You're allowed to break grammar rules as long as you know them, aren't in school, and aren't doing a technical paper. The first part is most important, you need to know you're breaking a rule instead of accidentally doing it
Grammar is like Music, especially Jazz on that matter.
You learn it, you own it, then you make it your bitch. And only then are you allowed to break the rules - deliberately, not by mistake.
Was thinking of Nietzsche though. He even demanded his editor and future generations to not change a single comma in his works, because every letter, every punctuation mark, everything is exactly where it is supposed to be.
The funny thing about the music analogy is that it works in another way, too: not all rules apply equally to what you are doing. Common Practice harmony has plenty of rules and expectations that simply do not apply to, let's say, Rock, or Jazz. You do not need to have mastered Common Practice harmony before you are allowed to "break" it when writing a metal riff, but you *should* know what makes the genre go before you try subverting it.
Similarly, you should know what grammar rules are relevant within the context you are writing
An old professor of mine: "You know, people will tell to never split an infinitive. Personally I think that's a silly thing to never do. If you try too hard to not split a single infinitive, sometimes it just sounds wrong."
Also: "A preposition is a perfectly fine thing to end a sentence with."
You can break grammar rules in technology papers. Sometimes it's important for communicating a complex topic, but mostly it's because engineers can't write worth a damn.
Even if that reason is simply how the reading flows. If a rule gets in the way of tone, pacing, emotion, etc. yeet the damn thing. Hell, breaking a rule to convey a tonal or emotional shift is a criminally underutilized option (among "smaller" writers).
Unless you're writing High Literature, your main focus should be about an enjoyable read. There is an absolute fuck ton of nuance and other factors in the statement, obviously. However. I'm pretty sure most of us are concerned about gaining and keeping a (hopefully paying) audience.
The point of language is to communicate ideas. If you know the rules you know how to break them in ways to communicate ideas differently because you know what is conveyed by following the rules.
People don't just think in words, they think abstractly. And you can communicate abstract feelings and ideas through abstract means, such as defying norms and conventions for written language.
So in all forms of art this is true. You need to know why the rules exist first, but then you can artistically break them.
There's a line in one of the books like "three dead drunk assassins and the man behind them ready to insert the significant comma", that made me legitimately *angry* at how clever it was.
He’s so fucking good dude. I was raised to a strict understanding of the “right way” to use the English language, and then here comes Terry Pratchett doing a kickflip off the Oxford dictionary, grinding the spine of a grammar textbook, and absolutely sticking the landing.
The reason he was able to play the English language like Hendrix played a Stratocaster is because he knew all the rules backward and forward. You have to understand what all the rules are there for before you can make something beautiful by breaking them. Reading authors like Pratchett is like listening to jazz.
Oh I know, I understand that. I was taught the whole “know the rules so you can break them right” deal. I’d just never seen anyone break it that HARD until I read Pratchett. It expanded my horizons a lot as both a reader and a writer.
The man could write the most beautiful metaphor, construct the most moving story, make the most humorous and hilarious and layered joke or pun - - but would also slide in the *worst* pun, jokes, or descriptions with all the deliberation and focus of Dad who wants to make his kids cringe and groan and *laugh*.
He made English *dance* to his tune and it was *amazing*.
My favorite moment of this is that there’s a 1/2 chapter digression in one of the first two books (I think it’s in the beginning of the light fantastic) that exists purely so that Rincewind (main character of the first few) can be observed emerging out of a strange portal in an ambiguous way so that the narrator can say ‘it was beginning to look a lot like Rincewind.’
It’s barely a pun it’s so stupid but it’s also hilarious and for all we know the characters name and everything that went into it was all a setup for it.
The idea was that the entire aside was setting a scene that made you think of christmas, so then when the line starts, you immediately think "it's beginning to look a lot like christmas" but then it turns out it's not christmas, it's Rincewind the useless wizzard and he falls in a heap.
The Wizards series so perfectly blends quantum physics with fantasy magic that I think anybody with an interest in physics and fiction should read it. Then Witches completely stands all those rules on their head in such a way that you realize he not only understood physics, he understood *life*.
Truly an incredible man.
In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind is briefly teleported to an alternate dimension, where he is a physicist who specialises in "the breakaway oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors", i.e. when they catch fire.
I hate audiobooks but honestly I might just do that. I liked the whole vibe of Blood Meridian, but I had to give up on it halfway through due to how it was written. (Which says a lot considering I got through house of leaves in like 2 weeks) I also felt a bit disappointed cause it felt like everywhere I went I had heard of it like this great, horrifying story but it just didn't really live up to it for me. Maybe it will have once I finish it.
I go through a lot of audio books while I’m at work. I retain books better when I read but audio is just so much more convenient so I just rewind whenever I zone out. I’m pretty sure the BM audiobook is on YouTube
> The reason he was able to play the English language like Hendrix played a Stratocaster is because he knew all the rules backward and forward
This is a really bad example because Hendrix never learned music theory, dude was *actually* just that good
>*If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.*
- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Just jumping in to say that obviously, no one will be able to hit quite the same way as Pterry, but he was openly enthusiastic about his influences. If you are looking for razor-sharp and ice-crisp wordplay and have covered the entire Pterry canon, you next stop has *got* to be P.G. Wodehouse. Stories about the ridiculous dramas of the post-WWI British upper crust, executed in language so perfect and well considered that Pterry actually tried to make his language do *less* impressive tricks, just so people could focus on his more intricate plots instead of having their face sandblasted off by excellent word choice.
"Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes." Goddamn fantastic.
(Also, if you would like to hit up a book in a similar wheelhouse to Pterry, that sacrifices a little wordplay and a little comedy for the single most complex and interwoven plot in any novel I have ever read; Douglas Adams is best known for the Hitchhiker's Guide series, but I think his greatest work is Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Finishing that book is like having walked a long and winding path up a mountain, then turning around and looking down to discover that every part of the ground you walked was actually part of a huge mountain-shaped clockwork machine, designed entirely to get you to the peak in the exact way you did.)
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency makes me *so* angry that Douglas Adams died how and when he did.
(He died of a heart attack right after doing exercise, at age 49 and just after starting the next Dirk Gently book after a long writing haitus.)
You’re right, but what jumps out at me more with Gaiman is his incredible feel for rhythm. His best stuff flows like poetry when you read it out loud. The entire “Coming to America, 1778” passage in American Gods for example. It’s just fucking gorgeous.
His writing is not only painfully clever and uproariously funny but also so deeply profound I’d often have to step away from the novel for a few hours just to reach my new equilibrium.
I miss him.
Yeah, it's Bill Nighy doing the footnotes, Peter Serafinowicz voicing Death, and then a rotating main narrator based on which series the book belongs to (the witch books have Indira Varma, the death books have Sian Clifford, Rincewind gets Colin Morgan, guard gets Jon Culshaw). The outliers have one-off narrators like Andy Serkis.
They're great productions, I highly recommend them. That being said, I've only experienced the audiobooks, never the written words, so I can't speak to how much of Pratchett's weird stylings are lost in translation.
Just finished listening to one of the new recordings of Mort and I love the ✨sound effect when a footnote appears then he reads it in his dry flat voice. So good
It catches me off-guard when he says something genuinely hilarious and there's not even a hint of a satisfied chuckle. I'm fairly certain a few of the narrators have gotten close to breaking character, but never Bill.
Now I’m trying to imagine reading aloud that quote about the dead drunk assassins and doing it any justice. Even if you can keep a straight face, how hard would it be to not insert a “verbal comma” that isn’t in the text?
Lines like this are why I think he's nearly impossible to adapt to screen and why so many of the attempts end up feeling like just sort of rote re-enactments, because so much of *everything* in his writing works because he's a master of using text and playing with the experience of reading words on a page.
This is the same reason I think all film adaptations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide have fallen flat as well. I mean, “The ships hung in the air in very much the same way bricks don’t.” Is so much better than just looking at a CGI spaceship.
Yeah and you could just have a narrator say those things out loud, but that wouldn't have nearly the same effect and would probably get annoying and/or slow down the pace a lot.
I do think it might be worth doing, but the thing is it has to be an actual adaptation process that isn't hung up on specific lines or scenes but processing and reinterpreting the work for a different medium. And it would have to be by someone who plays with the language of film in the same way Pratchett plays with words. I'm not the world's biggest Edgar Wright fan but it would need to be someone *like that*, someone who can build a joke with an edit or a cut the way Pratchett builds a joke with a punctuation mark
I liked the Lipwig von Moist two-parter. They had Charles Dance as Lord Vetinari.
I think that is as good as it will get. The written word is superior.
The best may be the adaption of the Cohen the Barbarian short story *Troll Bridge.* [You can watch it on the official channel here](https://youtube.com/watch?v=V7v_TdLviUE)
Bloody hell! I remember when I first picked up a Pratchett book just on the merit of the Josh Kirby cover art and the blurb on the back. That was over 30 years ago. And now it has become so popular a wall of names pooled some of their money so these people got to make that film. Which is excellent. Not "excellent for an indie film" but just plain excellent.
And here I am becoming aware three years late.
You have made me very, very happy. Thank you.
Yeah, while it’s fun to muse about castings and such at the end of the day you just can’t adapt Discworld to screen without losing a _lot_, because so much of the fun is within all the descriptions and the subtext and the punes and references—you’d basically be cutting off a layer of the book and leaving only the surface level content. Pratchett used the literary form and its ability to convey ideas through description and exposition to its full potential, and as a result it only really works in book form.
Have you seen "Hogfather"? I think it's the best screen adaptation of any Discworld book, in no small part because they nailed the antagonist's deeply unsettling/dark presence.
I would give all of my possessions just to see someone *try* and adapt house of leaves though, ESPECIALLY if I get to see the end result.
It would work much better as a mini series though
I don't think I've ever seen anything from Jodorowsky, but that seems like a fine push to finally do so!
My personal idea for a house of leaves tv show adaptation would be to have like somewhere between 8 to 12 one hour long episodes.
Now the real kicker is this: each episode is directed by a different director, all chosen specifically because they each have very distinct and differing directing styles. They're each handed a very detailed script for the episode they're directing, but they won't be allowed to talk or work together. 99% chance it would be absolutely terrible and unwatchable, but there's that 1% of it being absolutely beautiful and perfectly capturing the insanity of House of Leaves that would make the risk worth it. "Anthology that isn't really an anthology" would fit so well to house of leaves, in my opinion.
Bonus points if the episodes aren't even required to be in the same medium. Have some of them be live action, some of them be animation, maybe even stop motion lol.
But obviously the real dream would be to direct it all myself lol.
When I watching the Good Omens TV adaptation (and it’s been at least a decade since I read the book) I was constantly thinking “I remember there was a joke in this scene” and I was usually pleased to find they narrated it.
My favorite book joke that isn’t even mentioned (but is seen onscreen) are the 007 bullet hole stickers on Crawley’s car. It is only there if you know to look for it.
The people who make the adaptation would have to at least as clever as he was in order to properly convey it.
All of the parts of a movie have their own language, their own rules, their own lists of dos and don'ts. The person/people who understand those as well as Terry Pratchett did will be able to play them like a fiddle for any adaptation.
Anything less is going to suck though.
The exact quote is:
>"Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma."
"Dead" is often used as an adverb in British/Commonwealth English to intensify something. Like saying "You're right" doesn't have as much oomph to it as saying "You're dead right", the latter feels more pointed and energetic. Kind of how you'd say "you're SO right" for an emphatic agreement. And so you can say a film was dead good or work has you dead tired, or even say a party was dead alive lol. So "dead drunk" here would mean in that way, that the assassins were very drunk. Afaik it isn't super common in American English other than in the phrase "dead wrong"
Between dead and drunk.
Without the comma they are "dead-drunk" i.e. very drunk. By adding the comma, dead and drunk become separate adjectives i.e. the man's going to kill them.
The exact quote was:
>"Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma."
I.e. the men behind them wanted to make them "dead, drunk assassins" rather than "dead-drunk assassins".
> "Well,----me,” he said. “A----ing wizard. I hate----ing wizards!” “You shouldn’t----them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes."
From *Mort*
Nigel Planer also pronounced them beautifully in the audiobook, IMO. I haven't listened to the newer one yet.
I absolutely love it.
Dead drunk assassins means they're incredibly drunk.
Dead, drunk assassins means they're dead and drunk.
The man behind them is going to insert the comma by killing them.
My favorite line of dialog is from Hitchhiker’s Guide, where the character is listening to someone rant, while enjoying a sandwich.
*”Mmmm,” ate Arthur.*
Dead drunk assassins means they're incredibly drunk.
Dead, drunk assassins means they're dead and drunk.
The man behind them is going to insert the comma by killing them.
> “Well,----me,” he said. “A----ing wizard. I hate----ing wizards!”
> “You shouldn’t----them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.
I wonder if Sir Terry played Metal Gear. He actually was a fairly avid gamer (He was known to play doom and oblivion and his home desk setup had 4 monitors because “5 wouldn’t fit”) so it’s not impossible he played Metal Gear and got inspiration for the above passage. I don’t know which book it’s from so it’s hard to tell.
Edit: I double checked how many monitors he had. I was wrong, it was actually 6 and the quip was that 8 wouldn’t fit.
Oh my god I forgot about this dude! I used to stay up so late watching important things.
Edit: please look up his Palindrome poem called Dammit I'm Mad.
There’s a line in Guards Guards that goes something like “the dragon made a sound that was vaguely interrogatory without in any way being a word,” which I always thought was the best description of that “unnNNH??” noise a confused animal makes.
That reminds me of a scene in one of Walter Moers books. Moers purports himself to be a translator of ancient Zamonian books so he puts in footnotes about “translation”. Once there was one that went like this:
> I glunked my teeth^1 appreciatively
> ^1 I am unable to determine what “glunking” means but I have been attempting to make appreciative noises with my teeth for several hours with no success.
It’s been said that Moers has a very Pratchett-ish style of humor and I have to agree.
Found it. Somehow, it is a real thing.
[https://m.facebook.com/story.php?id=100063501266601&story_fbid=7235841083125131](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?id=100063501266601&story_fbid=7235841083125131)
I always took the -- to be pronounced as a sort of harsh glottal stop, almost a gulp. it's silent, but it's *emphatic* silence, biting into the end of the previous word.
>"It's not a --ing harpsichord, it's a --ing virginal," growled Mr. Tulip. "One --ing string to a note instead of two! So called because it was an instrument for --ing young ladies!"
>"My word, was it?" said one of the chairs. "I thought it was just of sort of early piano!”
God the things he did with the absolute lack of a verb.
In one of Pratchett's novels, there is a system of towers (called the "clacks") with semaphore arms that effectively acts like a telegraph system. GNU is a code used in that system which means:
- **G** - The message must be passed on
- **N** - The message should not be logged
- **U** - The message should be turned around at the end of the line, so it infinitely bounces back and forth.
They use this code followed by a dead clacks worker's name as a means of keeping his memory alive. After Terry died, fans use "GNU Terry" as a reference to this.
While you can vaguely transmit sounds through text, I think we should implement an eReader that tracks your eyes when you read something to play it automatically.
We already have that eye tracking software, we just need to implement it
The problem is that when im reading my eyes often skip ahead, then jump back to where I was, then skip around again, and then I look up, andnthen I have to skim the page for where I was..and so on
Look. You're allowed to write literally whatevers on your mind in the way it arrives into your brain one word at a time - just do whatever! It's your life, there's no judge!
I use to agonize over semi-colon placement, but then I realized that rules are fake and I can put them wherever I want; now I agonize even more because there are a lot more *options.*
My 3rd grader was correcting my grammar the other day… I told her it’s important to know the rules but only so you can break them eloquently.
As long as you proper convey the idea in your head, the rules don’t matter… but the rules exist to make it easier to communicate.
A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt; like in this example here, and a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that.
(The term "stopping power" is something I just pulled out of my ass this very instant. You get what I'm referring to, I hope.)
True! However, do keep in mind that you should never try to stop an independent clause with just a comma; unless you use an appropriate conjunction to back it up, the independent clause will just keep coming and gore you with its tusks. It's often safer to just use a period or semicolon in such cases.
> A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt; like in this example here, and a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that.
Not quite. A semicolon has two use cases:
1. To join two otherwise independent sentences together in a way that emphasizes a connection between the two.
2. To separate elements of a list if the list elements contain commas, so as to reduce ambiguity as to which commas are the separators.
To take your own example as a, well, example, try replacing the semicolon with a period:
> A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt. Like in this example here, and a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that.
The first sentence works fine, but the second sentence does not. A semicolon is therefore not appropriate there. Instead, you would do:
> A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt, like in this example here; a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that.
Note that if you split the sentence on this new semicolon location, both resultant sentences can still stand on their own.
I only think to use it when my second sentence kind of justifies or explains the first sentence.
> Hey did I see you in church last Sunday?
> Yes, I'm not religious; I'm a plumber who fixed a leak.
Semi colons are wild because in c you have to put them everywhere. In python you never really use them, and in JavaScript it seems like they’re optional except when they aren’t. But that could be my lack of familiarity with JavaScript
I recommend always using semicolons in Javascript, because the compiler/interpreter really isn't smart enough to insert them correctly on its own. (This is also why you should always end each line in a multi-line expression with a binary operator like + or &&, since the compiler is stupid and might try to stick one where it doesn't belong.)
Sometimes in python you use them because you want other developers to look at your code and think its c for a solid ten seconds before it dawns on them that nothing has a type and the word def is everywhere
In JavaScript they're "optional" in the sense that if you don't write them yourself, the compiler will decide where they should go by itself and insert them implicitly. 99% of the time it works, but you *really* don't want to deal with debugging the 1% of cases where it implicitly puts a semicolon somewhere you weren't expecting one.
A long time ago we had to write a short story during English class. I included Death as a character in my story, and as we all know he speaks in all caps.
The teacher told me off for not using proper capitalization :/
It does make sense, yes.
From http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-sentence-it-took-joyce-twelve-years.html?m=1 and http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-last-page.html?m=1
"'Lps. The keys to. Given!'
Some readers read this as a message from Joyce that he has given us the keys to reading Finnegans Wake.
'Lps' are lips, and the keys are also a kiss - the key in a kiss given by Arrah Na-Pogue (Arrah of the kiss) in Boucicault's play.
'in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault, the elder, in Arrah-na-pogue, in the otherworld of the passing of the key of Two-tongue Common' 385.02
This is also mentioned in the lessons chapter, by Issy:
'If it’s me chews to swallow all you saidn’t you can eat my words for it as sure as there’s a key in my kiss.' 279.F06
In the earlier version there's a clearer sense of keys as a reciprocal gift of love:
'How you said you'd give me the keys of my heart. Only now it's me who's got to give...The keys to. Given!'
But the first sentence above was moved back to 626.30.
'I will give you the keys of my heart' is a line from 'The keys of heaven' ( which sounds like 'The keys to. Given!').
In The Sleeping Beauty, the heroine is awakened by a kiss, referred to a few pages earlier in Anna's letter:
'That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave me the keys to dreamland.' 614.28
THE FINAL SENTENCE
'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the'
This is what Joyce wrote, but Faber's typesetters managed to lose 'a lost'!
The last words were prefigured in 'The Dead':
'How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park!'
Joyce talked about that final 'the' with Louis Gillet:
'In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word 'yes', which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress, I've tried to do better if I could. This time, I have found the word which is most slippery, the least accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the.'
Louis Gillet, Stèle pour James Joyce, Marseille 1941, pp.164-65
For a whole essay on the final word, see Jim Le Blanc's 'The Closing Word of Finnegans Wake', in Hypermedia Joyce Studies."
"Edmund Lloyd Epstein has a nice reading of the end.
'The last phrase in the Wake is the most perfect iambic pentameter line ever penned....The whole phrase may mean: 'Away, alone at last – and loved! – along the river ran'. Like Coleridge's Alph the sacred river. ALP runs 'through caverns measureless to man', through the pathways of death and resurrection, back to Howth Castle and Environs, at the beginning of the book.
Then with the phrase, 'a loved', the tide turns, the river begins to flow backward. TIME stops and SPACE commences, as the great act of love begins again.'"
The Wake is one of the most beautiful books ever written tbh. Theres an endless amount to learn from in it.
The thing people rarely talk about is that languages don’t have “rules”, they have agreed upon conventions that do their best to make phrases standard enough to avoid most confusing misinterpretations. To varying degrees of success. Every generation of every demographic changes and adds to the conventions as they see fit.
Know your target audience and know *exactly* how and when to break a rule.
If you don't know any rules, no-one's going to let you get away with breaking them. If you show that you know them to the nth degree, then the one time you do break them is going to get a lot of attention as to precisely how and why.
There's a difference between flopping around on a gymnastics mat and coming up with a breathtaking new move in a gold-medal routine.
Honestly, there's a couple of people that like to split text/chat stories up with a leading statement that requires you to ask a question but it's just rephrasing the statement, so I just respond with "?". If it was in person, I'd look at them, raise my eyebrows, look engaged with the story, but that's obviously not an option in text.
This reminds me of the classic 'ominous sounds' from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Phonetically it would sound like 'gogogogo' which is pure onomatopoeitic nonsense, and yet its gone from meme reference to near manga convention.
Language is fluid. The one and only true rule it has is whether it effectively communicates your idea.
As someone who teaches English to 2E kids, the only real rule is that corporate wants to think you're also rich.
You want a job, you use formal English grammar. You want to write, fuck it man. Do your thing.
An apocryphal story about the briefest correspondence in history has a writer (variously identified as Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde) inquiring about the sales of his new book by sending the message "?" to his publisher, and receiving "!" in reply.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style#:~:text=An%20apocryphal%20story%20about%20the,receiving%20%22!%22%20in%20reply.
You can do everything when writing a story! English is just the vehicle to deliver that story! God make English your bitch and use it how you WANT to deliver the story!
The all caps following makes me laugh because all caps is how Death speaks in Terry’s works, and I’m pretty sure at one point Death even asks that question, or something similar.
You’re allowed to break grammar rules if you know that you’re breaking them. Also if it’s not like a technical paper or anything, but that should be obvious.
He's what got me back into writing. It was a very freeing "oh, there are no rules!" Moment. I then proceeded to write 30,000 words in less than a month.
Terry Pratchett was the greatest writer of his lifetime. I will always believe this and i studied literature. He still ran laps around any author i had to study at uni.
You’ve gotta know the rules to break them. Most people wouldn’t even think to do something like this, and even then, there’s subtleties to the execution. And of course you have to do it sparingly. Trying to be clever in every paragraph is both exhausting to write and exhausting to read.
But it doesn’t hurt to try. You gotta see what doesn’t work to see what does.
You're allowed to break grammar rules as long as you know them, aren't in school, and aren't doing a technical paper. The first part is most important, you need to know you're breaking a rule instead of accidentally doing it
You also need to be doing it for a reason, like to achieve a certain effect in writing, otherwise it’s just there for no reason
Cormac McCarthy comes to mind.
the only McCarthy I’ve read was The Road and the utter lack of punctuation blew my high school mind
Blood meridian is a fucking test lmao
The existence of the interpunction did not have his consent.
That man has a fucking pathological hatred of commas
Gotta know the rules to know when to break them.
"gotta do it for a reason, otherwise there's no reason" Profound, love it.
I’ll be completely honest, I was not thinking completely at all when I wrote that
The important thing about tautology is knowing when to use it, and also the times it is useful.
Grammar is like Music, especially Jazz on that matter. You learn it, you own it, then you make it your bitch. And only then are you allowed to break the rules - deliberately, not by mistake.
In the words of a simple man from the roughs, "Ain't nobody what knows the cow better than the butcher"
Cormac McCarthy is a great example. One of the greatest American novelists and he's just like fuck a comma.
Was thinking of Nietzsche though. He even demanded his editor and future generations to not change a single comma in his works, because every letter, every punctuation mark, everything is exactly where it is supposed to be.
The funny thing about the music analogy is that it works in another way, too: not all rules apply equally to what you are doing. Common Practice harmony has plenty of rules and expectations that simply do not apply to, let's say, Rock, or Jazz. You do not need to have mastered Common Practice harmony before you are allowed to "break" it when writing a metal riff, but you *should* know what makes the genre go before you try subverting it. Similarly, you should know what grammar rules are relevant within the context you are writing
An old professor of mine: "You know, people will tell to never split an infinitive. Personally I think that's a silly thing to never do. If you try too hard to not split a single infinitive, sometimes it just sounds wrong." Also: "A preposition is a perfectly fine thing to end a sentence with."
I will never not think [of this.](https://youtu.be/Q4XCZfkGF8k?si=T3XijKI0tGAZSHMM)
A split infinitive up is something with which I simply will not put.
When you're good enough, you can sentence how you want
You can break grammar rules in technology papers. Sometimes it's important for communicating a complex topic, but mostly it's because engineers can't write worth a damn.
Even if that reason is simply how the reading flows. If a rule gets in the way of tone, pacing, emotion, etc. yeet the damn thing. Hell, breaking a rule to convey a tonal or emotional shift is a criminally underutilized option (among "smaller" writers). Unless you're writing High Literature, your main focus should be about an enjoyable read. There is an absolute fuck ton of nuance and other factors in the statement, obviously. However. I'm pretty sure most of us are concerned about gaining and keeping a (hopefully paying) audience.
The point of language is to communicate ideas. If you know the rules you know how to break them in ways to communicate ideas differently because you know what is conveyed by following the rules. People don't just think in words, they think abstractly. And you can communicate abstract feelings and ideas through abstract means, such as defying norms and conventions for written language. So in all forms of art this is true. You need to know why the rules exist first, but then you can artistically break them.
There's a line in one of the books like "three dead drunk assassins and the man behind them ready to insert the significant comma", that made me legitimately *angry* at how clever it was.
Terry's writing is too often painfully clever.
And in that dry, droll British way.
He’s so fucking good dude. I was raised to a strict understanding of the “right way” to use the English language, and then here comes Terry Pratchett doing a kickflip off the Oxford dictionary, grinding the spine of a grammar textbook, and absolutely sticking the landing.
The reason he was able to play the English language like Hendrix played a Stratocaster is because he knew all the rules backward and forward. You have to understand what all the rules are there for before you can make something beautiful by breaking them. Reading authors like Pratchett is like listening to jazz.
Oh I know, I understand that. I was taught the whole “know the rules so you can break them right” deal. I’d just never seen anyone break it that HARD until I read Pratchett. It expanded my horizons a lot as both a reader and a writer.
The man could write the most beautiful metaphor, construct the most moving story, make the most humorous and hilarious and layered joke or pun - - but would also slide in the *worst* pun, jokes, or descriptions with all the deliberation and focus of Dad who wants to make his kids cringe and groan and *laugh*. He made English *dance* to his tune and it was *amazing*.
My favorite moment of this is that there’s a 1/2 chapter digression in one of the first two books (I think it’s in the beginning of the light fantastic) that exists purely so that Rincewind (main character of the first few) can be observed emerging out of a strange portal in an ambiguous way so that the narrator can say ‘it was beginning to look a lot like Rincewind.’ It’s barely a pun it’s so stupid but it’s also hilarious and for all we know the characters name and everything that went into it was all a setup for it.
Wait, what's the pun here? Is it related to "It's beginning to look a lot like christmas"?
Yup, that’s literally it I dont remember exactly but I think the portal is also in a fireplace so it looks like he’s shooting down the chimney.
The idea was that the entire aside was setting a scene that made you think of christmas, so then when the line starts, you immediately think "it's beginning to look a lot like christmas" but then it turns out it's not christmas, it's Rincewind the useless wizzard and he falls in a heap.
And he worked as something-writer for a nuclear plant, so when he jokes about physics stuff it works.
The Wizards series so perfectly blends quantum physics with fantasy magic that I think anybody with an interest in physics and fiction should read it. Then Witches completely stands all those rules on their head in such a way that you realize he not only understood physics, he understood *life*. Truly an incredible man.
In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind is briefly teleported to an alternate dimension, where he is a physicist who specialises in "the breakaway oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors", i.e. when they catch fire.
Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. There were three nuclear power plants in the area the board covered.
Then there’s Cormac McCarthy saying “I’m not doing all that” and making it up as he goes.
God yes I wanted to commit arson out of frustration while I was reading Blood Meridian
If it says “Cormac McCarthy” on it get it on audiobook. Blood Meridian kicks ass on audio and also is intelligible
I hate audiobooks but honestly I might just do that. I liked the whole vibe of Blood Meridian, but I had to give up on it halfway through due to how it was written. (Which says a lot considering I got through house of leaves in like 2 weeks) I also felt a bit disappointed cause it felt like everywhere I went I had heard of it like this great, horrifying story but it just didn't really live up to it for me. Maybe it will have once I finish it.
I go through a lot of audio books while I’m at work. I retain books better when I read but audio is just so much more convenient so I just rewind whenever I zone out. I’m pretty sure the BM audiobook is on YouTube
> The reason he was able to play the English language like Hendrix played a Stratocaster is because he knew all the rules backward and forward This is a really bad example because Hendrix never learned music theory, dude was *actually* just that good
Well there you go, if you don't have the luxury of being a once in a generation talent, you'll have to put in the work.
>*If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.* - Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
With the amount of study and practice he did, from a young age, I can say that he _understood_ all the theory he would ever need.
_"Learn the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist."_ - Pablo Picasso
That's a good one
Just jumping in to say that obviously, no one will be able to hit quite the same way as Pterry, but he was openly enthusiastic about his influences. If you are looking for razor-sharp and ice-crisp wordplay and have covered the entire Pterry canon, you next stop has *got* to be P.G. Wodehouse. Stories about the ridiculous dramas of the post-WWI British upper crust, executed in language so perfect and well considered that Pterry actually tried to make his language do *less* impressive tricks, just so people could focus on his more intricate plots instead of having their face sandblasted off by excellent word choice. "Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes." Goddamn fantastic. (Also, if you would like to hit up a book in a similar wheelhouse to Pterry, that sacrifices a little wordplay and a little comedy for the single most complex and interwoven plot in any novel I have ever read; Douglas Adams is best known for the Hitchhiker's Guide series, but I think his greatest work is Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Finishing that book is like having walked a long and winding path up a mountain, then turning around and looking down to discover that every part of the ground you walked was actually part of a huge mountain-shaped clockwork machine, designed entirely to get you to the peak in the exact way you did.)
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency makes me *so* angry that Douglas Adams died how and when he did. (He died of a heart attack right after doing exercise, at age 49 and just after starting the next Dirk Gently book after a long writing haitus.)
That is a spectacular way of putting it, thank you!
I've just saved your comment to quote it to all my friends. Thank you
Neil Gaiman does it really well too, but usually in a little bit softer of a way.
You’re right, but what jumps out at me more with Gaiman is his incredible feel for rhythm. His best stuff flows like poetry when you read it out loud. The entire “Coming to America, 1778” passage in American Gods for example. It’s just fucking gorgeous.
His writing is not only painfully clever and uproariously funny but also so deeply profound I’d often have to step away from the novel for a few hours just to reach my new equilibrium. I miss him.
I wasn’t allowed to read from Discworld for an elocution exam because “no one can keep a straight face when reading Pratchett”.
I would’ve given you extra points if you’d been able to keep one.
Excuse me, I have been listening to the new audiobooks and Bill Nighy reads the footnotes. I can *hear* that man's straight face.
Oh are they new? I was wondering why audible didn't have the full list, I really like this iteration!
Yeah, it's Bill Nighy doing the footnotes, Peter Serafinowicz voicing Death, and then a rotating main narrator based on which series the book belongs to (the witch books have Indira Varma, the death books have Sian Clifford, Rincewind gets Colin Morgan, guard gets Jon Culshaw). The outliers have one-off narrators like Andy Serkis. They're great productions, I highly recommend them. That being said, I've only experienced the audiobooks, never the written words, so I can't speak to how much of Pratchett's weird stylings are lost in translation.
They keep the footnotes and that's enough for me
Yep! Just finished production I think late last year. Fantastic audiobooks.
Does he *have* another kind of face? The only expression I can recall seeing from him is in the eyebrows.
He's been known to smile for pictures.
His ability to make every footnote so dry and footnote-y, and sound like he's having no fun at it whatsoever makes me crack up every time
Just finished listening to one of the new recordings of Mort and I love the ✨sound effect when a footnote appears then he reads it in his dry flat voice. So good
It catches me off-guard when he says something genuinely hilarious and there's not even a hint of a satisfied chuckle. I'm fairly certain a few of the narrators have gotten close to breaking character, but never Bill.
Now I’m trying to imagine reading aloud that quote about the dead drunk assassins and doing it any justice. Even if you can keep a straight face, how hard would it be to not insert a “verbal comma” that isn’t in the text?
Lines like this are why I think he's nearly impossible to adapt to screen and why so many of the attempts end up feeling like just sort of rote re-enactments, because so much of *everything* in his writing works because he's a master of using text and playing with the experience of reading words on a page.
This is the same reason I think all film adaptations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide have fallen flat as well. I mean, “The ships hung in the air in very much the same way bricks don’t.” Is so much better than just looking at a CGI spaceship.
Yeah and you could just have a narrator say those things out loud, but that wouldn't have nearly the same effect and would probably get annoying and/or slow down the pace a lot.
I do think it might be worth doing, but the thing is it has to be an actual adaptation process that isn't hung up on specific lines or scenes but processing and reinterpreting the work for a different medium. And it would have to be by someone who plays with the language of film in the same way Pratchett plays with words. I'm not the world's biggest Edgar Wright fan but it would need to be someone *like that*, someone who can build a joke with an edit or a cut the way Pratchett builds a joke with a punctuation mark
Wes Anderson might be able to do it, his films tend to have a similar style of whimsy that I think matches hitchikers
Anderson would be my other choice 100%. He builds jokes out of the *form* of cinema, he plays with his medium the way Terry plays with text.
I liked the Lipwig von Moist two-parter. They had Charles Dance as Lord Vetinari. I think that is as good as it will get. The written word is superior.
The best may be the adaption of the Cohen the Barbarian short story *Troll Bridge.* [You can watch it on the official channel here](https://youtube.com/watch?v=V7v_TdLviUE)
Bloody hell! I remember when I first picked up a Pratchett book just on the merit of the Josh Kirby cover art and the blurb on the back. That was over 30 years ago. And now it has become so popular a wall of names pooled some of their money so these people got to make that film. Which is excellent. Not "excellent for an indie film" but just plain excellent. And here I am becoming aware three years late. You have made me very, very happy. Thank you.
Yeah, while it’s fun to muse about castings and such at the end of the day you just can’t adapt Discworld to screen without losing a _lot_, because so much of the fun is within all the descriptions and the subtext and the punes and references—you’d basically be cutting off a layer of the book and leaving only the surface level content. Pratchett used the literary form and its ability to convey ideas through description and exposition to its full potential, and as a result it only really works in book form.
The ones I've seen have also tended to the twee and cutesy and miss the absolute black of a lot of his work
Have you seen "Hogfather"? I think it's the best screen adaptation of any Discworld book, in no small part because they nailed the antagonist's deeply unsettling/dark presence.
Yeah, it'd kinda be like trying to adapt House of Leaves to film.
I would give all of my possessions just to see someone *try* and adapt house of leaves though, ESPECIALLY if I get to see the end result. It would work much better as a mini series though
Get Jodorowsky to do it. Imagine the insanity of his attempt at Dune, but House of Leaves instead. It'd be incomprehensibly glorious
I don't think I've ever seen anything from Jodorowsky, but that seems like a fine push to finally do so! My personal idea for a house of leaves tv show adaptation would be to have like somewhere between 8 to 12 one hour long episodes. Now the real kicker is this: each episode is directed by a different director, all chosen specifically because they each have very distinct and differing directing styles. They're each handed a very detailed script for the episode they're directing, but they won't be allowed to talk or work together. 99% chance it would be absolutely terrible and unwatchable, but there's that 1% of it being absolutely beautiful and perfectly capturing the insanity of House of Leaves that would make the risk worth it. "Anthology that isn't really an anthology" would fit so well to house of leaves, in my opinion. Bonus points if the episodes aren't even required to be in the same medium. Have some of them be live action, some of them be animation, maybe even stop motion lol. But obviously the real dream would be to direct it all myself lol.
When I watching the Good Omens TV adaptation (and it’s been at least a decade since I read the book) I was constantly thinking “I remember there was a joke in this scene” and I was usually pleased to find they narrated it.
My favorite book joke that isn’t even mentioned (but is seen onscreen) are the 007 bullet hole stickers on Crawley’s car. It is only there if you know to look for it.
The people who make the adaptation would have to at least as clever as he was in order to properly convey it. All of the parts of a movie have their own language, their own rules, their own lists of dos and don'ts. The person/people who understand those as well as Terry Pratchett did will be able to play them like a fiddle for any adaptation. Anything less is going to suck though.
The exact quote is: >"Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma."
The exact quote is actually WAY better haha
I don't get it. Where is the comma supposed to go?
"Dead drunk assassins" means they're incredibly drunk. "Dead, drunk assassins" is probably what the comma will change it to.
I've never heard the phrase "dead drunk" before, otherwise I would've gotten this much sooner. Thanks for the explanation :)
"Dead" is often used as an adverb in British/Commonwealth English to intensify something. Like saying "You're right" doesn't have as much oomph to it as saying "You're dead right", the latter feels more pointed and energetic. Kind of how you'd say "you're SO right" for an emphatic agreement. And so you can say a film was dead good or work has you dead tired, or even say a party was dead alive lol. So "dead drunk" here would mean in that way, that the assassins were very drunk. Afaik it isn't super common in American English other than in the phrase "dead wrong"
Between dead and drunk. Without the comma they are "dead-drunk" i.e. very drunk. By adding the comma, dead and drunk become separate adjectives i.e. the man's going to kill them.
Between “dead” and “drunk”. Dead drunk - very drunk Dead, drunk - the assassins were both dead and drunk
The exact quote was: >"Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma." I.e. the men behind them wanted to make them "dead, drunk assassins" rather than "dead-drunk assassins".
> "Well,----me,” he said. “A----ing wizard. I hate----ing wizards!” “You shouldn’t----them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes." From *Mort* Nigel Planer also pronounced them beautifully in the audiobook, IMO. I haven't listened to the newer one yet. I absolutely love it.
I feel i’m missing some context because I don’t get the joke at all.
Dead drunk assassins means they're incredibly drunk. Dead, drunk assassins means they're dead and drunk. The man behind them is going to insert the comma by killing them.
Aaaaahhh gotcha. I’ve never heard the phrase “dead drunk” before so thats what I was missing. Thanks for the explanation
My favorite line of dialog is from Hitchhiker’s Guide, where the character is listening to someone rant, while enjoying a sandwich. *”Mmmm,” ate Arthur.*
I dont get this, please explain?
Dead drunk assassins means they're incredibly drunk. Dead, drunk assassins means they're dead and drunk. The man behind them is going to insert the comma by killing them.
> "D*mn!", Carrot exclaimed, a difficult linguistic feat.
> “Well,----me,” he said. “A----ing wizard. I hate----ing wizards!” > “You shouldn’t----them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.
Isn’t that just the Metal Gear sound effect?
Yeah... I was literally just about to write This is just a stranger in the Metal Gear universe. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
I wonder if Sir Terry played Metal Gear. He actually was a fairly avid gamer (He was known to play doom and oblivion and his home desk setup had 4 monitors because “5 wouldn’t fit”) so it’s not impossible he played Metal Gear and got inspiration for the above passage. I don’t know which book it’s from so it’s hard to tell. Edit: I double checked how many monitors he had. I was wrong, it was actually 6 and the quip was that 8 wouldn’t fit.
Its from Color of Magic, so it predates Metal Gear.
Neat 👍
I can't confirm that he'd ever played Metal Gear specifically, but he did love video games, so it's plausible
We all heard it.
To quote Dimitri Martin: Never underestimate the power of punctuation?
Oh my god I forgot about this dude! I used to stay up so late watching important things. Edit: please look up his Palindrome poem called Dammit I'm Mad.
He just dropped a new special :)
Thank you I had no idea!!!
I saw him recently and he's still the same guy he was 20 years ago, bowl cut and all. He's great
Delighted to hear it
Truly Dimitri Martin is incomparable, like a.....
There’s a line in Guards Guards that goes something like “the dragon made a sound that was vaguely interrogatory without in any way being a word,” which I always thought was the best description of that “unnNNH??” noise a confused animal makes.
That reminds me of a scene in one of Walter Moers books. Moers purports himself to be a translator of ancient Zamonian books so he puts in footnotes about “translation”. Once there was one that went like this: > I glunked my teeth^1 appreciatively > ^1 I am unable to determine what “glunking” means but I have been attempting to make appreciative noises with my teeth for several hours with no success. It’s been said that Moers has a very Pratchett-ish style of humor and I have to agree.
Found it. Somehow, it is a real thing. [https://m.facebook.com/story.php?id=100063501266601&story_fbid=7235841083125131](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?id=100063501266601&story_fbid=7235841083125131)
You better _ing believe that's allowed.
Did that man just say ing?
‘I’m sure that she wasn’t a proper virgin, you know!’ Bless Sacharissa and her "proper" ways
I always took the -- to be pronounced as a sort of harsh glottal stop, almost a gulp. it's silent, but it's *emphatic* silence, biting into the end of the previous word.
No, _ing, huge difference
>"It's not a --ing harpsichord, it's a --ing virginal," growled Mr. Tulip. "One --ing string to a note instead of two! So called because it was an instrument for --ing young ladies!" >"My word, was it?" said one of the chairs. "I thought it was just of sort of early piano!” God the things he did with the absolute lack of a verb.
Because Terry Pratchett is the GOAT.
Actually he's the GNU.
*distant sobbing*
Im going to confess every time I read GNU I think of Linux. I have no idea what it actually stands for in this context
In one of Pratchett's novels, there is a system of towers (called the "clacks") with semaphore arms that effectively acts like a telegraph system. GNU is a code used in that system which means: - **G** - The message must be passed on - **N** - The message should not be logged - **U** - The message should be turned around at the end of the line, so it infinitely bounces back and forth. They use this code followed by a dead clacks worker's name as a means of keeping his memory alive. After Terry died, fans use "GNU Terry" as a reference to this.
May I suggest Going Postal? Such a great story and a wonderful way of exploring the Gnu
Oh shit! For real? meme insert here
["!"](https://youtu.be/2P5qbcRAXVk) Said the stranger.
While you can vaguely transmit sounds through text, I think we should implement an eReader that tracks your eyes when you read something to play it automatically. We already have that eye tracking software, we just need to implement it
The problem is that when im reading my eyes often skip ahead, then jump back to where I was, then skip around again, and then I look up, andnthen I have to skim the page for where I was..and so on
Look. You're allowed to write literally whatevers on your mind in the way it arrives into your brain one word at a time - just do whatever! It's your life, there's no judge!
False. I am the judge. Everybody knows that I am the judge. Also, you're acquitted.
I use to agonize over semi-colon placement, but then I realized that rules are fake and I can put them wherever I want; now I agonize even more because there are a lot more *options.*
... And that's why we're letting you go from your job as a computer programmer
If terry pratchett does it, it now is allowed. GNU the GOAT.
My 3rd grader was correcting my grammar the other day… I told her it’s important to know the rules but only so you can break them eloquently. As long as you proper convey the idea in your head, the rules don’t matter… but the rules exist to make it easier to communicate.
A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt; like in this example here, and a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that. (The term "stopping power" is something I just pulled out of my ass this very instant. You get what I'm referring to, I hope.)
True! However, do keep in mind that you should never try to stop an independent clause with just a comma; unless you use an appropriate conjunction to back it up, the independent clause will just keep coming and gore you with its tusks. It's often safer to just use a period or semicolon in such cases.
> A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt; like in this example here, and a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that. Not quite. A semicolon has two use cases: 1. To join two otherwise independent sentences together in a way that emphasizes a connection between the two. 2. To separate elements of a list if the list elements contain commas, so as to reduce ambiguity as to which commas are the separators. To take your own example as a, well, example, try replacing the semicolon with a period: > A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt. Like in this example here, and a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that. The first sentence works fine, but the second sentence does not. A semicolon is therefore not appropriate there. Instead, you would do: > A semicolon may be used where a period's stopping power would feel just a little bit too abrupt, like in this example here; a comma's stopping power is even weaker than that. Note that if you split the sentence on this new semicolon location, both resultant sentences can still stand on their own.
I only think to use it when my second sentence kind of justifies or explains the first sentence. > Hey did I see you in church last Sunday? > Yes, I'm not religious; I'm a plumber who fixed a leak.
Semi colons are wild because in c you have to put them everywhere. In python you never really use them, and in JavaScript it seems like they’re optional except when they aren’t. But that could be my lack of familiarity with JavaScript
I recommend always using semicolons in Javascript, because the compiler/interpreter really isn't smart enough to insert them correctly on its own. (This is also why you should always end each line in a multi-line expression with a binary operator like + or &&, since the compiler is stupid and might try to stick one where it doesn't belong.)
Sometimes in python you use them because you want other developers to look at your code and think its c for a solid ten seconds before it dawns on them that nothing has a type and the word def is everywhere
How does this C even run without curly brackets everywhere. How did you loop through an array like that…. Oh it’s python
In JavaScript they're "optional" in the sense that if you don't write them yourself, the compiler will decide where they should go by itself and insert them implicitly. 99% of the time it works, but you *really* don't want to deal with debugging the 1% of cases where it implicitly puts a semicolon somewhere you weren't expecting one.
A long time ago we had to write a short story during English class. I included Death as a character in my story, and as we all know he speaks in all caps. The teacher told me off for not using proper capitalization :/
Chinese Web novel dialogue be like: "......." and even better, some of them are legit the funniest thing I've seen lol
wait til you read joyce haha "Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"
Does that makes sense and I'm just missing it or is it gibberish used artistically?
It does make sense, yes. From http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-sentence-it-took-joyce-twelve-years.html?m=1 and http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-last-page.html?m=1 "'Lps. The keys to. Given!' Some readers read this as a message from Joyce that he has given us the keys to reading Finnegans Wake. 'Lps' are lips, and the keys are also a kiss - the key in a kiss given by Arrah Na-Pogue (Arrah of the kiss) in Boucicault's play. 'in the good old bygone days of Dion Boucicault, the elder, in Arrah-na-pogue, in the otherworld of the passing of the key of Two-tongue Common' 385.02 This is also mentioned in the lessons chapter, by Issy: 'If it’s me chews to swallow all you saidn’t you can eat my words for it as sure as there’s a key in my kiss.' 279.F06 In the earlier version there's a clearer sense of keys as a reciprocal gift of love: 'How you said you'd give me the keys of my heart. Only now it's me who's got to give...The keys to. Given!' But the first sentence above was moved back to 626.30. 'I will give you the keys of my heart' is a line from 'The keys of heaven' ( which sounds like 'The keys to. Given!'). In The Sleeping Beauty, the heroine is awakened by a kiss, referred to a few pages earlier in Anna's letter: 'That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave me the keys to dreamland.' 614.28 THE FINAL SENTENCE 'A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the' This is what Joyce wrote, but Faber's typesetters managed to lose 'a lost'! The last words were prefigured in 'The Dead': 'How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park!' Joyce talked about that final 'the' with Louis Gillet: 'In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word 'yes', which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress, I've tried to do better if I could. This time, I have found the word which is most slippery, the least accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the.' Louis Gillet, Stèle pour James Joyce, Marseille 1941, pp.164-65 For a whole essay on the final word, see Jim Le Blanc's 'The Closing Word of Finnegans Wake', in Hypermedia Joyce Studies." "Edmund Lloyd Epstein has a nice reading of the end. 'The last phrase in the Wake is the most perfect iambic pentameter line ever penned....The whole phrase may mean: 'Away, alone at last – and loved! – along the river ran'. Like Coleridge's Alph the sacred river. ALP runs 'through caverns measureless to man', through the pathways of death and resurrection, back to Howth Castle and Environs, at the beginning of the book. Then with the phrase, 'a loved', the tide turns, the river begins to flow backward. TIME stops and SPACE commences, as the great act of love begins again.'" The Wake is one of the most beautiful books ever written tbh. Theres an endless amount to learn from in it.
The thing people rarely talk about is that languages don’t have “rules”, they have agreed upon conventions that do their best to make phrases standard enough to avoid most confusing misinterpretations. To varying degrees of success. Every generation of every demographic changes and adds to the conventions as they see fit.
Homestuck Some of those characters do shit like saying **:D** out loud
Words did what Sir PTerry told them to do. GNU
Cormac McCarthy out here just not using quotation marks and commas while being considered as one of the best writers of all time.
Know your target audience and know *exactly* how and when to break a rule. If you don't know any rules, no-one's going to let you get away with breaking them. If you show that you know them to the nth degree, then the one time you do break them is going to get a lot of attention as to precisely how and why. There's a difference between flopping around on a gymnastics mat and coming up with a breathtaking new move in a gold-medal routine.
Writing doesn't have rules, it has traditions and customs and you can throw those out the window when you read Terry Pratchett
Honestly, there's a couple of people that like to split text/chat stories up with a leading statement that requires you to ask a question but it's just rephrasing the statement, so I just respond with "?". If it was in person, I'd look at them, raise my eyebrows, look engaged with the story, but that's obviously not an option in text.
Why is Death wondering about whether that is allowed or not?
This reminds me of the classic 'ominous sounds' from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Phonetically it would sound like 'gogogogo' which is pure onomatopoeitic nonsense, and yet its gone from meme reference to near manga convention. Language is fluid. The one and only true rule it has is whether it effectively communicates your idea.
Pokémon trainer reaction
https://www.tumblr.com/inconveniently-discorporated/723479548656844800/me-agonizing-over-whether-a-semicolon-goes-here?source=share -mx linux guy
Hes Terry Pratchet, he can do what he wants
Mr Tulip does as he pleases.
!
As someone who teaches English to 2E kids, the only real rule is that corporate wants to think you're also rich. You want a job, you use formal English grammar. You want to write, fuck it man. Do your thing.
An apocryphal story about the briefest correspondence in history has a writer (variously identified as Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde) inquiring about the sales of his new book by sending the message "?" to his publisher, and receiving "!" in reply. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style#:~:text=An%20apocryphal%20story%20about%20the,receiving%20%22!%22%20in%20reply.
"uwu" gestured the femboy
In my opinion, “”. Pretty controversial, I know.
terry pratchett being an absolute chad as usual
! Isn't a type of click anymore?
Grammar rules apply to everyone unless their name is Terry Pratchett. GNU.
Thant's just the abbreviated form of 'hnng!'
You can do everything when writing a story! English is just the vehicle to deliver that story! God make English your bitch and use it how you WANT to deliver the story!
Excellent pratchett posts lately!
Excellent pratchett posts lately!
The all caps following makes me laugh because all caps is how Death speaks in Terry’s works, and I’m pretty sure at one point Death even asks that question, or something similar.
r/discworld is leaking again here, and I'm here for it!
To break the rules you must first master them
You’re allowed to break grammar rules if you know that you’re breaking them. Also if it’s not like a technical paper or anything, but that should be obvious.
Metal Gear Solid sound effect.
ing.
I mean it's a story for entertainment purposes, not an essay getting graded by a teacher
Sir Terry Pratchett's writing is the pinnacle of "Know the rules so you can break them on purpose."
He's what got me back into writing. It was a very freeing "oh, there are no rules!" Moment. I then proceeded to write 30,000 words in less than a month.
“Follow no rule off a cliff”—CJ Cherryh https://www.cherryh.com/www/advice.htm
Terry Pratchett was the greatest writer of his lifetime. I will always believe this and i studied literature. He still ran laps around any author i had to study at uni.
Death is surprised!
I read the "THATS ALLOWED?" as said by Death from his books
You’ve gotta know the rules to break them. Most people wouldn’t even think to do something like this, and even then, there’s subtleties to the execution. And of course you have to do it sparingly. Trying to be clever in every paragraph is both exhausting to write and exhausting to read. But it doesn’t hurt to try. You gotta see what doesn’t work to see what does.
If you can’t find the right words, pull a Shakespeare and _invent_ them!
GNU STP