The winner of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. The B-L Fiction Contest challenges entrants “to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.”
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ [...]
Category > Language
“It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”
Emergency Help for Writer’s Block
Fifteen-year-old Peg believes that everyone is born with certain quotas: their bodies are already programmed with the number of people they’ll sleep with, the amount of soda they’ll drink, the number of countries they’ll travel to. One Tuesday morning, Peg wakes up and realizes she’s exhausted her quota of speech.
Not a bad start. I could [...]
Latin No Longer The Status Quo
Local councils in Britain had decided to remove Latin from official documents creating consternation in classics circles. From AP:
The council in Bournemouth, a town of 170,000 on England’s south coast, has a ”plain language” policy that lists 19 Latin words and phrases to be avoided, and suggests replacements. The council recommends ”improvised” instead of ad [...]