I am Tom Freeland,
a lawyer in Oxford, Mississippi. The picture in the header is my law office.
I'm on Twitter as NMissC
Missing Posts: If you have a link to a post that's not here or are looking for posts from Summer of 2010, check this page.
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Thursday Morning Various
- Dahlia Lithwick has an entertaining account of the oral argument in the medal of honor case– over whether it violates the First Amendment to make it a crime to say you won medals in the military. By her account, first the Solicitor General was pretty well beaten up during his argument but then the tide turned entirely as the respondent made concessions right and left.
- Cormac McCarthy is an enemy of semicolons and exclamation marks. According to the Chronicle of Higher Learning, McCarthy read Lawrence Krauss’s biography of Richard Feynman, Quantum Man, and liked it enough to write Krauss and say so, and then offer to edit it for the paperback edition, an effort that is acknowledged in the back cover of the book. Among the changes: “To start with,” Krauss writes, “he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
- Campbell Robertson visited East Tennessee to write about moonshiner “Popcorn” Sutton, whose fondly remembered local recipe is being revived through a legal microdistillery.
- If you have one or more Google accounts, You’ve got until February 29th to set privacy settings under which Google will at least partly anonymize your search history and limit itself to internal uses of that history. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has instructions about changing the settings.
- Here’s a tale of a fateful ship. Previously, I’d only known William D. Porter as the Union navy officer known for actions in the Vicksburg campaign. Turns out there was a WWII Fletcher class destroyer named after him, and the destroyer was doomed to mishap after mishap, peaking with the time it launched an armed torpedo in the direction of the battleship Iowa at a time the president happened to be riding on it. This lead to the arrest of the entire ships crew after they’d been sent away, an event that never happened to any other ship in the history of the navy. And that’s just one of a series of spectacular mishaps, starting with its first effort to leave port after its initial shakedown cruise. The blog post I linked was so over-the-top I checked the story out on Wikipedia, which has a quite similar account of the ship’s ill-fated history. h/t Brad DeLong’s twitter feed.
- William Saletan, a Slate writer I often find annoying (particularly in science writing), has a very long piece up about Romney’s evolving views about choice and related issues. The piece has links to video and audio and long quotes from contemporary articles and documents, and provides more than one ever would want to know about the subject while setting forth Saletan’s view about how Romney operates. Did I say the piece was really long? It does seem to really have the goods on this subject. Huffington Post, meanwhile, has a 1995 Philadelphia Magazine quote from Santorum, who said that he was pro-choice until he ran for Congress. He credits deciding to read up on the issue with his change of heart, a simpler account than was required for Romney’s longer record.
- Emptywheel observed that Sen. Grassley’s Twitter feed is truly strange. And it is.
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For those who doubt me about Grassley’s Twitter feed, here’s the next to most recent one:
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Oskaloosa town meet 33ppl hiway63 funding post office groovernorquist F&F. Obamacare lightbulb rule farmbill truckerregulation debt
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“Obamacare lightbulb rule?”
You are obviously unfamiliar with the Democrat Party’s conspiracy to force us all to buy fluorescent bulbs, thus turning us into a nation of squinters who will have no recourse but socialism for our eyecare needs.
Cormac McCarthy, though brilliant, has his priorities wrong grammatically and needs to be championing the use of the Oxford comma, the lack of which is barbarous. Shakespeare used semicolons did he not? And exclamation marks. And, yes, the Oxford comma.
I am not listening to semicolon advice from a man who doesn’t use quotation marks.
Well, this blog’s official style does call for use of the Oxford comma. I’m an over-frequent user of semi-colons, but slightly disinclined to use exclamation marks.
But what’s the deal with fiction writer hostility to quotation marks? Can you enlighten us, Lee?
Since quotation marks obviously add clarity, the objection against them must be aesthetic, right? Same with semicolons: they increase clarity, but some writers just don’t like how they look. To some degree I can relate. I don’t like how semicolons look inside a list, and I would never use one in dialogue, but I’ve got no problem with quotation marks. Plus if you don’t use quotation marks then American readers instantly think: Cormac McCarthy.
You know what bugs me these days? The comma used between two consecutive adjectives. Most of the time it serves no purpose.
I’m very glad we agree on the Oxford comma.
The best standard I ever heard on semicolons and the fiction writer originated with the great Padgett Powell: one per career.
The semicolon can be abused, but so can any other punctuation mark.
One exclamation point per brief is my self-imposed limit; usually I can do with none.
The use of the dash for dialogue is European, I think — I can’t recall the distinction between when to use it vs. <> in French. Joyce used dashes for dialogue. He thought quotation marks were ugly.
(Me, I would hate single quotation marks if I were a Brit: ‘Aunt Mary liked her teapot’s colour’ causes a moment’s uncertainty as to whether that’s an apostrophe or a quotation mark. Double quotation marks are far superior.)
Anderson, would you listen to semicolon advice from e.e. cummings?
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One exclamation point per brief is my self-imposed limit; usually I can do with none.
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I feel about exclamation marks in legal writing the way I feel about use of bold face type: If you haven't made the point have appropriate emphasis by the language you use, you probably haven't made the point strongly or clearly enough. I let myself bold face something on a first draft, knowing I'm going to come through in the next round and get rid of it. Same with an exclamation mark. Then read it, and if it doesn't quite make the point without the typography, I work on the language.
I'm having trouble understanding the hostility to semicolons, though.
I’m surprised McCarthy would spend breath on such a mundane opinion. I guess when you realize you’re a VIP, you think you’ve got to put in on everything.
Anderson, would you listen to semicolon advice from e.e. cummings?
Verse is a different game altogether.
… I guess the key to a good exclamation point is when the sentence actually reads oddly without one.