"Halle-verbal infix-lujah."

In honor of National Grammar Day:

To whimsically digress, let us invoke here the existence of the infix in English. The official party line, promulgated at the elementary-school level, is that English has prefixes and suffixes but no infixes. The thoughtful grammarian will have noticed that English has at least one infix, bleeping, as in abso-bleeping-lutely, in-bleeping-credible, and fan-bleeping-tastic. (The exact spelling and pronunciation of bleeping is subject to some variation.)

—Teresa Nielsen Hayden, in an endnote to "On Copyediting," in Making Book.

(And John M. Ford is still missed.)

In Dozens of Colors of Thread

So Elly, who is one of the finest writers and crafters I know, is starting to do how-to videos, and the first one out the gate is showing that she has as deft a hand with a video editor as she does with a blue pencil.* Behold:





Fantastic. And while the polish and perfectionism of her work is what I admire, it's the lolcats and the two-headed chicks that make her One Of Us.

(Impressed? She also sells this stuff, you know.)
_____
*Proverbially. It being the Digital Age and all, I've never actually seen her mark up a hardcopy even when it was my prose she was providing with Gentle Correction. But Elly is an editor's editor, and the blue pencil, like the sword, exists always in the mind.

That's it. I'm putting my quill back in my goose.

Obviously, I needed humbling today. It seems there's this young drummer named Sara with a gift for polyrhythm and an ear for prog.

Here she is at 12, doing "Red."

And at 13, doing "YYZ."

That there is pure joy. I should live so long as to infuse all my work with as much.

(Via TNH, on BoingBoing.)

Blameless and Amazon

Elizabeth Bear (whose books you should read, and on whose livejournal I've found myself of late engaging in the Wednesday night Criminal Minds fansquee, because I am the King of the Chubby Nerds) has written a self-described feminist screed on the Subterranean Press website that pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about this gender-and-society stuff:

Dear Patriarchy:

I don’t care what you think.

I’m not here to convert you. I’m not here to enlighten you. I’m not here to try to earn your respect. I don’t need it.

I am not scared of you.

It is, as the kids these days say, made out of awesome. RTWT, right now.

(And it occurs to me that this is more or less exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say, "I'm a feminist. Not the nuts kind.")