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Iambic…hunh? 
“Poetry, you want to read over and over, to get as much savor and meaning from it as you can. When you read newspaper reporting over and over it’s usually because there’s a snag in it somewhere.”
—Roy Blount Jr., humor writer and author of Alphabet Juice, 2008 (Thanks to alert WORDster Herb Strentz)
Editorial Comment: Honey, get me rewrite!
More from Unka Roy:
“According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary. In proof, they point to pigs. Steven Pinker, in Words and Rules, observes that pigs go oink oink in English, nøff nøff in Norwegian, and in Russian chrjo chrjo. That may look arbitrary.
As if it went something like this:
English committee member #1 What’ll we put down for pig noise?
Member #2 (whose motives are unclear) Let’s name it for my uncle Oink.”
News Note: Forced merger between the journalism and speech departments @Utah State on temporary “hold.”
Ha Ha Ha so true. Wonderful copy editors.
ReplyDeleteI understand noff noff and oink oink, but chrjo chrjo? ha ha. I think poetry and newspapers have more in common than one would think. They both have to pull the readers in and engage them in a story, or an idea. newspapers and poetry are both framing an idea and telling people what to know and believe.
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