Bob and I decided to take Wendell Berry’s advice and escape the despair of the world by to find the peace of wild things. We headed to the winter birding grounds in eastern North Carolina. If you have only ever been to the Outer Banks in the summer, winter is a very different experience, offering opportunities for solitude. I posted video as solitude doesn’t mean silence: swans, especially, are very noisy. The sounds invite you into their world.
All posts by witchyrichy@gmail.com
Grumpy Old Lady: Proofreading Edition
I always hesitate to post about poor proofreading because I know my own blog posts are probably riddled with errors. But I am not a professional journalist, nor do I play one on TV. And, according to Grammar Bitch, I can blame my old age for those errors.
I am, however, a lifelong member of the English major’s club who has grown increasingly frustrated with the utter lack of concern for proofreading—especially in an age when AI is readily available to check spelling and grammar for you. This isn’t about style or substance or rhetoric; these are silly punctuation, spelling and missed words that a simple read aloud would have picked up.
I generally just roll my eyes and move on, but today I was annoyed because the writer was so busy being snarky about Selena Gomez (I’m a fan!) that she, a professional journalist, overlooked her own misses:
We can all be honest about the fact that Selena Gomez has had some catastrophic red carpet misses over the years. But her style has drastically improved in recent months–and she looked incredibly (sic) tonight in this off-the-shoulder Prada gown.
I ran the quote through ChatGPT, which suggested the following revisions, including hyphenating “red carpet” when used as an adjective:
We can all agree that Selena Gomez has had some catastrophic red-carpet misses over the years. However, her style has drastically improved in recent months—and she looked incredible tonight in this off-the-shoulder Prada gown.
The bot adopts a more professional tone and streamlines the prose. While it may not align with the writer’s intended style, at least it gets the words right. To her credit, she did hyphenate “off-the-shoulder” correctly, but—not to be too snarky myself—it was probably written that way in the press release.
I suspect part of the issue is that proofreaders no longer exist so there is no second reader. Many decades ago, when I worked in public relations, my boss, a founding member of the grammar police, required extensive proofreading prior to printed publication. We read it alone, together, forwards and backwards. Every so often, an error crept in. It happens to the best of us. But errors were very rare in the four years I worked there, probably because we knew we would find ourselves on our own sort of red carpet when it was discovered. Today, it seems errors abound from headlines to first paragraphs to captions. Maybe we just have bigger things to worry about?
I promise this blog is not going to become an extension of the grammar police state but if you come for Selena, you better get it right. Plus, she did look incredible.
Happy Belated Public Domain Day
We celebrate the new year in many ways. Perhaps, in terms of access to literature, music and the arts, nothing is more important than Public Domain Day, which occurs annual on January 1. Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain defines public domain as “the realm of material — ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts — that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. It includes our collective cultural and scientific heritage, and the raw materials for future expression, research, democratic dialogue and education.”
What does this mean? Works created in 1929 and sound recordings recorded in 1924 are now part of this vast collection of stuff to read, to view, to listen to and, most importantly, to build upon in ways that traditional copyright severely restricts.
Not everyone sees the public domain as a good thing, hence the reference to items “falling into” the public domain. The past few years have been particularly controversial as the original Disney characters have entered this unregulated territory. Disney is no friend to anything that allows anyone unmitigated access to Mickey, Minnie and the rest of the crew.
I just finished reading A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. My copy came from Project Gutenberg, the repository of public domain books, one of those amazing projects that harnessed the Internet to expand access to the world.
I went looking for this year’s list as one of my LibraryThing challenges is to read something that recently came into the public domain. I think it will be The Maltese Falcon.
Grow Your Own
My summer garden was largely a bust from drought and critters. I did get a nice harvest of onions, garlic and ginger. In fact, there are still onions in the raised bed as the warm weather is encouraging second growth and blossoms. And, with Thanksgiving just days away, we haven’t had frost yet to make the collards sweet and tender. Gardeners and farmers are watching the climate change a little bit each year. Someone on a podcast recently–maybe Jon Stewart–reminded us that the canary in the coal mine dies. Not sure why that has stuck with me. Warnings are just that and we ignore them at our peril.
This post wasn’t meant to be about climate change but sometimes I let my subconscious do the writing, like my own private AI bot. I nicknamed her Rhetorica when I was in graduate school. Perhaps TMI?
This post was meant to be about was the joy and ease of growing your own food, at least in small batches. My goal this fall was to replace those plastic tubs of lettuce mixes that I was buying regularly. Heads of lettuce–think iceberg and romaine–can be challenging to get to maturity without losing them to bugs and varmints. But, those tubs are filled with baby greens, and they are easy to grow, especially inside. Throw a few seeds in the dirt, give them sun and water, and they are ready to start harvesting in a few weeks. I have been clipping leaves from my first planting in October and put in a second go in early November that is about ready to be transplanted. I started with a collection of 10 different varieties but you can start with a mix of seeds, too.
There is something satisfying about eating food you have grown. I also enjoy a bit of gardening in the winter months. Just a couple pictures: I love the view of the pole barn through the porch door in the second one.
Hot Takes
I am working on a longer post about my recent road trip read, Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule. But, I didn’t want to miss a few quick items that might be of interest.
While there is some question as to whether the examples in Alanis Morissette’s song, Ironic?, are actually ironic, there is no question that the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma has provided a classic example. The first act of his new Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism is to force schools to show his prayer video to every student, teacher and parent. Most schools have refused and the Oklahoma Attorney General has said he overstepped his bounds. (His one concession was that he only encouraged, rather than required, the students to pray with him.) I hope the teachers tasked with teaching irony as part of the Oklahoma standards take note.
Search, by Michelle Huneven, uses the story of one Unitarian Universalist congregation’s search for a minister as an exploration of the relationship between community and organization. Since the narrator is a food writer by day, the novel is full of wonderful descriptions of meals and includes recipes at the end. The book is funny, poignant and authentic, based on my own experience with the UUs, and, I should say, with other community focused organizations. Decision making becomes more challenging when it has to be made by people who supposedly share certain values and have equal say over the process and outcome. Huneven also explores the changing landscape of churches as they struggle to connect with younger people while maintaining the shared history and culture.
Astrologers have been excited about today’s big move: Pluto, planet of death, destruction and transformation, moved from Capricorn, where it has been for 16 years, into Aquarius where it has not been for 200 years and where it will stay until 2043. Big changes are coming according to People magazine. We have to look at the abyss before we can rebuild the world. My astrologer of choice is Chani Nicholas, in case you were wondering. This, by the way, has nothing to do with the Age of Aquarius. But I’m including the song anyway for your enjoyment.