Month: January 2019

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Lemmings rushing to the slaughter

Today’s word of the day: “Malaphor.” This is a combination of “metaphor” and “malapropism,” and appears in such forms as:

  • “It’s not rocket surgery.”
  • “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.”
  • The title of this post

…and so on.  I use some of these myself quite deliberately, so I suppose I am not precisely helping to maintain the purity of the language.

This is courtesy of the very-delightful podcast The Allusionist, which I recommend to anyone else who enjoys wordy goodness; host Helen Zaltzman is whimsical and nerdy in proportions I very much enjoy.  Link there goes to the episode I listened to this morning; recommended for a listen if you have a spare twenty minutes or so.

As often seems to happen, nature appears to have suddenly remembered mid-January that it is supposed to be winter, and dumped an alarmingly huge pile of snow on our heads; as I walked to meet everyone for ramen last night the wind was constantly sweeping fistful after fistful of vicious glitter into my face. 

Today: piles everywhere of blinding white, some nearly as tall as I am.  (Miracle of miracles: the TTC ran like a dream this morning, and I secured a seat within a single stop.  I can only guess that perhaps most folk stayed home today.)

I’m not looking forward to the shoveling, but it IS rather lovely to look at…

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As it turns out, I’m pretty bad at this.

This “blogging on the regular” thing, that is. Still, I’m going to give it a shot, once again: no merit in abusing myself for not doing it, so let’s set that aside and carry on.

As I type, it’s a frosty late-January afternoon – the laundry is on, there’s cauliflower roasting for tonight’s soup, foccacia bread is rising, and Mark is doing his best to locate some creepy swamp people in Red Dead Redemption 2. Outside, Nature has elected to dump a blinding-white powdery snow on top of everything. Probably I OUGHT to be shoveling it.

I am not shoveling it. Instead I am having a second coffee, though I will likely regret the not-shoveling later on.

The plan is: Two hundred words, most days. About anything. I can do that, surely; I can use up two hundred words writing an email to re-schedule a meeting. Build a routine, and therefore a habit.

I think the first order of business shall be to do a few improvements around here. I’m no graphic designer, but at least I can make sure all the proper plugins are installed and such.

In the meantime, here’s one of the songs that’s been an earworm for me lately:

Reading right now:

Playing right now: