Thank You For Not Forcing Me To Smoke

Outside every entrance on the OCCC campus there's a sign that reads, "THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA REQUIRES NO SMOKING BEYOND THIS POINT." The signs are about fifty feet away from the doorways, so there's some space to avoid the airborne death-crud.

The way these signs are written makes me laugh, though. I know they mean that smokers should smoke no closer to the doors than these signs, but what it actually says is that the state does not require people to smoke past the sign. I'm glad. If they did require me to smoke, I couldn't get to work without breaking a law, or a statute, or whatever governs smoking on campus.

Despite the signs, though, smokers huddle right around the doors. I guess the addiction is so strong that they can't manage to walk that far away from the building, or care whether others have to breathe their filth just to leave. And cigarette butts must be awfully heavy, based on the number of them I see on the ground. Just. Can't. Get. To an ashcan.

Sorry. Ranting again.

I Hate When Newspapers Are Dumb

So, over at the Star Tribune there's a story of a guy who cut off a rattlesnake's head, but was bitten by said rattlesnake anyway, after the head was severed. That's a weird story, and in this age of filling every space with information, no matter how banal or trivial, I suppose it qualifies as "news."

What irritates me about the story is the headline:

Rattlesnake's decapitated head bites man

To "decapitate" means to cut something's head off. I'm aware that the semifunctional drone at the Strib means to indicate that the head was cut off and then bit the man, but in the interest of packing as much drama as possible into the headline he's (or she's--women can be morons, too) mangled his semantics. The problem is, for a head to be decapitated, its head has to be cut off. But I'm not sure how you cut off a rattlesnake's head's head.

The headline writer had a couple of options to make sense: either

Decapitated rattlesnake bites man

or

Rattlesnake's severed head bites man

would work just fine. If they felt the need, they could have used some Sean--er . . . exclamation marks:

Undead Rattlesnake's Severed Head Injects Innocent Child With Zombie Venom!!!!

I prefer my understated versions, though.

Book Store is Closed for the Evening

Too much snow, so the store closed and I don't have to work tonight. That's a good thing, because my brain is exploding with ideas for my screenplay, and it takes a while for me to get them out.

One thing's been bothering me for days, and it shouldn't. It's petty and pointless, but my mind won't let it go. Last week a co-worker was telling a story about her weekend, and she said, ". . . all of the sudden, I was laying on my back."

Now, normally I'll laugh pretty hard about somebody falling down, but her misuse of the phrase "all of a sudden" irked me. It's not something that's generally noticeable when spoken, since "alluvasudden" and alluthesudden" sound too close to call most of the time. But it irked me.

It irks me for a lot of reasons. First, it's an archaic construction that people use without even thinking about it. "Of a sudden" is just a wordy version of "suddenly," and if there's one way to make an adverb even worse, it's to make a phrase out of it.

And then there's the "all" element. When people say "I'm all about that," or "he was all, like, 'What's your problem?'" I have to resist the urge to put my fingers in their eyes and push until they're all, like, all about being in agony. The word "all" has only a few sensible uses, and these are not them. (When Strongbad says "All up ons," however, this is hilarious.)

But there's also the identity of the sudden that has to be addressed. In the correct usage (all of a sudden), any sudden will do. Which sudden? I don't know. A sudden. When people bastardize this phrase, we suddenly have to pick which sudden this situation is all of. Is it this sudden? How about the sudden over there? I don't know which sudden is the sudden, and this is critical to understanding the phrase.

But if I demand that my co-worker identify of which sudden she was all while falling down, she'll look at me as though I've gone all pedantic, and I'm all about not being all pedantic.

I also hate when people write (or sometimes say) "should of" instead of "should have." I understand "should've" sounds like "should of," but it's not that. If you've never seen "should've" in print, you need to start reading beyond Dick and Jane. If you've seen should've and somehow failed to make that connection, I have no suggestions. You should of read more as a child. Then you'd be all about speaking English competently. Or "all of a competence."