Slapping Pages

• I have never been comfortable using most slang.
• Even back when I was a kid, I never used skater speak.
• Other than “dude.”
• I still address most people as “dude.”
• (No gender implied, obviously.)
• (But certainly not in the ordained sense, either.)
• When I see certain slang used in headlines, it makes me … cringe.
• Which the kids would say, “is cringe.”
• Or something.
• I’m not quite clear on the usage.
• The one that started me off on this language rant is “slaps.”
• As in, “And yes, Dev Patel slaps.”
• That was a sub-headline on Lithub.
• Made my left eye twitch.
• (Always the left eye that’s twitchy.)
• I mean, I get it.
• You can’t really be a language purist.
• Language is a living thing.
• It changes minute by minute, from people to people, person to person.
• But there’s that fine line between evolution and …
• Looking at someone and thinking, “Did you mean that for real, or are you using it ironically?”
• I dunno. It’s probably just me.
• After all, I get embarrassed for characters in movies.
• That headline made me embarrassed for whoever wrote it.
• It could also just be the feeling of outside you get when you see a certain demographic using language you don’t.
• Inspires you to feel … other.
• This makes me think that studying language would be a cool profession, especially in a sociological sense.
• But can someone do that anymore?
• Does higher ed push that kind of thing, or is the end goal how economically productive they can make a person?
• Just posing the question. Don’t freak out on me.
• Speaking of Dev Patel … I still haven’t seen The Green Knight, but I keep hearing great things about it.
• It’s on the List.
• Over the holiday weekend, I spent one of my days reading on the couch.
• Read a real book (not Kindle) cover to cover, in fact.
• I’ve been stumbling around from book to book trying to find a sticking place for months.
• Took a page turner to do it.
• It was amazing to me how relaxing that was, once I got over the “you’re wasting a whole day reading” guilt.
• Literary Hub may be my favorite site to have stumbled upon in years.
• If you’re into the books, anyway.
• When I say books, I mean fiction.
• I don’t do a lot of non-fiction reading unless it’s research for something I’m writing.
• “Research.”
• I read to go away, to relax, to experience a different perspective, and because I crave stories.
• If there were a Question of the Day place around here, that’d be today’s question:
• “What do you crave?”
• “What do you need?”
• Or, perhaps slightly less risky, “What’s the last book you read in one day?”
• (And if you’ve never read a book in one day, well, you’re missing out.)
• Have a Wednesday, people.

I write these lists for work three times a week, so they’re sanitized for work audiences. Still, kinda fun to do.