts are a breeding ground for would be hackers and crackers - with a situation like that, it was only a matter of time.

As far as hacks go, this one was relatively harmless (though the Twitter execs trying to monetize the service may disagree with me on that point). Nobody’s bank account was drained. Nobody really believed O’Reilly was being outed by FOX News.

What’s interesting to me is how we use words as code. When we type them over and over into a server to get access to a website, they lose their meaning. Do you think that whoever set the “happiness” password felt happy every day while he or she typed it in? Devoid of context, words become little more than letter patterns, in this case motor commands from the brain. If there is any meaning, it’s “let me in, already.”

Say a word again and again, until the syllables run together, and you have a group of circular phonemes, not a word at all. (What the hell does “Om mani padme hum” mean, anyway?)

Names have a similar sort of meaning transfer. When I took the name Ruby, I thought a lot about its meaning. Now I rarely think about it, and I’m sure when my wife hears the word Ruby, she thinks of me before she thinks about a red stone with the hardness of nine mohs.

I am a word addict, but of all the qualities of words, the one I like best is that they mean something. They are the most basic metaphor of our human lives.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s don’t use common words as passwords. I would argue further that we should not use anything with meaning as a password. Let’s keep those meanings sacred, shall we? After all, 8-letter/number/symbol patterns are infinite. The number of words in any dictionary, on the other hand, is decidedly finite.

[Picture via MAKE:Blog]

My love affair with crosswords began in high school. See, when you’re cutting classes, it helps to have something to do to pass the time. I would do the Daily News or New York Times crossword, sometimes with my friend Denise. She would put two letters in a box to fit words that she wanted to place. It was infuriating.

That love affair revived a couple of years ago, and I dragged my wife in for a threesome. We’d trade the crossword back and forth when we were stuck, and sometimes — but not always — we’d get it all done.

It is my ambition to one day complete (solo, sorry honey) a Saturday New York Times crossword. Everyone thinks Sundays are the hardest, but that’s not true. It’s just the largest. From the Amazon listing for the Saturday book:

The Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle is the most challenging puzzle of the week, which is why it has gained such an eager following. The most serious solvers know that actually finishing the puzzle is no small feat.

No small feat, indeed. When I get any of the words in that puzzle, it’s a triumph. A girl can dream….

What’s NaNoWriMo? It’s National Novel Writing Month, the 30-day writing extravaganza, in which thousands of people around the world try to write a novel in the month of November. No, it doesn’t have to be a full, complete, edited novel, it just has to be 50,000 words by midnight on November 30. That comes out to 1,667 words per day, in case you’re counting.

Want to sign up? NaNoWriMo is the link.

So far it’s not going too well for me. My wife and I were planning to start at midnight, but she wasn’t feeling well, so we let it go. Not behind yet, but rest assured, I will be soon enough.

Starting… now!

I have often spoken about the gap between my taste as a reader and my ability as a writer. When you’re starting out in the arts (or, in my case, when you’ve been starting out for 20 years), you know good stuff when you read it, but there’s a painful lack of ability to reach that bar when you sit down to create. It can be career-killing, that gap.

Here’s Ira Glass, undeniably successful in his writing and his work, speaking about the gap and how to overcome it: [via Centrum]

Now whatever your creative pursuit, set some goals and get through it. I will be doing so, myself.

The word poverty originates comes from the Latin, paupertatem, via Old French, poverte. It is first recorded in Old English around 1225, as mentioned in a book published in 1868, Old English Homilies.

We use the word poverty, and its cousin, poor, casually, meaning broke, perhaps, or cash deficient. Yet we know true poverty when we see it, don’t we? In people who are homeless. Or people who debate between heating their houses in the winter and eating.

Growing up, I thought we were poor, my single mother and I, but she worked steadily, at the same job throughout my childhood, a good job by many standards — a job with the City that had good benefits. I didn’t have the same clothes or sneakers as some of my classmates, or a piano, and my mother slept in the living room of our one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. But in reality, by the definitions set out for us by the U.S. Government, we were not “poor.”

According to the U.S. Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines for 2008, a family of two, like ours, would have to be making less than $14,000 a year in the contiguous U.S. to be below the poverty line. We lived in New York City. It is unfathomable to me to think someone could live on that amount of money and still eat, get clothing, and use transportation to and from a job on that income in New York.

Apparently it is also unfathomable to the human services providers, too, because you qualify for food stamps at 130% of the federal poverty limit, for WIC at 185%, and often for Medicaid (depends on the state) at 200%. According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, “Research suggests that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs.”  So if the guideline doesn’t even determine what we consider poor, why set it at falsely low levels? Seems to me there can only be one reason: to deny people benefits. (But I’m a cynic. If you can think of another, please speak up.)

I’m taking three steps against poverty, starting today. I urge you to find three things you can do to stop poverty, however you or the government defines it. Here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Donate. I’m going to take Brian from Copyblogger up on his generous offer to match 250% of my $10 donation to Save the Children! Unheard of, really, people. You should donate ten bucks, too.
2. Educate myself. In addition to the research I did for this post, I’m going to read a book that’s been on my to-read list for too long: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
3. Vote. You heard it here first. And I’m not a non-profit, so I can say vote for That One, please. If you don’t, please don’t tell me about it.

Last week the New York Times did an article about Palin calling McCain a maverick at the VP debates.

This word, maverick, derives from a surname — a surname that survives to this day.

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

The rest of the article goes on to detail some terrific activities of this lefty family, including serving in the Roosevelt administration, defending draft resisters and atheists, attacking the Iraq war, and serving as a board member for the Texas ACLU.

Says Terrellita, “Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’”

There are lots of words that derive from names. Here are a few others:

Boycott - after Captain Boycott, an Irish land-agent who was shunned by neighbors — they would not speak to him, buy from him, nor sell to him — after refusing to lower rents for his tenants

Dahlia - from Anders Dahl, an 18th-century Swedish botanist who introduced the flower

Dunce - from John Duns Scotus, an unstupid philosopher whose ideas went out of fashion in the 16th century, and were from then on thought to be idiotic

Guillotine - after Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a French assemblyman during the Revolution, who called for a universal method for capital punishment

Lynching - after Charles Lynch, a judge in Virginia at the time of the Revolutionary War who exacted strict punishment against English loyalists

Mausoleum - for the tomb of King Mausollos of Caria, a monument of such stature as to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Quixotic - after Don Quixote, the famous character in the Spanish novel of the 1600s

Tawdry - from St. Awdrey, who gave her name to a fair at which you could buy lacy clothing that was later deemed cheap and of poor quality

Maybe some descendants with these names also cringe when they hear their birthright misused, who knows?

One thing is abundantly clear, however: McCain is no Maverick.

When my wife and I were watching clips of Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, I commented that her responses were more like poetry than prose. They were non-linear, free association style riffs, and with her (affected?) midwestern lilt, it sounded like a spoken word performance.

Apparently I was not the only one who noticed. Slate writer Hart Seely added some line breaks to her quotes and came up with “The Poetry of Sara Palin”:

“On Reporters”

It’s funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don’t know,
You know …

Reporters.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

It reminded me of an oldie but goodie, the George W. Bush quote poem I had hanging in my cubicle for some time. It still gives me joy to read, so forgive me for reproducing it here. This one is slightly different than the Sarah Palin poetry, in that it is a multitude of quotes that are rearranged to create the poetry. But each one has been verified.

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

Indeed. Let’s make the pie higher.

I’m not really a reader of USA Today. I think of it as too conservative and dumbed-down to waste my time on. Sometimes I glance at it over a hotel continental breakfast. And for some reason, my workplace, known for its staggering cumulative intellect, peddles this newspaper exclusively in the cafeterias.

But today, amid the ”greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression,” a friend pointed me to a story by Craig Wilson in the USA Today that is worthy of some note: it’s National Punctuation Day.

Today is National Punctuation Day, a day set aside to reflect on the fact a semicolon is not a medical problem. At least that’s what NPD founder Jeff Rubin, a former newspaperman, wants to impart.

I hesitate to write about punctuation since it has never been my strong suit. Commas especially. Or is it commas, especially?

I have long held the belief that I must have been sick the day commas were taught. Where to put them. When to use them. When not to use them. Do you put one before the conjunction in a simple series of three or more items? (The answer is yes. I just looked it up on Rubin’s website, nationalpunctuationday.com)

I am a great fan of punctuation. Generally I try not to be a prescriptivist when it comes to language rules, but I am so fond of punctuation that it’s difficult for me to keep my directives and opinions to myself. (Lest you now take great joy in scouring my prose for punctuation errors, let me disclaim that I am not perfect, and even the best of us punctuation nerds can benefit from an editor. So please, feel free to correct me.)

Opinions? What would opinions have to do with something so precise as punctuation?

Style guides, those taskmasters of prescriptivism, differ – for example, on the serial comma rule. The Associated Press Stylebook, which lords over the majority of journalism in this country, deletes the serial comma. While The Chicago Manual of Style insists upon it. Maybe it’s because my true love is fiction, but I take Chicago’s side on this (and most other) punctuation quibbles.

I read a good portion of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I didn’t finish it, in part because it was overdue at the library and in part because though it was funny, I wondered exactly how much of her British punctuation rules really applied to our ‘Merican habits. I did appreciate that, though she was not in favor of comma proliferation, it was a matter of taste, not standards.

I love the comma. For me, that half breath taken is like life itself, breathing its way into sentences. A little pause brings character and drama to otherwise flat, dull sentences. And when there isn’t a pause denoted by the comma, there is visual deliniation, a guide for the reader of the sentence. What commas do is eschew obfuscation — that is, they clarify a sentence. It’s especially important when some knob is trying to read your precious word strings aloud.

So I loved hearing that my liberal peppering of the comma was tolerated, even by those not so comma inclined, like Truss.

I’ve also made dear friends with the semicolon. As Wilson points out in his article, they are somewhat too pretentious for casual communication; I’m loathe to put them in e-mail. But they are handy little buggers, creating conjoined twins of sentences that would otherwise be merely adjacent.

So we come to the exclamation point, that much-maligned symbol of exuberance and emphasis. Like many students of my generation, I was initiated to proper composition with a slim copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. According to Elements, this abrasive slash marring the end of your sentence “is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands.” Egads! We’re using it wrong. Of course, Strunk doesn’t sink to talk at all about multiple exclamation points, which in my opinion are one of the greatest scourges of the Internet.

There we have it, my punctuation manifesto, in honor of National Punctuation Day. [Editor's note: Exclamation point omitted in deference to Strunk and White.]