Monday, December 11, 2006

Pensées

Several of the people on my blogroll have changed templates: “Sharp Sand”, “pages turned”, and “my space” most recently. This creates a curious feeling, as if an acquaintance of mine should show up having had cosmetic surgery and dyed her hair.

For quite a long time I thought that Shameless Words was a woman, but then he wrote something that told me otherwise. He travels alone quite a bit, and I thought that was unusual, until he revealed himself to be a man and then it didn’t seem unusual at all. I began to think, Men do travel alone more than women do. The friends of mine who are my age travel a lot, all over the world in fact. That seems to be the thing to do with one’s retirement, but the widows travel in groups, never alone, and even the couples travel in tours or with another couple.

Bill and I are like the geese being fattened for foie gras: we are tied to a rope that allows us to travel in a certain small circumference of the northeast section of the continent.

A long while ago, the writer John Metcalf wrote an essay about how to punctuate a thought. Do you put it in italics? In quotation marks? After much discussion, he determined that it was best to use a comma and then a capital letter. He convinced me, and I have done that ever since. I did it in paragraph two.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I use italics, but with some of these ready-made publishing programs, like blogger, the italics don't transfer from word processor to blogger.

Metcalf's way doesn't really get my attention as well as the italics. I guess I'm not a careful reader because I missed it until you mentioned it in your last paragragh.

Randy

Miriam Jones said...

I like the use of a capital letter. Subtle.

Re. blog templates: Rather than dying their hair, some people pierce their nose! I feel very fusty as my template has been set for awhile now. It took me so long to do it that I can't imagine having the time to change it. It's getting unwieldy, though.

S. Kearney said...

Hello Nancy,

I've just stumbled across your blog and I will now definitely link to you if that's OK. It's only recently that I noticed your visits to my blog, with your address appearing in my statistics. Welcome!

It's interesting that you thought Shameless Words was written by a woman. You're not the first person to have said that, which I find very interesting. A psychologist would have a field day on that one! :)

It's also very interesting that you concluded that I travel alone, which must be something about how I write: so keen to maintain the anonymity, the mystery. The truth is that I travel with my partner, but I don't put personal details in my blog entries.

I look forward to reading more of your blog, Nancy, and I hope you're not too disappointed to discover that Shameless is in fact a man. You're always welcome at Shameless Words. Take care.