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cimoreneso, i was reading a piece of badfic, and i came across what is probably the best sentence ever. or at least my favourite sentence ever:
yeah. i. what? it's almost deep, in that insane, makes-no-sense kind of way. i want to name something this now.
"He can’t say the words, they’re too ingrained in him to enumerate."
yeah. i. what? it's almost deep, in that insane, makes-no-sense kind of way. i want to name something this now.
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(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 07:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 07:16 pm (UTC)and in the comments someone corrects her--she had originally spelled it "their too ingrained in him to enumerate". they correct her "their" without MENTIONING THAT IT MAKES NO SENSE.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 07:21 pm (UTC)But then I can be a bit literal at times.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 09:28 pm (UTC)given the amount of time i've spent pondering it, i'd count it as very successful if it were a poem.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 07:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 07:37 pm (UTC)People like the big words, whether or not they know what they mean.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 09:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 08:07 pm (UTC)"words too ingrained in me to enumerate. send help."
(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 09:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 09:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 10:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 01:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 01:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 05:04 pm (UTC)It's zen, babe, it's zen.
(no subject)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 01:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 09:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 08:54 am (UTC)- Dictionitis with Malignant Thesaurism. The key problem here is that the patient has not learned that when you click on the thesaurus button in Word, the words listed in the box are not all synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably, and, further, that the "suggested spellings" the spell-checker offers are likewise potentially non-synonymous and thus incorrect. Cure: finding a language care provider patient enough to hammer the golden rule of "Thou shalt not use a word if thou has not the first fucking clue what it means" into the head of our victim. This will prove challenging, but persevere.
- Impacted Dictionitis. In this form, the patient has simply lost the ability to use any kind of dictionary, or even ask other people for definitions, and can thus only make guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar words he (or she) has seen or heard. (And no, I don't know where someone like that might find new words; I don't hang out with the diseased.) Often, these guesses are very, very wrong. Cure: one school of language care suggests purchasing an unabridged dictionary and whacking the patient over the head with it. Another school suggests detention. Research into these and alternative treatments is ongoing.
(Note: other, rarer forms of dictionitis do exist. For more information, speak to a language care specialist.)Tragically, almost 10% of the world's population, including 25% of English-speaking teenagers, are afflicted with some form of dictionitis. Someone you know may be suffering from this even as you read these words. Dictionitis patients look just like me or you, so - or, well, wait. They look normal, so they don't look like us. But my point is: you can only identify this disease during a routine examination of the patient's writing. If you find evidence of dictionitis, bring patient and writing sample to a language care provider immediately. If we all apply our diligence and vigilance, we can end dictionitis in our lifetimes.
At least, I hope to god we can.
(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 09:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 10:12 am (UTC)"He can't say the words. They're buried so deep inside him that he'll never say them out loud."
Not a great sentence at all, but at least it makes some kind of sense. But, being a badfic writer, she couldn't quite manage to write that. So she wrote:
"He can't say the words. They're too deep to say."
Our author looked at that sentence, and a thought formed in the writing sector of her brain. And that thought was, this doesn't sound quite right. What she should've done at that point was find another way to say what she actually meant. Instead, she went to the thesaurus and came up with words that meant 'deep' and 'say,' but were longer, ergo better. Not that she knew what they meant, but who can you trust if you can't trust a thesaurus? So she plonked them into her story and moved on, pausing only to splice the hell out of the sentence with a comma she had lying around.
Obviously, that's just one theory, and there are many ways those words could've ended up there. But it's a theory, at any rate, and theories are good. (I find that I can accept crimes against language more easily if I understand how they might have happened.) And there's some support for it; she correctly spelled both words. Someone who had only heard or seen the word in passing would have likely screwed up the spelling of at least one of them. (It's not a guarantee, because auto-correct would catch a lot of the possible misspellings. But it's a data point, anyway.)
(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 10:20 am (UTC)god, it almost makes sense that way. i suppose i preferred it not to make sense, from my cringing reaction, or maybe i was just fearing for my sanity if i came to contemplate the process (or the intent) too deeply.
and no, you're right, it's an entire work of badfic, and she does stuff like that at other points, and she's just now eighteen, so she was probably seventeen when she wrote it. and she had another piece that (to my eye, at least) showed some kind of... promise, in the form of an intriguing idea and some evocative images and... stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 09:54 am (UTC)