Sunday, June 17, 2007

I May be Remarrying

Retired Husband and I attended a wedding in Kelowna on Saturday. We drove up Friday and returned this afternoon. Unfortunately the weather there was no better than it was here, and there was a disturbing tendency for mawkish tears during the (many!) speeches at the reception, but it was a pleasant event and wonderful to get away for a few days.

I have to say that one of the highlights of Grammar's entire weekend occurred early Saturday morning. Tired from the drive up, I had fallen asleep by 9:30 the night before, and consequently was irreversibly awake at the crack of dawn. As RH slept peacefully on, I managed to dress myself in the dark and headed to the lobby to partake of the continental breakfast therein, gathering up the Globe and Mail from outside our door en route.

No, none of this is the highlight yet, but we're nearly there.

Having collected a coffee and warm cinnamon bun, I settled onto a couch in the quiet early-morning lobby and opened the newspaper. At the top of the front page was a banner alerting us tersely as to what sort of things we might be pleased to encounter in the various sections of the paper within. And here was Grammar's moment.

ZEUGMA. This is what I was promised in the Focus section. Well, naturally I was beside myself. Wouldn't you be?

Perhaps not. I am probably one of the few people in this world peculiar enough to actually know what a zeugma is. Because, you see, it is a grammatical term.

I scrambled to the Focus section and there, o bliss divine, o heab'n indeed, was a full three-page article headlined "Big words". Blog people, it took me an hour to read this article. It took me that long because it was erudite and precisely on point (the point being Things that Interest Grammar Moses Exceedingly) and therefore I read it several times. I dug a pencil out of my purse and underlined some things. Other things I circled, and some I even put a star beside. I annotated it with excited comments of my own, which no one will ever read and will soon become pulpy goo at a recycling plant. Yes, blog people. I am, in fact, exactly this strange.

The byline for the article suggested the writer, being one Ian Brown, was likely a male person, and I sat for several moments contemplating the plausibility of my being able to convince this man to marry me and if so, would I really be willing to divorce RH, who after all is a perfectly good spouse other than his complete inability (not to mention utter indifference) to write a beautifully articulate 7,000-word article about Big Words.

One day soon I will, in my own inimitable way, give you the gist of the article so that you may share my excitement. It will be considerably shorter than 7,000 words. But some of them may be Big.

3 comments:

solomon said...

The zeugma is indeed unknown to most people, but not to me. When I was a young man, a particularly conspicuous, erumpent and ugly zeugma grew on my left cheek. I confronted my disease with penicillin, my embarrassment with false aplomb, my pain with Anacin, and my self-repugnance with drink. I’d almost forgotten that encounter with zeugma until you brought it up in your blog.

Grammar Moses said...

Oh, well done, Solomon!

katie lore said...

Wow, the apple sure didn't fall far from the tree!