Thursday, June 01, 2006

when the ale tasted worse than the lager i threw it further

The gods shone down in my little office—and then they flipped a little tongue and strode off. The past two and a half days I grappled with a rough-terrain manuscript, trying to tie together grammatical veer-offs and chunked cliffsides. I thought I had an easy one to follow, but alas there are chicken-pocked references to piece out. About as fun as filling out tax forms, it put my brain here to a quick Hawaii.

Remember “worsen”? That weakling verb that pinches my nerves. There’s another. Last night while I was watching a show on the history of brewing on the History Channel, a—

Did you know there are beer anthropologists? How badass that is. And I don’t mean that as in Dude I’m a beer anthropologist. I can totally booze up every day and get paid for it. I mean what an interesting job. Better than sitting in an office all day, breathing stale air and destroying my eyeballs while tapping on plastic and destroying my wrist functionality (even if I do have the world’s best boss)—

beer anthropologist used the word “furthering.” “Furthering” is weak and wanting for meaning in a way similar to "worsening." It is first an adjective or an adverb, the comparative of “far.” Indeed it is listed in the American Heritage 3rd edition pocket dictionary, as the third meaning: to advance the progress of. Like “worsen,” “further” is lazy. Instead of thinking of a more specifically active verb to elucidate the idea and action of moving something further forward, you can just stretch out the shirt that “further” wears.

Poor thing—its shirt has holes in the shoulders and pit stains. It's over-worn, spread thin, torn.

Prescription: Slide a beer across the bar to “further” and spend a second extra locating a more contextually meaningful verb. You can find it, this verb, along with the others uncalled on for their duties, slack-assing over mojitos in a posh city loft.

2 Comments:

Blogger cupcake said...

I was just reading your blogger profile and I didn't realize you were such a big Spiderman 2 fan. Intresting.

9:52 AM  
Blogger Sara said...

Yeah, it surprised me too. It's got profound themes, I think, embedded within the surface superhero story.

2:47 PM  

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